Politicians, pundits, and countless others indiscriminately describe disfavored provisions as “tax loopholes.” Yet as my colleague and fellow tax scholar Professor Heather Field demonstrates in her recently published article, A Taxonomy for Tax Loopholes, the term lacks definitional clarity. The phrase has been used, variously, to reference statutory ambiguities, violations of the spirit of the… Continue reading →
Jon Ronson’s recent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed examines the plight of people whose reputations were besmirched online and their efforts to restore their good names. The combination of the availability of a breathtaking amount of information on individuals and the sanctimoniousness of call-out culture creates a “perfect storm,” in which a sullied reputation is… Continue reading →
What drives health care costs ever higher? Consolidation may be playing a key role. In this context, Professor Jaime King’s contribution to the St. Louis University Annual Health Law Symposium, “The Anti-Competitive Potential of Cross-Market Mergers in Health Care” (coauthored with Erin C. Fuse Brown), is a clarion call for antitrust authorities to consider seriously… Continue reading →
America seems mired in a highly partisan and polarized political era. The truth is that we have been so for some time, and that the polarization has infected the most apolitical of legal subjects: civil procedure. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have always been adventuresome, at least in the eyes of the rest of… Continue reading →
When a principal hires an agent to perform a task, she puts herself at risk of sustaining losses resulting from the agent’s lack of effort. For example, consider a homeowner who hires a plumber to fix a pipe. The plumber can choose to put forth great effort toward a long-lasting fix or to put forth… Continue reading →
Scott Dodson is rightly regarded as “Mr. Jurisdiction” among American legal academics. He has written a spate of articles about many different jurisdictional issues that establish him as the leading authority of his generation on these subjects. In Jurisdiction in the Trump Era, a contribution to a symposium with Fordham Law Review, he draws on this expertise to… Continue reading →
At the center of Binyamin Blum’s prize-winning article “The Hounds of Empire: Forensic Dog Tracking in Britain and its Colonies, 1888-1953,” 35 Law and History Review 621 (2017), is a counterintuitive narrative. An uninformed reader (such as yours truly) could be forgiven for believing that modern, “scientific,” forensic techniques—fingerprinting, tool marking, analysis of skeletal remains,… Continue reading →
My colleague Scott Dodson has established himself as one of the country’s leading civil procedure scholars by tackling some of the subject’s trickiest puzzles. In a recent article in the Georgetown Law Journal called “Jurisdiction and Its Effects,” Professor Dodson has done it again, training his sights on the vexed subject of jurisdiction. Professor Dodson… Continue reading →
In “Reliance on Nonenforcement,” appearing in the William & Mary Law Review, my brilliant colleague Zach Price continues his leading work on executive–branch nonenforcement, an issue that has risen to the forefront in an era of divided and polarized politics. The idea of executive nonenforcement is straightforward and has a long pedigree. Has a police… Continue reading →
In a recent colloquium contribution titled “Restraining Lawyers: From ‘Cases’ to ‘Tasks’” published in Fordham Law Review, my colleague Morris Ratner, one of the most incisive voices on the intersection of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the actual business model of attorney litigation, dissects the traditional “case” as the unit of measure for… Continue reading →
