Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Comments on Roger Cotterrell's Essay, 'The Struggle for Law: Some Dilemmas of Cultural

Abstract: First, many thanks to Carrie Menkel-Meadow, the editors of The International Journal of Law In Context and the sponsors of this series for facilitating this lecture, and for inviting my participation. And a special thank you to Professor Roger Cotterrell for sharing with us such a generous, humanistic and hopeful account of law’s moral possibilities, when faced with multicultural conflict within a society governed by a liberal rule of law. I very much appreciate the opportunity to reflect on this set of claims, although I feel somewhat an outsider to the task, as I’ll explain below. I understand Professor Cotterrell as arguing, first, that traditional Anglo-American jurisprudence has not sufficiently theorised the role of culture and cultures, second, that multiculturalism renders inadequate, for different reasons, both Weberian and non-positivist or non-instrumental accounts of law’s liberal aspirations, and third, that one possible way for law to contribute constructively to a moral and peaceful multicultural society would be to conceive of itself not just as an instrument for the fulfillment of private and conflicting individual purposes, not just as the target of passions from a more-or-less unified culture, but rather, as a means of respectful communication between cultures, albeit one that imposes individualist and liberal side-constraints on the conversation so fostered: to wit, that the law itself, and its parts, must be rigorously respectful of the autonomy and decency of all individuals, and must demand as much from citizens. I am sympathetic to all three prongs of this project. I agree entirely that jurisprudence has not well theorised the cultural; I agree that some of the strains in the general facade of liberal legalism are a result of multicultural forces and aspirations; and I am happy to share in the call for legal doctrine that is civil and respectful. So in these comments, I will just voice some worries about the overall thrust of the project, and offer some friendly amendments. The worries are threefold: the first is jurisprudential, the second is political and the third might best be called aspirational.

How Do Nonprofit Firms Respond to Tax Policy

Abstract: We investigate the effects of variations in the value of the charitable contribution deduction on nonprofit firm behavior, including exploring for the first time the effects of the tax price of giving on fund-raising. We find that a 1 percent increase in tax subsidies is correlated with a 2.0 percent increase in fund-raising, while the elasticity of real charitable output to changes in tax price is less than one in absolute value for most firms. We derive a new equation for treasury efficiency in the presence of fund-raising and find that while our point estimates still support treasury efficiency, our confidence intervals are wide enough to allow some possibility that the deduction is not cost effective. Further, the modest elasticity of charitable output to tax price implies that tax subsidies can crowd out other revenue sources, such that the efficacy of the subsidy depends on the relative efficiency of these alternative sources.

Federal Fairness to State Taxpayers: Irrationality, Unfunded Mandates, and the 'Salt' Deduction

Abstract: By sheer dollars alone, the largest impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax is to deny many taxpayers the deduction for the taxes they paid to their state and local governments under § 164 of the Internal Revenue Code. This Article provides a fine-grained analysis of the overall fairness of the state- and local-tax deduction ? and, by implication, the fairness of its partial repeal through the Alternative Minimum Tax. I offer for the first time a close examination of how newly understood limits on taxpayer mobility and rationality might affect individuals' choices of bundles of local taxes and local government services, which in turn informs our assessment of the "fairness" of those exchanges. Many of these lessons can be generalized to consumer choices more generally. In addition, I track the reciprocal benefits and burdens that flow between the national government and local governments ? again, although the influx or outgo of billions of dollars surely affects how the federal tax system should account for the outputs of local government, scholars have neglected that question. Finally, I note that § 164, and therefore the Alternative Minimum Tax, can have serious effects on federal-state relations, such that the debate over both provisions is in many ways a debate not only over fairness but also about federalism.

Pulling the Stops on Genocide: The State or the Individual?

Abstract: The International Court of Justice's decision on the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro) has exposed the unforeseen irony in the international consensus on the singular distinction of genocide as the crime of crimes. Defying expectations, this classification coupled with the conception of a �civil genocide� has magically transformed into a legal shield which protects states from responsibility even as individual convictions are being handed down. Yet, the history of the Genocide Convention easily recalls the objective of preventing the commission of genocide by states and individuals alike. This article thus ponders on the virtue of seeking recourse under the Genocide Convention � whether against the state or the individual. In traversing this inquiry, it embarks on a comparative analysis of selected case law from the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda, and the International Court of Justice. As it uncovers a counterintuitive clash of jurisprudential outcome and a widening gap between the ideal and the real, the article identifies the legal bolts which need to be adjusted so that the genocide stops can be pulled in the right direction.

Getting to 'Let's Talk': Comments on Collaborative Environmental Dispute Resolution Processes

Abstract: This essay discusses the factors which are encouraging or disabling collaborative decision making and legal processes in environmental disputes. As a commentary on Brad Karkkainen's article on the use of collaborative processes in situations of both "natural and legal destabilization" events, the article reports on several successful environmental collaborative processes, highlighting the new process expertise and new knowledge of consensus-based, multi-jurisdictional decision making. It also suggests some countervailing factors and impediments to the effective use of collaborative dispute resolution in both environmental and other complex multi-party disputes. The essay concludes by outlining some challenges to the field of collaborative decision making and legal and social change and offers some suggestions for meeting those challenges, such as linking levels of governments and solutions to a variety of governance problems, using more flexible and contingent outcomes and "resolutions," developing a wider scope of "triggering events" and creative solutions, and considering rigorously the relationship of formal legal endowments to less formal processes for legal and political decision making.