Crises and Tax

How can law best mitigate harm from crises like storms, epidemics, and financial meltdowns? This Article uses the law and economics framework of property rules and liability rules to analyze crisis responses across multiple areas of law, focusing particularly on the ways the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) battled the 2008–09 financial crisis. Remarkably, the IRS’s responses to that crisis cost more than Congress’s higher-profile bank bailouts. Despite their costs, many of the IRS’s responses were underinclusive, causing preventable layoffs and foreclosures. This Article explains these failures and demonstrates that the optimal response to crises is to shift from harsh property rules to compensatory liability rules, temporarily. Arranging such a shift in advance further mitigates harm when crises arrive. This analysis also provides new insights for the broader literature on property rules and liability rules. For example, arranging in advance for temporary moves to liability rules during crises can avoid windfalls, allow speedier relief, and encourage flexible private contracts. These lessons have practical applications in areas as far afield as how constitutional law and patent law respond to epidemics

Pliability, or the whitney extension theorem for curves in carnot groups

The Whitney extension theorem is a classical result in analysis giving a necessary and sufficient condition for a function defined on a closed set to be extendable to the whole space with a given class of regularity. It has been adapted to several settings, among which the one of Carnot groups. However, the target space has generally been assumed to be equal to R^d for some d $\ge$ 1. We focus here on the extendability problem for general ordered pairs (G\_1,G\_2) (with G\_2 non-Abelian). We analyze in particular the case G\_1 = R and characterize the groups G\_2 for which the Whitney extension property holds, in terms of a newly introduced notion that we call pliability. Pliability happens to be related to rigidity as defined by Bryant an Hsu. We exploit this relation in order to provide examples of non-pliable Carnot groups, that is, Carnot groups so that the Whitney extension property does not hold. We use geometric control theory results on the accessibility of control affine systems in order to test the pliability of a Carnot group. In particular, we recover some recent results by Le Donne, Speight and Zimmermann about Lusin approximation in Carnot groups of step 2 and Whitney extension in Heisenberg groups. We extend such results to all pliable Carnot groups, and we show that the latter may be of arbitrarily large step

On pliability of del Pezzo fibrations and Cox rings

We develop some concrete methods to build Sarkisov links, starting from Mori fibre spaces. This is done by studying low rank Cox rings and their properties. As part of this development, we give an algorithm to construct explicitly the coarse moduli space of a toric Deligne-Mumford stack. This can be viewed as the generalisation of the notion of well-formedness for weighted projective spaces to homogeneous coordinate ring of toric varieties. As an illustration, we apply these methods to study birational transformations of certain fibrations of del Pezzo surfaces over $\mathbb{P}^1$, into other Mori fibre spaces, using Cox rings and variation of geometric invariant theory. We show that the pliability of these Mori fibre spaces is at least three and they are not rational

Circle of Sarkisov links on a Fano 33-fold

For a general Fano $3$-fold of index $1$ in the weighted projective space $\mathbb{P}(1,1,1,1,2,2,3)$ we construct $2$ new birational models that are Mori fibre spaces, in the framework of the so-called Sarkisov program. We highlight a relation between the corresponding birational maps, as a circle of Sarkisov links, visualising the notion of relations (due to Kaloghiros) in Sarkisov program

Pliability Rules

In 1543, the Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, determined the heliocentric design of the solar system. Copernicus was motivated in large part by the conviction that Claudius Ptolemy\u27s geocentric astronomical model, which dominated scientific thought at that time, was too incoherent, complex, and convoluted to be true. Hence, Copernicus made a point of making his model coherent, simple, and elegant. Nearly three and a half centuries later, at the height of the impressionist movement, the French painter Claude Monet set out to depict the Ruen Cathedral in a series of twenty paintings, each presenting the cathedral in a different light. Monet\u27s goal was to demonstrate how his object of study may be perceived by observers differently depending on the circumstances of the observation. In the spirit of these two projects, in 1972, Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed resolved to craft a comprehensive, yet elegant, model for organizing the universe of legal entitlements. The article\u27s impact has been profound and enduring. In their path-breaking article, Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral, Calabresi and Melamed established a new way of conceptualizing legal rights and duties. Departing from traditional jurisprudential notions, Calabresi and Melamed introduced the concepts of property rules and liability rules as the ordering principles of the legal system, and then analyzed their virtues and vices as means of protecting legal entitlements. Property rule protection forces potential takers to secure the consent of the entitlement owner, and thus allows the owner to determine the price of her entitlement. Liability rule protection, by contrast, allows potential takers to avail themselves of other people\u27s entitlements as long as they are willing to pay a collectively determined price that is usually set by a court, a legislator, or an administrative agency

Lightweight protective clothing for the safe handling of high-intensity pressurized lamps

Five commercially available clothing materials, selected for their high cutting resistance, high strength, light weight and pliability, were tested by exposing them to exploding lamps located less than 60 cm (2 ft) away. Face shield material tested initially was commercial high-strength polycarbonate plastic

Flexible composite film for printed circuit board

A flexible printed circuit for a printed circuit board in which layers of reaction product composed of a combination of phenoxy resin - polyisocyanate - brominated epoxy resin, and in which the equivalent ratio of those functional groups is hydroxyl group: isocyanate group: epoxy group - 1 : 0.2 to 2 : 0.5 to 3 are laminated on at least one side of saturated polyester film is discussed

Flexible substrate for printed wiring

A very flexible substrate for printed wiring is disclosed which is composed of a blend of phenoxy resin-polyisocyanate-brominated epoxy resin in which the equivalent ration of the functional groups is hydroxyl grouped: isocyanate group: epoxy group = 1:0.2 to 2:0.5 to 3. The product has outstanding solder resistance and is applied to metal without using adhesives

Singular del Pezzo fibrations and birational rigidity

A known conjecture of Grinenko in birational geometry asserts that a Mori fibre space with the structure of del Pezzo fibration of low degree is birationally rigid if and only if its anticanonical class is an interior point in the cone of mobile divisors. The conjecture is proved to be true for smooth models (with a generality assumption for degree 3). It is speculated that the conjecture holds for, at least, Gorenstein models in degree 1 and 2. In this article, I present a (Gorenstein) counterexample in degree 2 to this conjecture.Comment: This is essentially a more detailed version of the second section of arXiv:1310.5548. To appear in the proceedings of the conference 'Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry', held in Trento, Italy, 201