When the Law is Understood—L3C No

The November, 2009 issue of Community Dividend, included an article entitled “The L3C: A new business model for socially responsible investing.” The article spoke enthusiastically about “[t]he low-profit limited liability company, or L3C, …a newly developed form of business that blends attributes of nonprofit and for-profit organizations in order to promote investment in socially responsible objectives.” We understand the enthusiasm; proponents of the L3C have predicted dramatic benefits. However, after careful study of the relevant law, we have concluded that the enthusiasm is misplaced. The L3C concept is fundamentally flawed, potentially dangerous, and at best counterproductive. We also understand that our skepticism may make us seem like a pair of Grinches. We want, therefore, to briefly describe our experience in this realm of law and to outline the legal issues we have considered. We have each been involved in the law and practice of limited liability companies for more than 20 years. One of us (Bill) has a full-time practice that includes substantial amounts of work with low-income housing and community development financing transactions and extensive work with nonprofit organizations. The other of us (Daniel) is a professor of law, who was the Reporter for the Uniform Limited Partnership Act (from the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws) and Co-Reporter for the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act. Each of us has taught and written extensively about LLCs. In our assessment of the L3C concept, we have considered the arguments and claims of the L3C’s proponents (including statements made in state legislatures), and also the laws providing for limited liability companies, regulating charitable foundations, and governing the sale of securities. The promoters of state L3C legislation describe three principal benefits from the L3C form: (1) the L3C complies or “dovetails” with IRS program-related investment (“PRI”) rules, thereby enabling private foundation investment in qualifying business enterprises that operate according to for-profit metrics (but nonetheless for socially beneficial purposes); (2) the L3C permits “tranched investment” through which foundations can make high risk/low return investments to enable profit-seekers to make low risk/high return investments, thereby bringing market-rate capital into socially beneficial enterprises; and (3) the L3C creates a “brand” to enable easy comprehension and use of the PRI tool. Our research shows that none of these benefits exist

CoRRPUS: Codex-Leveraged Structured Representations for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding

Story generation and understanding -- as with all NLG/NLU tasks -- has seen a surge in neurosymbolic work. Researchers have recognized that, while large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, they can be augmented with symbolic means to be even better and to make up for any flaws that the neural networks might have. However, symbolic methods are extremely costly in terms of the amount of time and expertise needed to create them. In this work, we capitalize on state-of-the-art Code-LLMs, such as Codex, to bootstrap the use of symbolic methods for tracking the state of stories and aiding in story understanding. We show that our CoRRPUS system and abstracted prompting procedures can beat current state-of-the-art structured LLM techniques on pre-existing story understanding tasks (bAbI task 2 and Re^3) with minimal hand engineering. We hope that this work can help highlight the importance of symbolic representations and specialized prompting for LLMs as these models require some guidance for performing reasoning tasks properly.Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 202