The international tax system is in the midst of a contest between automatic information reporting and anonymous withholding models for ensuring that nations have the ability to tax offshore accounts. At stake is the extent of many countries’ capacity to tax investment income of individuals and profits of closely held businesses through an income tax in an increasingly financially integrated world...
The Benefits of a Big Tent: Opening Up Government in Developing Countries
Bringing open data and open government under a single banner, Yu and Robinson argue, leads to conceptual muddling that ultimately impedes progress for both projects. They express a concern that superficial commitments to open data “can placate the public’s appetite for transparency.” Drawing on our experiences with the Kenya Open Data Initiative and the Open Government Partnership, we argue that...
The Case Against Tamanaha’s Motel 6 Model of Legal Education
The radical overhaul of legal education espoused in Professor Brian Tamanaha’s new, widely read book Failing Law Schools would represent a disastrous step backward in legal education. Tamanaha and his supporters argue that the current crisis in legal education—rampant unemployment among debt-laden law graduates and plummeting law-school applications—requires a dramatic reduction in law-school...
Bons Mots, Buffoonery, and the Bench: The Role of Humor in Judicial Opinions
Despite the serious nature of court orders, judicial opinions can be humorous. While some decisions are funny simply because of their facts, judges have also employed puns, penned poems, cited songs, and formulated fables to convey legal conclusions creatively. Scholars and jurists debate the propriety of such humor. However, witticisms and quips continue to find their way into legal reporters...
What Happens in the Jury Room Stays in the Jury Room . . . but Should It?: A Conflict Between the Sixth Amendment and Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b)
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees all criminal defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury—a jury that is free of bias and that decides the case solely on the evidence before it. If even one juror is biased or prejudiced, the defendant is denied this fundamental right. Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b) generally prohibits jurors from testifying as to what occurred...
Trade Dress Protection for Cuisine: Monetizing Creativity in a Low-IP Industry
Cuisine exists in intellectual property law’s “negative space”: It is relatively unprotected by formal intellectual property (IP) laws, yet creativity and innovation flourish. This runs contrary to the given economic wisdom that propertization is required to incentivize creation. Community norms and the first-mover advantage help to explain how cuisine thrives in this low-IP equilibrium. However...
Prosecutors Hide, Defendants Seek: The Erosion of Brady Through the Defendant Due Diligence Rule
This Article is the first to examine the routine—but problematic—practice of courts forgiving prosecutors for failing to disclose Brady evidence if the defendant or his lawyer knew or with due diligence could have known about the evidence. This Article begins by explaining the insidious emergence of the “due diligence” rule and catalogs how courts have defined, justified, and applied the rule...
A Labor Paradigm for Human Trafficking
Although human trafficking has gained unprecedented national and international attention and condemnation over the past decade, the legal instruments developed to combat this phenomenon have thus far proved insufficient. In particular, current efforts help an alarmingly small number of individuals out of the multitudes currently understood as falling under the category of trafficked persons, and...