Sep 4, 2019 Marin K. LevyCourts Law
Jeffrey L. Fisher & Alli Orr Larsen,
Virtual Briefing at the Supreme Court, 105
Cornell L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
How do the Justices (and their law clerks) know what they know? More specifically, how do they acquire the information that they rely on when deciding cases? Alli Orr Larsen has done more than anyone in recent years to answer this set of questions. From exploring the role of amicus brief “facts” in Supreme Court opinions to tracing “in house” fact-finding by the Justices themselves, Larsen has shown how information comes to, and is sought by, members of the Court in surprising and perhaps unsettling ways. It is thereforeunsurprising that Larsen, with renowned Supreme Court advocate Jeff Fisher, have new and important information about how facts and arguments reach chambers today.
The starting point of Virtual Briefing is that the digital age has opened new avenues for reaching the Justices. As readers of this site will no doubt acknowledge, many in the legal profession gather crucial information about cases online. Whereas yesterday’s lawyer might have consulted bar journals and op-ed pages to glean legal insights, today’s lawyer has her pick of podcasts, blogs, and twitter feeds devoted to the Court. As one example, according to ABA estimates, there were a mere 100 legal blogs in 2002 and more than 4000 by 2016. These sources provide what the authors dub “virtual briefing”— written or oral online advocacy, outside the normal briefing process, aimed at influencing the outcome of a case at the Supreme Court. Continue reading "Confronting Online Advocacy"
Sep 3, 2019 Daithí Mac SíthighTechnology Law
Ellen P. Goodman & Julia Powles,
Urbanism Under Google: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto, __
Fordham L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at
SSRN.
National Geographic’s April 2019 issue focused on ‘cities’, presenting photographs, highlighting challenges, and wondering about the future. Its editor highlighted that two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in a city by 2050, and recent history is replete with unfinished or abandoned blueprints for what this future might look like. Yet in the field of technology law and urban planning, the biggest story of the last two years may well be that of Toronto, where a proposal to rethink urban life through data, technology, and redevelopment has prompted important reflections on governance, privacy, and control.
In Urbanism Under Google: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto, forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review, Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles set out to tell the story of the ‘Sidewalk Toronto’ project, from its early announcements (full of promise but lacking in detail) to the elaborate (yet no less controversial) legal and planning documents now publicly available. Goodman and Powles contribute to the public and academic scrutiny of this specific project, but their critique of process and transparency will obviously be of value in many other cities, especially as ‘smart city’ initiatives continue to proliferate. Continue reading "We the North"
Sep 2, 2019 Charlotte CraneTax Law
In Tax Equivalences and Their Implications, Alan Auerbach reviews some of the commonly invoked equivalences that have been incorporated into the vocabulary of tax policy discussions during the last half-century. He offers a quick (and refreshingly accessible) summary of the analysis economists have used to break down the study of tax instruments so that their predicted impacts can be compared in terms of their overall effect on the economy. More important, he points out the situations in which these generally useful assumptions about equivalence across tax instruments will not hold, and, in doing so, hints that arguments from equivalence may have sometimes played a perhaps oversized role in tax policy discussions.
Equivalence for Auerbach’s purposes generally refers to the idea that identified tax policies have, in his words, “the same impact on fundamental economic outcomes.” One key economic outcome is the extent of the misallocation of resources resulting from the dead-weight losses taxes always entail. Under an economist’s view, for instance, a labor income tax can be seen as equivalent to a consumption tax as long as there is no initial wealth (and therefore earnings are only derived from labor) and all earnings are consumed. Continue reading "What Is Lost in Translation? From Theory to Practice in Tax Policy"
