Nanotechnology's potential impact on worldwide industries has nations around the world investing billions of dollars for research in order to capture a part of the projected trillion dollar market for nanotechnology products in 2010. The current rush to patent nanotechnologies may lead to an overcrowded nanotechnology patent thicket that could deter critical innovation and continued product...
Redistribution via Taxation: The Limited Role of the Personal Income Tax in Developing Countries
Inequality has increased in recent years in both developed and developing countries. Tax experts, like others, have focused on how taxes may reduce this growing inequality of income and wealth. In developed countries, the income tax, and especially the personal income tax, has long been viewed as the primary instrument for redistributing income. This Article examines whether it makes sense for...
Choosing a Tax Rate Structure in the Face of Disagreement
In this Article Professor Kornhauser proposes an Integrity Principle that Congress should use when legislating in the face of inevitable disagreement and conflict among principles. This Principle, loosely based on Ronald Dworkin's principle of integrity, requires Congress to promote coherence from both a practical and theoretical perspective. The practical aspect insists that Congress enact laws...
The Political Psychology of Redistribution
Welfare economics suggests that the tax system is the appropriate place to effect redistribution from those with more command over material resources to those with less: in short, to serve "equity." Society should set other mechanisms of private and public law, including public finance systems, to maximize welfare: in short, to serve "efficiency." The populace, however, may not always accept...
Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the U.S. Income Tax
At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income tax. This shift in U.S. tax policy marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - one that was guided not...
Tax or Welfare? The Administration of the Earned Income Tax Credit
The earned income tax credit (EITC) is a transfer program aimed primarily at low income working parents, administered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as part of the federal income tax. Although generally tax-like in its administration, in substance it resembles nontax antipoverty transfer programs, such as Food Stamps and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In recent years...
"Let Economic Equality Take Care of Itself": The NAACP, Labor Litigation, and the Making of Civil Rights in the 1940s
During World War II, the lawyers of the NAACP considered the problem of discrimination in employment as one of the two most pressing problems (along with voting) facing African Americans. In a departure from past practice, they pursued the cases of African American workers vigorously in state and federal courts and before state and federal administrative agencies. These cases offered the NAACP...
The Original Meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause
This Article explores the original meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause. Under the current interpretation, the Clause gives the President extremely broad authority to make recess appointments. The Article argues, however, that the original meaning of the Clause actually confers quite limited power on the President and would not permit most of the recess appointments that are currently made...