Comment, Failure to Pay Any Poll Tax or Other Tax : The Constitutionality of Tax Felon Disenfranchisement

If the government convicts a citizen under the tax evasion provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, some state disenfranchisement laws preclude that citizen — now a felon — from voting. In this sense, the right to vote depends on the payment of federal income taxes. The Constitution\u27s Twenty-Fourth Amendment, however, guarantees that the federal franchise “shall not be denied or abridged... by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” If “other tax” includes income taxes, the text of the Twenty-fourth Amendment appears to prohibit the disenfranchisement of citizens convicted of tax felonies. This Comment argues that courts should construe the Twenty-Fourth Amendment narrowly to permit the disenfranchisement of tax felons — even though the Twenty-Fourth Amendment’s plain language precludes states from disenfranchising tax felons for federal elections

The Social Boundaries of Corporate Taxation

Historically, the tax law distinction between corporate and conduit treatment drew primarily on doctrinal understandings, treating state-law corporations as corporate for tax purposes and classifying unincorporated legal entities based on their resemblance to conventional state-law corporations. More recently, commentators and Treasury have abandoned these doctrinal touchstones in favor of efficiency, broadly construed, as the guiding principle in determining an entity’s tax classification. This Article argues that, while important, efficiency considerations should not function as the sole arbiter of the boundary between corporate and conduit tax treatment. First, classical corporate taxation is, in many ways, deeply embedded within a larger network of legal and social meanings. Classical corporate taxation operates in concert with, rather than separately from, these legal and social meanings. For this reason, the rules governing entities’ tax classification should take these interrelationships into account, if not as a primary norm, then as a secondary consideration when empirical or other uncertainties preclude a clear choice based on efficiency. The social boundaries of corporate taxation refer to the extent to which these types of nontax considerations implicate the Code’s structural distinction between corporations and conduits. Second, efficiency is often conceptually tractable as a metric, but this intuitive appeal can mask significant empirical uncertainties about behavioral responses, especially if policymakers possess limited information, have difficulty reversing inapposite decisions, or face other constraints. In these situations, policymakers should take cues from the broader legal and social context in which tax law operates. Finally, by claiming that corporate tax law is situated in broader legal and social contexts, this Article does not attempt to validate or valorize the independent merit of these other contexts. Instead, this Article advocates consistency across policy areas — “fit” within the broader legal and social framework — rather than particular policy prescriptions

Penobscot Transformer Tales

This article describes part of a collection of mythological texts obtained from and dictated by Newell Lion of the Penobscot tribe at Oldtown Maine to Frank G Speck

Tax Planning and Policy Drift

This Article proposes a framework for analyzing how private-sector legal interpretations influence public policy. Political scientists and legal scholars use the terms “bureaucratic drift” and “legislative drift” to describe how administrative agencies and future legislative coalitions affect public policy enacted by Congress. This Article identifies a third category of policy drift: “planning drift.” Planning drift describes deviations from an enacting legislature’s policy preferences that result from private experts’ interpretations of existing law. After Congress enacts a statute, the first people to interpret and apply the new legislation generally are not regulators or judges, but instead are private experts, such as lawyers, acting in the service of their clients. Although these experts’ interpretations do not have legal authority in a formal sense, this Article elaborates mechanisms through which these interpretations shape the course of public policy. Specifically, these interpretations give private experts a first-mover advantage in the interpretation of new legislation and affect the substance of subsequent legislative and bureaucratic interventions. Where private experts’ legal interpretations distort legislative policy preferences, Congress may have an incentive to limit planning drift. From Congress’s perspective, however, planning drift is not always undesirable. As this Article argues, Congress may tolerate or even welcome planning drift, depending on how it interacts with other types of policy drift and congressional politics and purpose. This Article concludes by outlining strategies that Congress could use to constrain planning drift where it is not desired. In an appendix, this Article illustrates planning drift using a detailed historical case study of the rules restricting “trafficking” in corporate tax losses

The Curious Conundrum Regarding Sulfur Abundances In Planetary Nebulae

Sulfur abundances derived from optical emission line measurements and ionization correction factors in planetary nebulae are systematically lower than expected for the objects' metallicities. We have carefully considered a large range of explanations for this "sulfur anomaly", including: (1) correlations between the size of the sulfur deficit and numerous nebular and central star properties; (2) ionization correction factors which under-correct for unobserved ions; (3) effects of dielectronic recombination on the sulfur ionization balance; (4) sequestering of S into dust and/or molecules; and (5) excessive destruction of S or production of O by AGB stars. It appears that all but the second scenario can be ruled out. However, we find evidence that the sulfur deficit is generally reduced but not eliminated when S^+3 abundances determined directly from IR measurements are used in place of the customary sulfur ionization correction factor. We tentatively conclude that the sulfur anomaly is caused by the inability of commonly used ICFs to properly correct for populations of ionization stages higher than S^+2.Comment: 40 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

A Comparative Study of Social Comparison, Materialism, and Subjective Well-Being in the U. S., China, Croatia, and India

As the globalization of markets spreads Western media and consumerism across the world, it raises the question as to whether the arguments proposed by theories of social comparison and cultivation hold true in non-Western societies. In this study, we test the relationships between social comparison associated with television programming, materialism, and subjective well-being among college students from the United States, China, Croatia, and India. Structural equation modeling results reveal that the positive relationship between social comparison and materialism is universal. However, the mediating role of materialism between social comparison and subjective well-being is different between individualistic and collectivistic societies

Cognitive Foundation of Diversity Management: Bridging the Gap between Aspiration and Reality

Lewin’s change model states that the most effective way to implement a change is to reduce restraining forces. In this article, we suggest that cognitive biases are a major restraining force that has been ignored in diversity management research. Drawing upon the theory of rationality/intuition two-system thinking, we explain that the driving forces for workforce diversity are primarily propelled by rational reasoning. Yet, their effects are impeded by the cognitive roadblocks rooted in intuitive thinking. We propose a behavioral design approach to reduce the restraining forces by mitigating perceptual biases and judgment errors in the work context

Mobility and Diffusion of a Tagged Particle in a Driven Colloidal Suspension

We study numerically the influence of density and strain rate on the diffusion and mobility of a single tagged particle in a sheared colloidal suspension. We determine independently the time-dependent velocity autocorrelation functions and, through a novel method, the response functions with respect to a small force. While both the diffusion coefficient and the mobility depend on the strain rate the latter exhibits a rather weak dependency. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the initial decay of response and correlation functions coincide, allowing for an interpretation in terms of an 'effective temperature'. Such a phenomenological effective temperature recovers the Einstein relation in nonequilibrium. We show that our data is well described by two expansions to lowest order in the strain rate.Comment: submitted to EP