Authors:Matthew S. Johnson Abstract: The taxation of hospitals is plagued with subjectivity, which especially burdens nonprofit hospitals. Inconsistencies across localities further exacerbate the uncertainty encountered by nonprofit hospitals seeking local tax exemptions. While federal and state tax implications for nonprofit hospitals receive most of the attention from debaters and scholars, local property tax exemptions are also of significant value for nonprofit hospitals and have been largely overlooked. This Comment explores the policy arguments for and against nonprofit status for hospitals. It shows that while the federal government has chosen relatively bright-line rules for determining non-profit status, localities are far less predictable. This Comment contributes to the literature by (1) highlighting the overlooked local taxation implications on the non/for profit hospital debate, (2) analyzing the inefficiencies that are created through inconsistencies across localities, and (3) suggesting the implementation of clear expectations for hospitals to receive specified tax breaks. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:50 PDT
Authors:Thomas Smith Abstract: The commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sit just beyond the president’s removal power, for now. The U.S. Supreme Court has all but overruled Humphrey’s Executor, which declared the constitutionality of the FTC’s statutory protections from at-will presidential removal. Recent rulings in Seila Law, Free Enterprise Fund, and Collins held that restrictions on the president’s removal of various government agency officials are unconstitutional. Despite these cases, the Court has not directly overruled Humphrey’s Executor, and in theory, its precedent still provides the FTC commissioners with protection from the president’s removal power. However, the modern FTC is easily distinguishable from the 1935 FTC described in Humphrey’s Executor. Congress originally justified the FTC’s independence on the basis that the commission was to be uniquely expert and non-partisan. If the FTC wishes to retain the precedential effect of Humphrey’s Executor then the FTC must reclaim the congressional vision described in Humphrey’s Executor. The Commission’s appointees must exhibit FTC subject-matter expertise. Once appointed, the Commissioners must see their seven-year tenure through to the end despite shifts in government politics, and they must take care to ensure that their rhetoric and other actions do not ruin the perception of political impartiality that the founding Congress sought to create. By reclaiming these principles of expertise and impartiality, the FTC’s character will more closely resemble what Congress intended when it was established over a century ago and be more likely to survive future scrutiny from the judiciary. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:50 PDT
Authors:Rafi Reznik Abstract: Contemporary Second Amendment law, which originated with the famous Heller decision (2008) and reached a new peak with Bruen (2022), relies on an implicit political theory. This article uncovers and critiques that theory. I argue that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence positions interpersonal self-defense, and more generally individual response to crime, at the heart of the meaning of American citizenship. The paradigmatic citizen for whom state institutions should be designed is a self-defender, because, per the Court’s interpretive methodology, this is what the American people want. This line of cases thus attempts one of the most challenging feats of modern political philosophy: squaring popular sovereignty with natural rights, and particularly the right to use violence in self-defense. Curiously, however, the philosopher who first and most influentially established how self-defense and popular sovereignty bear on each other, Thomas Hobbes, is absent from Second Amendment analyses. The article explains why this absence is unfortunate and then rectifies it.Ruling that self-defense is a necessary component of the good state puts the Second Amendment in Hobbesian terrain. However, while Hellerian Second Amendment law might appear to vindicate Hobbes’s protoliberal bases for justice, with the necessary adjustments for a constitutional democracy, Hobbes does very different things with the same ingredients. Hobbes would recognize the conclusions that the Supreme Court reaches as exactly those that we ought to overcome. The Second Amendment’s self-defense is hierarchical and moralistic: it is a just infliction of violence and an individual right to designate fellow citizens as criminals. Hobbes’s self-defense is egalitarian and materialistic: it is a matter of self-preservation. Hence, for Hobbes, self-defense is neither a moral nor a social achievement. It will always have a place in public life, but that does not make the presence of self-defense a desirable one. Self-defense is base, as we are when we are left alone; we contract to no longer be left alone. Rather than come naturally and be discarded if they don’t, Hobbes thought that peace and sociability require work.The article focuses on four critiques of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment that Hobbes helps to flesh out. First, Hobbes conceptualized self-defense as directed toward safety, whereas the Supreme Court adopts the Lockean view, which links self-defense to autonomy and hence allows private appeals to morality to cut through political associations and assert themselves by force. Second, Hobbes held an egalitarian understanding of political subjectivity, and ascribed corresponding representation and protection responsibilities to state institutions. The Heller-Bruen line of cases, in contrast, favors a patriarchal order of hierarchy and self-sufficiency. Third, Hobbes viewed self-defense as natural but unfortunate, a right that we have but that should not dictate our everyday lives. The phenomenon of mass shootings epitomizes the dangerous repercussions of a contrasting cultural script, according to which the ultimate American citizen is a self-defender. Fourth, Hobbes linked self-defense and popular sovereignty to cultivate a flourishing public life, but the Hellerian Court translates this relationship into constitutional fetishism. For the Second Amendment Supreme Court, self-defense serves not to bring about a social contract but to break one up. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:49 PDT
Authors:Ethan Schow Abstract: John Naughton, notable journalist and academic, has asserted that “[common sense] should also revolt at the idea that doctrines about copyright that were shaped in a pre-Internet age should apply to a post-Internet one.” And yet, in crucial aspects of international law, this is the situation in which the world finds itself today. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (the “Berne Convention” or the “Convention”) is one of the most important multinational agreements concerned with copyright law, but it has not been amended since September 28, 1979. Although the internet technically existed in an early and limited form at that time, its use did not become popular and widely available to the public until it was privatized in the 1990s. Because of this timing, the Berne Convention does not reflect any of the practical possibilities for the creation and dissemination of copyrighted works that the internet has made possible, let alone the explosion of creative content and the changing attitudes toward authorship, sharing, and copyright that those realized possibilities have brought about. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:49 PDT
Authors:Charles S. Bullock III et al. Abstract: This article systematically compares how federal, state, and local civil rights agencies in the ten standard regions of the United States enforce fair housing law complaints filed by Blacks and Latinos. Specifically, it explores the extent to which regional outcomes at all three levels of government are decided favorably where, between 1989 and 2010, a racial or ethnic violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 or the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 is alleged. The results reveal significant variations in outcomes between these groups across the country. Most importantly, the probability of an outcome favorable to the complainant depends on the region in which the complaint is filed, the race or ethnicity of the complainant, and the racial or ethnic composition and the number of complaints filed per capita in the state in which a complaint originates. In general, while complaints filed by Latinos are more likely to receive a favorable outcome than those filed by Blacks, favorability rates for Latinos are more dependent on the region where the complaint is processed than they are for Blacks. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:48 PDT
Authors:Richard H. Pildes Abstract: The decline of effective government throughout most Western democracies poses one of the greatest challenges democracy currently confronts. The importance of effective government receives too little attention in democratic and legal theory, yet the inability to deliver effective government can lead citizens to alienation, distrust, and withdrawal from participation, and worse, to endorse authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through the dysfunctions of democratic governments.A major reason for this decline in effective government is that democracies have become more politically fragmented. Political power has been dispersed among many more political parties, organized groups, and even more spontaneous, instantly mobilized non-formal groups. In the proportional-representation systems of Western Europe, power is now divided across many more political parties, including recent, insurgent ones. In the first-past-the-post system of the United States, the main parties are much more internally fragmented. Outside groups, and even individual actors, have far greater power to disrupt and undermine government efforts to forge policy than in the past.This article expands and extends earlier work I have done on political fragmentation in the United States. It identifies the various forms political fragmentation has taken across Western democracies in general. The article then explores some of the major economic and cultural forces that are fueling fragmentation across most Western democracies.This piece then turns to a substantial analysis of the communications revolution, as another major cause of the political fragmentation in democracies today. The challenge this revolution poses to democratic government is more profound than more familiar concerns with disinformation, misinformation, offensive speech, and the like. The communications revolution might inherently undermine the capacity for legitimate, broadly accepted political authority – the authority necessary to be able to govern effectively in democratic systems. Political fragmentation is the result of dissatisfaction with the way democracies have been governing, yet it also makes effective governance all the more difficult. Though there is insufficient appreciation of this new era of political fragmentation, overcoming this fragmentation and delivering effective governance is among the most urgent challenges facing democracies across the West. PubDate: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:44:48 PDT
Authors:Colin P.A. Jones Abstract: This article will propose and explain a draft amendment to the United States Constitution that would secure an intermediate degree of political representation for Americans living in U.S. territories. While concerned principally with U.S. territories, the amendment would also address Congressional representation for the District of Columbia. PubDate: Wed, 31 Aug 2022 06:54:19 PDT
Open Access journal
[4 journals]
