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Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Embedded Librarians: Teaching Legal Research as a Lawyering Skill
The current movement for reform of legal education focuses on teaching both knowledge and practical skills in combination, as recommended in the 2007 Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers. In light of technology that now makes masses of law and related information available online, unorganized and seemingly unmanageable, this article proposes that law schools draw on the professional skills of their law librarians to teach students advanced legal research and analysis by embedding them in law school clinics. It outlines a pedagogy for teaching legal research in clinics as a lawyering skill, complete with ethical responsibilities and professional standards, consonant with the recommendations of the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, the 2009 Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education, and the 1992 ABA Taskforce on Law Schools and the Profession, Legal Education and Professional Development (the MacCrate Report). It examines how the relatively new trend of embedding librarians in practice settings, offering assistance at the point of need, could be effective in law schools. Finally, it advances a model for embedding law librarians in law school clinics based on the experiment conducted at the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, begun by first embedding one librarian in the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic and then continued by adding on other clinics. This article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Legal Education.
Source: works.bepress.com
Offshore Accounts, Corporate Income Shifting, and Executive Compensation
In this essay, Professor Book introduces articles that arose out of the Villanova Law Review Norman J. Shachoy Symposium hosted at Villanova Law School on September 23, 2011. The symposium brought together some of the nation’s leading academics, practitioners, and journalists to discuss issues relating to the taxation of offshore individual offshore accounts and offshore operations of multinational corporations (MNCs), and the role of the tax laws in regulating executive compensation. As I discuss in this introductory essay, the articles at some level implicate essential questions of fairness, including questions of both vertical and horizontal equity. The image of millionaires hiding money in undeclared offshore bank accounts has triggered unprecedented administrative and legislative reactions to detect those accounts and deter that type of evasion; some of the largest American MNCs paying no or little tax raises questions about our corporate and international tax policy; executives’ high pay, at companies implicated in highly publicized corporate scandals and the near meltdown of the financial sector, has contributed to federal legislation meant to influence corporate governance. That those in positions of power, through legal or other means, can continue to perpetuate advantages not generally available contributes to dissatisfaction with institutions. When institutions that should be among our most respected can exacerbate and perpetuate inequalities, especially at times of economic uncertainty, there is bound to be both a public and legislative backlash. While there is a great deal of disagreement about how to calibrate the tradeoff between limiting incentives to create wealth on the one hand, and the ill-effects of income and wealth inequality on the other, there is general agreement that those with positions of power should not abuse that power by extracting rents from the market or hiding assets by secreting them away in undeclared bank accounts. Likewise, when some of our most profitable MNC’s or richest Americans have an effective tax rate below that of many with modest incomes, those trade-offs inherent in the discussion about the degree of vertical equity become more visible, and likely to generate political and popular attention. How our tax system will address these questions remains to be seen. There is no doubt, however, that policymakers and academics interested in issues of offshore evasion, international income-shifting and executive compensation will find this symposium’s articles essential reading.
Source: works.bepress.com
Increasing Participation in the Rulemaking Process
Agency rulemaking has an immense impact on federal policymaking. The Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) paradigm of notice and comment is meant to provide a mechanism to allow for responsiveness and accountability to unelected agency officials who wield enormous power when promulgating general rules. This article centers on the insufficiency of notice and comment to provide both input to the IRS and legitimacy to the IRS’s actions when guidance touches on issues that are germane to lower income or disadvantaged taxpayers.
In this brief article, I build on administrative and poverty law scholars who have looked at the ways institutional proxies can help agencies design better rules ex ante, enhance the legitimacy of agency actions, and improve public respect and trust in government. To that end, I look to ways to formalize the TAS role in rulemaking so that its influence is more clearly tethered to its institutional powers.
Source: works.bepress.com
A New Paradigm for IRS Guidance: Ensuring Input and Enhancing Participation
This article highlights how, in light of the increasing role that the IRS plays in the lives of poorer and marginalized individuals, when promulgating rules, the IRS will have to go beyond the mechanism of the APA notice and comment regime to ensure robust public participation. While others have discussed the IRS’s approach to the notice and comment regime, commentators generally have overlooked the problems associated with lower income taxpayers’ lack of voice in the rulemaking process. To remedy that shortfall, I call for changes in agency conduct to encourage public participation in formulating rules. I build upon a model proposed by administrative law scholars who have suggested legislative reform to the APA and changes in agency practice to place greater responsibility on administrative agencies to gather input from regulated parties. I argue that the IRS, when confronted with the need to formulate rules that are likely to impact the lives of disadvantaged or low income taxpayers, should, to the extent feasible, affirmatively seek out the input of taxpayers, consumer groups, and expert intermediaries. The article builds on scholars who have considered the role that proxies can play to help address pluralistic imbalances and considers the possible role that two key institutional actors, the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) and low income taxpayer clinics, can play in the IRS’s rulemaking function. My proposed expansion of the role of TAS and clinics would allow the IRS to harness the collective wisdom of its increasingly diverse constituency and enhance the legitimacy of the rules it promulgates
Source: works.bepress.com