Distinguishing the “Truly National” From the “Truly Local”: Customary Allocation, Commercial Activity, and Collective Action

This Essay makes two claims about different methods of defining the expanse and limits of the Commerce Clause. My first claim is that approaches that privilege traditional subjects of state regulation are unworkable and undesirable. These approaches are unworkable in light of the frequency with which the federal government and the states regulate the same subject matter in our world of largely overlapping federal and state legislative jurisdiction. The approaches are undesirable because the question of customary allocation is unrelated to the principal reason why Congress possesses the power to regulate interstate commerce: solving collective action problems involving multiple states. These problems are evident in the way that some federal judges invoked regulatory custom in litigation over the constitutionality of the minimum coverage provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The areas of health insurance and health care are not of exclusive state concern, and it is impossible to lose—or to win—a competition requiring skillful lawyers or judges to describe them as more state than federal, or more federal than state. Nor is it most important what the answer is. More promising are the approaches that view congressional authority as turning on either commercial activity or collective action problems facing the states. My second claim is that these two approaches have advantages and disadvantages, and that the choice between them exemplifies the more general tension between applying rules and applying their background justifications. I have previously defended a collective action approach to Article I, Section 8. My primary purpose in this Essay is to clarify the jurisprudential stakes in adopting one method or the other and to identify the problems that advocates of each approach must address

Sokolsky v. Kuhn, 405 So. 2d 975 (Fla. 1981)

Creditors\u27 Rights-GARNISHMENT-REDUCING PAST-DUE CHILD SUPPORT TO FINAL MONEY JUDGMENT: THE VANISHING EXCEPTION TO WAGE EXEMPTIO

I.R.C. Section 1014(e) and Gifted Property Reconveyed in Trust

The taxpayer’s method of property acquisition is significant in determining the proper income tax or adjusted basis in the property. Distinct adjusted basis rules apply to the transferee of property acquired by purchase, gift, and inheritance. A buyer who purchases property for cash receives an adjusted basis in the property acquired equal to its cost. For property acquired by gift, the general rule is that the donee’s adjusted basis equals the donor’s adjusted basis immediately prior to the transfer. A third income tax basis regime applies to the taxpayer who happens to acquire property by inheritance upon the death of a decedent

Unduly Influenced Trust Revocations

This article addresses both the will and the revocable trust as vehicles to accomplish gratuitous property dispositions, and analyzes the requisite mental capacity necessary to convey property during life and after death. This article focuses on undue influence in such situations, and the use of constructive trusts as remedial tools to rectify cases of undue influence. The author concludes by proposing that because of the existence of available and adequate probate and trust remedies, trust beneficiaries harmed as a result of undue influence should first resort to the equitable remedy of constructive trusts before being able to pursue a legal remedy through tort claims against the importuning party

Dark Matter In Minimal Trinification

We study an example of Grand Unified Theory (GUT), known as trinification, which was first introduced in 1984 by S.Glashow. This model has the GUT gauge group as $[SU(3)]^3$ with a discrete $\mathbb{Z}_3$ to ensure the couplings are unified at the GUT scale. In this letter we consider this trinification model in its minimal formulation and investigate its robustness in the context of cosmology. In particular we show that for a large set of the parameter space the model doesn't seem to provide a Dark Matter candidate compatible with cosmological data.Comment: To appear in the LXXXVI session of the "Les Houches" summer school. 9 pages, 2 graph

Political Instability: Effects on Financial Development, Roots in the Severity of Economic Inequality

We here bring forward strong evidence that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. As such, it needs to be added to the short list of major determinants of financial development. First, structural conditions first postulated by Engerman and Sokoloff (2002) as generating long-term inequality are shown here empirically to be exogenous determinants of political instability. Second, that exogenously-determined political instability in turn holds back financial development, even when we control for factors prominent in the last decade’s cross-country studies of financial development. The findings indicate that inequality-perpetuating conditions that result in political instability are fundamental roadblocks for international organizations like the World Bank that seek to promote financial development. The evidence here includes country fixed effect regressions and an instrumental model inspired by Engerman and Sokoloff’s (2002) work, which to our knowledge has not yet been used in finance and which is consistent with current tests as valid instruments. Four conventional measures of national political instability - Alesina and Perotti’s (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks’ (2005) work, and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability - persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. Political instability’s significance is time consistent in cross-sectional regressions back to the 1960’s, the period when the key data becomes available, robust in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from structural inequality to political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, and then to financial backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand which policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness