On the Edge: Declining Marginal Utility and Tax Policy
By Sarah B. Lawsky. Full text here. Tax policy and scholarship generally assume that income has declining marginal utility (that is, that the next dollar is worth less to a wealthier person than to a poorer person). This assumption provides an easy justification for redistributive taxation. But the legal literature provides no firm grounding for the…
Continue ReadingMoney Talks but It Isn't Speech
By Deborah Hellman. Full text here. The Article challenges the central premise of our campaign finance law, namely that restrictions on giving and spending money constitute restrictions on speech, and thus can only be justified by compelling governmental interests. This claim has become so embedded in constitutional doctrine that in the most recent Supreme Court case…
Continue ReadingNote: Legitimate Absenteeism: The Unconstitutionality of the Caucus Attendance Requirement
By Heather R. Abraham. Full text here. Dubbed by the Washington Post as “undemocratic,” the caucus system for selecting delegates to national party presidential nominating conventions tends to disenfranchise identifiable factions of voters, including deployed service members, religious observers, persons with disabilities or in poor health, students who attend school away from home, and shift workers…
Continue ReadingNote: Rule 14a-11 and the Administrative Procedure Act: It's Better to Have Had and Waived, than Never to Have Had at All
By Reed T. Schuster. Full text here. A dramatic sequence of events starting in the summer of 2007 caused the United States’ banking and financial systems to collapse and thrust the country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It was not just one thing, but a confluence of factors that led to the…
Continue ReadingNote: The Cloying Use of Unallotment: Curbing Executive Branch Appropriation Reductions During Fiscal Emergencies
By Tyler J. Siewert. Full text here. To ensure the perpetuation of balanced budgets, which are legal and practical requirements in forty-nine states, many state legislatures bestow upon the executive branch broad powers to reduce appropriations through unallotment statutes. The Note accentuates two dire legal inefficiencies plaguing an ample number of these laws. First, many statutes…
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