{"title":"Hidden in Plain Sight: IRS Publications and a New Path to Tax Reform","authors":"Andrea Monroe","doi":"10.5744/FTR.2017.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/FTR.2017.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Internal Revenue Service (IRS) publications are everywhere in tax practice and almost nowhere in tax scholarship. These publications seek to explain substantive tax law to the general public in a simple, comprehensible, and accurate manner. IRS publications are not only the primary source of information about tax law for taxpayers who file their own returns, but such publications are also essential for online tax preparation platforms, like TurboTax, and for third-party tax return preparers, who rely on this information when selling their services to millions of taxpayers each year. From the perspective of these stakeholders, IRS publications are not simply explanations of substantive tax law; they are substantive tax law. Yet IRS publications are scarcely mentioned in legal scholarship or tax policy debates. Considering their influence and ubiquity in tax practice, the broad inattention of scholars and policymakers to IRS publications is enormously surprising. This Article suggests that IRS publications can do more than help non-expert stakeholders navigate their annual tax filing obligations; these publications can also offer significant and unexpected value for experts in their world of legal scholarship and tax policy debates. Studying IRS publications can yield important lessons about one of the greatest challenges facing the federal income tax system—complexity. Virtually all stakeholders agree that tax law is too complicated, but we seldom make meaningful progress toward simplifying the law. This Article proposes that the study of IRS publications can help experts identify and prioritize complexity problems in federal tax law. By using IRS publications to recognize high-risk/high-value problems with complexity, experts can formulate a tax research and reform agenda that will bypass many theoretical and epistemological roadblocks to tax simplification. The key is that IRS publications offer experts a new starting point in the long road toward tax reform, one that has been hidden in plain sight for decades.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128665125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Legitimacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union","authors":"Mark A. Pollack","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2911836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2911836","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines both scholarly debates and empirical evidence about the normative and sociological legitimacy of one of the oldest, busiest and most powerful international courts in the world: the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). With respect to normative legitimacy, the paper identifies and applies three criteria for international court legitimacy, namely that courts should be fair and unbiased, that their rulings should be politically acceptable and legally sound, and that they should operate openly and transparently. While the CJEU has historically enjoyed a high degree of normative legitimacy, I find, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a vigorous debate regarding overlapping charges of bias, of judicial activism and poor legal reasoning, and of opacity at the Court. By contrast with normative legitimacy, sociological or descriptive legitimacy measures diffuse support for the Court among its various audiences. The study of public attitudes toward the Court, I argue, is highly sensitive to measurement issues, but in general paints a picture of a public support that has been historically widespread but shallow and quite fragile, and I demonstrate that this support has decreased in the past decade, as the Court has been caught up in a broader crisis of EU legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133517628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Competition Law for a Post-Scarcity World","authors":"Salil K. Mehra","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2717137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2717137","url":null,"abstract":"Writers, economists and IP scholars have hailed signs of an incipient shift to a post-scarcity world. Driving this change are rapid decreases not only in marginal cost, but also in the fixed or first-unit costs of production. Whether these changes become economy-wide, or remain confined to a subset of industries, they have dramatic implications for competition law and policy. This Article is the first to address these implications. In particular, because of the incentive for incumbent firms to engage in what may be termed “anti-disruption” – as examples such as the Apple/e-books antitrust case and the regulatory responses to Uber show – competition law must play an active role in assisting the transition to a post-scarcity world. Playing this role will not be simple, but the welfare gains of this societal shift make it impossible to ignore.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124056914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword; Forward!","authors":"Jonathan C. Lipson","doi":"10.7765/9781526117694.00005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526117694.00005","url":null,"abstract":"This brief Essay: (1) provides a foreword to the Symposium issue of the Temple Law Review, \"The (Un)Quiet Realist: Reflecting and Building on the Work of Bill Whitford,\" sketching very briefly Whitford’s career; (2) summarizes a few highlights from the many excellent contributions to the Symposium, with an emphasis on their use of Whitford's work and the larger \"Wisconsin\" tradition of which it is a part (the state's motto is \"Forward!\"); and (3) touches on what proved to be Whitford's forward-thinking methodological contributions to empirical legal scholarship.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121252908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defining Income","authors":"Alice G. Abreu, Richard Greenstein","doi":"10.5744/ftr.2011.1005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5744/ftr.2011.1005","url":null,"abstract":"More than half a century ago in Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass, the Supreme Court defined \"income,\" as used in section 61 of the Internal Revenue Code, as \"undeniable accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion.\" The Code narrows the scope of income by providing for specific exclusions but, outside of those exclusions, the Code's own, self-referential definition-\"gross income means income from whatever source derived\" - seems to confirm the broad scope of the definition.The breadth of the Glenshaw Glass definition appears to be nearly co-extensive with the Haig-Simons definition of income, which is widely accepted as providing the theoretical foundation for the income tax. Accordingly, many tax professionals interpret the language in section 61 and Glenshaw Glass solely in light of the economic principles reflected in the Haig-Simons definition. The analytical structure for determining what is income appears clear and is generally treated as immutable. The analysis begins with the broad mandate of section 61 and Glenshaw Glass. As long as there is a realized accession in the economic sense within the taxpayer's dominion, Glenshaw Glass would seem to provide that there is income unless, pursuant to the very first words of section 61, there is an exclusion in the statute. From the time they are introduced to the tax law, students are taught this analytical structure, and by the time they become practitioners and then judges or scholars, it is second nature.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130361882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL","authors":"N. Duru","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-0343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-0343","url":null,"abstract":"Two days before Super Bowl XLI in 2007, the game's two opposing head coaches posed with the trophy one of them would hoist after the contest. It was a fairly unremarkable event, except that both coaches were African American - a fact that was as much of a story as the game itself. This unique milestone resulted from the work of a determined group of people whose struggles to expand head coaching opportunities for African Americans ultimately changed the National Football League. Since the league's desegregation in 1946, opportunities had grown plentiful for African Americans as players but not as head coaches - the byproduct of the NFL's old-boy network and lingering stereotypes of blacks' intellectual inferiority. Although Major League Baseball and the NBA had, over the years, made progress in this regard, the NFL's head coaches were almost exclusively white up until the mid-1990s. Advancing the Ball chronicles the campaign of former Cleveland Browns offensive lineman John Wooten to right this wrong and undo decades of discriminatory head coach hiring practices - an initiative that finally bore fruit when he joined forces with attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran. Together with a few allies, the triumvirate galvanized the NFL's African American assistant coaches to stand together for equal opportunity and convinced the league to enact the Rooney Rule, which stipulates that every team must interview at least one minority candidate when searching for a new head coach. In doing so, they spurred a movement that would substantially impact the NFL and, potentially, the nation. Featuring an impassioned foreword by Coach Tony Dungy, Advancing the Ball offers an eye-opening, first-hand look at how a few committed individuals initiated a sea change in America's most popular sport and added an extraordinary new chapter to the civil rights story.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"42 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120858561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Happiness Studies and Legal Policy","authors":"P. H. Huang","doi":"10.1146/ANNUREV-LAWSOCSCI-102209-152828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1146/ANNUREV-LAWSOCSCI-102209-152828","url":null,"abstract":"Social scientists have conducted numerous empirical and experimental studies of self-reported happiness. This review focuses on two fundamental areas of research in happiness and law, namely alternative measures of happiness and various policies to foster happiness. There are many aspects, concepts, dimensions, and visions of happiness. Empirical findings often depend critically on which particular measure of happiness is analyzed. Happiness studies have applications to national well-being indices; policy evaluation; civil judicial and jury decision making about liability and damages in cases of sexual harassment, employment discrimination, and torts; optimal tax law design; family law; criminal sentencing; legal education; and legal practice. There are decision-making, health, productivity, and psychological benefits to various types of happiness. There are more or less paternalistic happiness interventions, including policies to encourage regular physical exercise, good sleep, and meditation. Hopefully,...","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134532567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disputing Limited Liability","authors":"C. L. Boyd, David Hoffman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1411431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1411431","url":null,"abstract":"This project presents six years of hand-collected federal district court data to analyze the first representative sample of veil piercing litigation. Our method identifies veil piercing complaints through Westlaw's trial pleadings database and codes each case through a detailed examination of PACER records. We test a variety of hypotheses to understand how such litigations are resolved. We find that plaintiffs succeed quite often in veil piercing litigation, if success is defined as winning on motions that do not terminate a case. A variety of legal and extra-legal factors predict such interstitial veil piercing successes. Voluntary creditor causes of action promote veil piercing; LLCs are in very limited circumstances better insulated from veil piercing claims than corporations; undercapitalization is strongly associated with success while conclusory grounds like \"facade\" and \"sham\" are not; and defendants' legal sophistication is predictive of plaintiff failure. Extra-legal factors play a more striking and counterintuitive role. Plaintiffs suing companies with few employees are much more likely to win veil piercing motions, and obtain relief in cases, than plaintiffs suing companies employing many workers. This results holds even when controlling for legally-relevant variables. Contrary to both theory and previous empirical work, we also find that judicial liberalism is inversely related to the likelihood of plaintiff success. Our results call into question existing normative and descriptive approaches to the disputation of limited liability and contribute to more general scholarship about selection effects and judicial behavior. They do not provide any easy answers to the question of what defendants can do to insulate themselves from veil piercing. Our analysis suggests: Very little, apart from being very big.","PeriodicalId":332765,"journal":{"name":"Temple University Beasley School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series","volume":"406 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116499232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}