Suchergebnisse

Validly due and payable state and local taxes often go unpaid because the absent tax debtor chooses not to pay voluntarily and has no assets from which the tax debt can be collected in the taxing state. He often has assets elsewhere, but they may be difficult for the tax creditor to discover and to reach. Only a few years ago out-of-state assets could not be reached at all, nor could the tax debtor himself be reached except within the taxing state, in its own courts, and by its own legal processes. Formerly, no state would use its law or its courts to enforce the penal or the revenue laws of another state. As to claims based upon penal laws, this inhospitality to some extent still persists, although the definition of penality for that purpose is being narrowed.' With respect to claims based upon revenue laws, however, the legal attitude has changed. As is often the case, this change was initiated by a few thoughtful common law courts and then was taken up by the state legislatures. Today it is generally possible for a state or its subordinate units to maintain tax collection actions in most of the sister states. Yet such revenue collecting lawsuits seldom are brought and are not always successful when brought. Attempted evasion of tax obligations is no small matter, and movement from state to state affords a large part of the opportunity for it. Sales and use taxes normally are collected from sellers of goods, and an in-state seller can be investigated with reasonable thoroughness. Such an investigation often is not possible with out-of-state sellers, and it is probable that large amounts of use taxes are never collected from them.' Income taxes can be evaded by nonresidents who earn income in a state then remove themselves and the income before taxes can be collected, and also by residents who move from the state before tax collection. Moreover, withholding can reach only a portion of these absentees. Death taxes provide another of several examples of levies that can be minimized through interstate slippage. ...

Differences about how the business of federal circuit and district courts should be administered--as distinguished from how their cases should be decided--down through the years have presented a persistent conflict between an ideal of national uniformity and an effort to maintain local control over administrative details. In one sense this has been a contest between reformers who have sought increased efficiency in federal judicial administration and local judges whose rallying cry was judicial independence and whose personal interest was in continuing to run things as they were accustomed within their own little domains. Occasionally patronage was involved. This did not mean, however, that the locally preferred procedures were always inefficient--sometimes they worked better in a particular district or circuit than proposed reforms would have. The story of that slow, limited advance is the theme of Professor Fish's book. The author is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Duke University and is along-time student of the federal judicial system. Starting with Taft in 1922, the book presents a factual account of how some measure of administrative control has been gradually achieved in the federal district and circuit courts, always over vigorous opposition, and often with only half-hearted support from the judges who did not actively oppose it.'

It is increasingly common today for courts to render opinions as they did in an earlier common law era, that is, to answer the principally litigated issue first, then to give answers to incidental questions that are apt to arise thereafter. Admittedly these incidental answers are dicta only, but they are substantially authoritative and serve useful purposes. By employing such a technique, appellate courts can do a better job than legislatures usually have done in promulgating comparative negligence rules. With respect to matters upon which the legislature has never taken any position, legislative inaction constitutes no affirmative assertion of legislative intent to leave the law as it has always been. When the socio-legal need for a change in judge-made law is evident, when the courts which made the law in the first place can do as good a job and possibly a better one than the legislature is likely to do in updating it, and when the legislature gives no sign of acting on the matter, it seems that judicial action is fully justified. In such a situation, judicial inertia induced by reluctance to take on a difficult task is no virtue.

AbstractTaiwan's record of preventing infections and deaths from COVID-19 outshines that of almost every other nation, far outstripping the performance of the US, all European countries, and almost all Asian countries. Yet Taiwan is the nation closest to Wuhan, font of the pandemic. Equally importantly, Taiwan's public health achievement has occurred without the government dictates such as business and residential lockdowns that have aroused controversy and caused economic and psychological distress around the globe. This essay relates the story of Taiwan's actions during the crucial early months of 2020 and explores the factors—historical, geographical, legal, institutional, strategic, and cultural—accounting for Taiwan's remarkable success. Prominent among those factors are the legal and institutional infrastructure of preparedness that Taiwan constructed following its unhappy experience with the 2003 SARS outbreak, and the prompt and decisive measures taken upon discovery of the Wuhan outbreak on 31 December 2019. A dialogue between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches of government following the SARS episode enabled the infrastructure of preparedness to be created through a process consonant with democratic government, respecting principles of individual liberty and fairness. Risk communication techniques were skilfully employed to build public trust in expert advice about measures for infection prevention. Persuasion, not compulsion, was the norm. Cultural factors including customary acceptance of mask-wearing and authoritative advice, and perhaps a high level of risk-aversity, also played an important part. Taiwan's pandemic control policies have drawn criticism of government overreach. Some recommendations, such as for outdoor masking, bear little rational relation to infection prevention and are best characterized as mere "hygiene theatre." Nevertheless, early-2020 government measures received a high level of public approval. Taiwan's successful response to the pandemic illustrates the nation's nature: a disciplined democracy.