Foreword: The Supreme Court\u27s Estate Planning Jurisprudence

Sophisticated trust and estate counsel must keep up with near-daily developments in the substantive state law of wills, trusts and estates, as well as state and federal laws of wealth transfer taxation. Because of the sheer volume of statutory law and administrative regulations that estate planners must master, it is easy to lose sight of the important role that federal courts play in shaping the field of estate planning. Federal tax cases are routinely heard by the United States Tax Court, the Federal District Courts, the Court of Federal Claims and appellate courts in all circuits. Yet very few tax cases make it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. For this reason, the role of the nation\u27s highest court in the development of estate planning jurisprudence may be under-theorized. This issue of the ACTEC Law Journal considers the role of the United States Supreme Court in interpreting income, estate and gift tax laws and how those interpretations have shaped the development of contemporary estate planning practice

Foreword

The authors in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems explore the everyday lives of international law. More specifically, the authors theorize and investigate select practices of the International Criminal Court (ICC), by which I mean recurrent and meaningful work activities—social or material—that are performed in a regularized fashion and that have a bearing, whether large or small, on the operation of the ICC. By conceiving the ICC as a bundle of practices rather than as a unitary actor whose performance is primarily governed by politics, I seek to re-direct the existing literature on the much debated international organization, which has largely failed to engage, both theoretically and empirically, with the inner workings of the sizable bureaucracy based in The Hague—and the many organizational, cultural, and other cleavages that run through it and that have had a more than random institutional effect on international adjudication. In this foreword I give a brief account of the theoretical foundations on which this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems rests, then provide an overview of the empirical investigations. I close by briefly sketching avenues for further research

From the CIO Point of View: The IT Doesn\u27t Matter Debate

EDITOR\u27S FOREWORD: This article differs from the articles CAIS published previously in that it is a debate on the nature of IT written by practitioners from three different points of view. It deals with IT Doesn\u27t Matter, a polemic written by Nicholas Carr, then editor of the Harvard Business Review in which he argued that the days when IT offered strategic advantage are long since gone and that managers therefore should undertake a different approach to IT. The paper, obviously, became notorious in the IS community. On December 3, 2003, the Southern California Chapter of the Society for Information Management, at its regular meeting invited three of its members with long experience as chief information officers to debate the issue. The title of the meeting was: I.T. Doesn\u27t Matter or Does It? How to Improve the Value and Perception of I.T. The three debaters were assigned a position to argue: favorable to Carr (Laskey), neutral (DeJarnett), and unfavorable to Carr (Trainor). Edited versions of their remarks are presented below

Foreword

Preface to the Volume by O. Rak on the Neolithic Rhyta, cult vessels distributed in most of the Balkan peninsul