Does the Supreme Court’s Decision in Wayfair Apply Retroactively?

A recent decision of the Oregon Tax Court suggests that it may be premature to dismiss the challenging questions raised by the retroactive application of Wayfair as entirely hypothetical. Accordingly, after providing an overview of the case law governing retroactive application of Supreme Court state tax decisions repudiating preexisting constitutional doctrine, we examine the Oregon Tax Court’s opinion in Global Hookah Distributors Inc. v. Department of Revenue, which addressed the question whether Wayfair applied retroactively to the state’s tobacco products tax

The Internet Tax Freedom Act at 25

In October 1998, Congress enacted the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), a temporary three-year “moratorium” on the enactment of new state and local “taxes on Internet access” and on “multiple or discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce.” After extending the act temporarily several times, Congress, in 2016, finally and controversially struck the language temporarily extending the act, thereby making it permanent.With its idiosyncratic legislative history and statutory language, as well as the recent attention it has received in connection with legal challenges to digital services and analogous taxes, we thought it would be appropriate to commemorate ITFA’s 25th birthday by reviewing the act and the litigation it has spawned and to consider whether it is “fit for service” in today’s digital economy

Closed classes of functions, generalized constraints and clusters

Classes of functions of several variables on arbitrary non-empty domains that are closed under permutation of variables and addition of dummy variables are characterized in terms of generalized constraints, and hereby Hellerstein's Galois theory of functions and generalized constraints is extended to infinite domains. Furthermore, classes of operations on arbitrary non-empty domains that are closed under permutation of variables, addition of dummy variables and composition are characterized in terms of clusters, and a Galois connection is established between operations and clusters.Comment: 21 page

The 9/11 Litigation Database: A Recipe for Judicial Management

The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, presented the American legal system with unprecedented challenges regarding whether, and how, to compensate those who suffered harm as a result. Congress stepped in almost immediately to provide a victims’ compensation fund that dealt primarily with those who were directly and immediately affected. But many other harms manifested later. In the months that followed as many as 60,000 persons came to the World Trade Center (WTC) to aid in what amounted to around-the-clock rescue, recovery, and debris removal at the WTC site. Of that number, over 10,000 responders filed tort claims for injuries they claimed to have suffered as a result of exposure to contaminants at the site. Aside from workers’ compensation and disability insurance, their lawsuits in federal court were their only means by which to seek damages for their injuries. No one questions that the atmosphere around the WTC site was a toxic cocktail of epic proportions, especially in the earlier months. Plaintiffs’ complaints set forth claims of negligence, violation of safe-place statutes, and failure to disclose the true nature of the relevant risks. The plaintiff-responders wound up alleging over 380 different injuries arising from their exposures. They claimed that the City of New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, four prime contractors and hundreds of subcontractors were liable to them in tort. Congress assigned all of these responder claims to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the cases were ultimately consolidated before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who presided over all of the tort claims arising from the 9/11 attacks. An article entitled Managerial Judging: The 9/11 Responders’ Tort Litigation, coauthored by Judge Hellerstein and Special Masters Henderson and Twerski, recently published in the Cornell Law Review, contains a comprehensive analysis of the 9/11 litigation and ultimate settlement. This Article will focus and enlarge on one aspect of that subject, the creation of a program of core discovery and a database to gather and maintain information about all 10,000 claimants. The function of the database was to aid the court and the parties to manage discovery and to choose cases for further and intensive discovery and early trial in order to make it possible for the parties to negotiate a comprehensive settlement of the massive litigation

The 9/11 Litigation Database: A Recipe for Judicial Management

The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, presented the American legal system with unprecedented challenges regarding whether, and how, to compensate those who suffered harm as a result. Congress stepped in almost immediately to provide a victims’ compensation fund that dealt primarily with those who were directly and immediately affected. But many other harms manifested later. In the months that followed as many as 60,000 persons came to the World Trade Center (WTC) to aid in what amounted to around-the-clock rescue, recovery, and debris removal at the WTC site. Of that number, over 10,000 responders filed tort claims for injuries they claimed to have suffered as a result of exposure to contaminants at the site. Aside from workers’ compensation and disability insurance, their lawsuits in federal court were their only means by which to seek damages for their injuries. No one questions that the atmosphere around the WTC site was a toxic cocktail of epic proportions, especially in the earlier months. Plaintiffs’ complaints set forth claims of negligence, violation of safe-place statutes, and failure to disclose the true nature of the relevant risks. The plaintiff-responders wound up alleging over 380 different injuries arising from their exposures. They claimed that the City of New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, four prime contractors and hundreds of subcontractors were liable to them in tort. Congress assigned all of these responder claims to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the cases were ultimately consolidated before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who presided over all of the tort claims arising from the 9/11 attacks. An article entitled Managerial Judging: The 9/11 Responders’ Tort Litigation, coauthored by Judge Hellerstein and Special Masters Henderson and Twerski, recently published in the Cornell Law Review, contains a comprehensive analysis of the 9/11 litigation and ultimate settlement. This Article will focus and enlarge on one aspect of that subject, the creation of a program of core discovery and a database to gather and maintain information about all 10,000 claimants. The function of the database was to aid the court and the parties to manage discovery and to choose cases for further and intensive discovery and early trial in order to make it possible for the parties to negotiate a comprehensive settlement of the massive litigation

Improved Bounds on Quantum Learning Algorithms

In this article we give several new results on the complexity of algorithms that learn Boolean functions from quantum queries and quantum examples. Hunziker et al. conjectured that for any class C of Boolean functions, the number of quantum black-box queries which are required to exactly identify an unknown function from C is $O(\frac{\log |C|}{\sqrt{{\hat{\gamma}}^{C}}})$, where $\hat{\gamma}^{C}$ is a combinatorial parameter of the class C. We essentially resolve this conjecture in the affirmative by giving a quantum algorithm that, for any class C, identifies any unknown function from C using $O(\frac{\log |C| \log \log |C|}{\sqrt{{\hat{\gamma}}^{C}}})$ quantum black-box queries. We consider a range of natural problems intermediate between the exact learning problem (in which the learner must obtain all bits of information about the black-box function) and the usual problem of computing a predicate (in which the learner must obtain only one bit of information about the black-box function). We give positive and negative results on when the quantum and classical query complexities of these intermediate problems are polynomially related to each other. Finally, we improve the known lower bounds on the number of quantum examples (as opposed to quantum black-box queries) required for $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC learning any concept class of Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension d over the domain $\{0,1\}^n$ from $\Omega(\frac{d}{n})$ to $\Omega(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log \frac{1}{\delta}+d+\frac{\sqrt{d}}{\epsilon})$. This new lower bound comes closer to matching known upper bounds for classical PAC learning.Comment: Minor corrections. 18 pages. To appear in Quantum Information Processing. Requires: algorithm.sty, algorithmic.sty to buil