Forward: Rewriting the Script ArticleForthcoming
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Recommended Citation
Robyn Powell, Forward: Rewriting the Script, Oklahoma Law Review (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Articles
Till Death do us Part(ner) – Imputed Fraud Liability Concerns for Spouses Following the Supreme Court’s Decision in Bartenwerfer v. Buckley ArticleForthcoming
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Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Till Death do us Part(ner) – Imputed Fraud Liability Concerns for Spouses Following the Supreme Court’s Decision in Bartenwerfer v. Buckley, 59 Ga. L. Rev. (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Formulary Apportionment: A New Framework for Personal Income Taxation ArticleForthcoming
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Andrew D. Appleby, Formulary Apportionment: A New Framework for Personal Income Taxation, 52 Pepp. L. Rev. (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The prevalence of post-pandemic remote working arrangements and increased interstate migration have upended existing personal income taxation regimes. For decades, the current paradigm proved to be an imperfect but workable means to determine which state has the prevailing claim to impose tax on a particular item of income. The individual’s state of residence has a residual claim to all the individual’s worldwide income, but defers to the state in which the income is derived if such a state is determinable. To that end, the state of residence typically provides a credit for income taxes paid on a source basis to other states. Fundamentally, source trumps residence in the context of personal income taxation.
The problem is that taxing jurisdictions can no longer readily determine the source of income or the individual’s state of residence within the existing legal constructs. Existing legal structures designed to tax employment income cannot cope with widespread remote working arrangements. The rise of the digital economy and independent contractor “gig work” allows individuals to shift the source of their income. At the same time, individuals are also shifting their state of residence from high-tax to low-tax states at historic rates. Increased interstate migration, particularly of high-net-worth individuals and profitable closely-held businesses, has allowed income to migrate with individuals. The result is a genuine threat of multiple taxation for individuals and significant revenue losses for taxing jurisdictions. The stakes are enormous, as personal income tax regimes account for approximately one-quarter of all state and local tax revenues.
The solution—formulary apportionment—is a concept with which states are very familiar. Although formulary apportionment has been the prevailing paradigm for multistate corporate income taxation for decades, state legislatures and the existing literature have largely and surprisingly failed to recognize the promise of formulary apportionment for multistate personal income taxation. This Article remedies that oversight.
Taking Tokens Article
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Andrew D. Appleby, Taking Tokens, 91 Tenn. L. Rev. 321 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Tokenization began a fundamental transformation of our laws of ownership, but this transformation is curbed by a lag in the laws of taxation. This Article provides the theory and doctrinal tools to mend this disconnect. Tokenization provides a method to prove and transfer ownership of valuable assets such as art, real property, and equity interests in all types of entities. The tokenization process creates a nominal token that represents the legal ownership rights in the underlying asset. The token, and thus the ownership of the underlying asset, can then be verified and transferred in a process that may be more efficient than doing so with the underlying asset directly.
Blockchain-based tokenization promises to increase efficiency exponentially, which will reduce transaction costs and allow for greater market participation. Blockchain-based tokenization also inherently obscures ownership and transfers of the underlying asset, which may produce significant tax benefits for the asset owner but erode the state and local tax base. State and local governments impose taxes on the ownership and transfer of property. These taxes typically apply only to tangible property, not intangible property. If ownership of tangible property is transferred via an intangible token, such as a blockchain-based non-fungible token (“NFT”), significant transaction taxes may be avoided. In addition, determining which taxing jurisdiction has the statutory and constitutional basis to impose tax on the tokenized transaction is problematic.
This Article answers the crucial tax questions that arise with blockchain-based asset tokenization. First, this Article examines foundational tokenization principles, which implicate many fields of law. Next, this Article analyzes blockchain-based tokenization in several important contexts, focusing on the tax implications of each. In conclusion, this Article resolves jurisdictional and constitutional challenges, and provides a normative approach for taxing blockchain-based tokenized assets.
Keeping Current – Property Article
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Darryl Wilson, Keeping Current – Property, 38 Probate and Property 12 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Aren’t We Exhausted Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero? Publishers, Prisons, and the Practicing Bar Article
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Ashley Krenelka Chase, Aren’t We Exhausted Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero? Publishers, Prisons, and the Practicing Bar, 56 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 525 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Legal research companies are no more novel than the other platforms we use to navigate our daily lives, and they operate similarly to other information access giants like Amazon and Ticketmaster. Academics are quick to decry the cost of course materials and attorneys are quick to complain about their monthly research bills, but year after year, academics assign course materials through Lexis and Westlaw, and attorneys rely on those products to perform the research necessary to quickly move cases through the system. Similarly, there is ample information available about the problems associated with prison services monopolies and attorneys have been quick to denounce those predatory practices and the harm they place on incarcerated people. Some attorneys have gone so far as to attack some technologies that may benefit litigants as unauthorized practice of law, while also suggesting a change in entry requirements for practicing law for the benefit of indigent criminal litigants, so a law-school-to-public-defender pipeline can be created for the benefit of those individuals. But where is the outcry surrounding legal information access, access which could immediately and significantly impact the ability of incarcerated litigants to understand their cases, themselves?
This article will discuss the history of access to legal information in American prisons, and the history of legal information ownership and the myriad ways in which these ownership schemes negatively impact all Americans, but acutely impact incarcerated litigants. It describes the advocacy work of attorneys surrounding the use of technology by non-lawyers, ability to practice law and, yes, Taylor Swift tickets. The Article concludes with suggestions for how this kind of advocacy can be mobilized to fight back against predatory publishers for the benefit of all those currently in the justice system, but especially those fighting for their freedom behind bars.
Keeping Current – Property Article
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Darryl Wilson, Keeping Current – Property, 38 Probate and Property 18 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Review of Veterans Law Decisions of the Federal Circuit, 2022-2023 Edition Article
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Yelena Duterte et al., Review of Veterans Law Decisions of the Federal Circuit, 2022-2023 Edition, 73 Am. U. L. Rev. 1091 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In 2022 to 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”) continued its conversation with the Court of Appeals for Veterans
Claims (“Veterans Court”), Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”), and veterans to help sculpt the jurisprudence coming from the youngest of the federal
courts, the Veterans Court. The Federal Circuit’s jurisprudence addressed ten main legal issues: class actions, petitions for writ of mandamus under the All Writs Act, defining standards of proof with the term “results from,” the benefit of the doubt doctrine post-Lynch, education benefits, less than honorable discharges, the rating schedule, implicit denials, equitable tolling and estoppel, and prejudicial error post-Tadlock.
Article IV and Indian Tribes ArticleForthcoming
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Grant Christensen, Article IV and Indian Tribes, Iowa L. Rev. (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Unlike the first three articles of the Constitution which create the three branches of the federal government, Article IV establishes a set of rules to police the actions of states and knit them together into a single union. Notably absent from Article IV is any mention of the tribal sovereign. Concomitantly, there has been no comprehensive academic discussion thinking about how the tribal sovereign complicates the purposes of Article IV. This piece advances a completely new understanding of Article IV and its implications in federal Indian law. It suggests that where Article IV advances rights to individual citizens (i.e. a citizen’s right to enforce a court judgment or their claim to the protection of the Privileges and Immunities Clause) then states may not use their connection to any tribal sovereign as an excise to deny them the protections of those rights. In contrast, where Articles IV speaks to rules designed to ensure states treat each other respectfully (i.e. requests for extradition, claims under the Equal Footing Doctrine, or any attempt to enforce the Guarantee Clause) then Article IV’s rules do not permit states to abridge, abrogate, modify, or erode the inherent rights of tribal nations. As the Court has recently opined, tribal governments themselves were absent from the Constitutional Convention and so constitutional limitations on the inherent powers of sovereigns do not extend to tribal governments.
Tribal Courts Are Courts of General Jurisdiction ArticleForthcoming
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Grant Christensen, Tribal Courts Are Courts of General Jurisdiction, Fla. L. Rev. (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Twenty years ago the Supreme Court misread its precedents and took a short cut to do what was “simpler” instead of what was right. It determined that tribal courts are not courts of general jurisdiction without examining the origins of tribal judicial power. Writing for the majority in Nevada v. Hicks, Justice Scalia concluded that in order to find that tribal courts were able to interpret federal law the Court would have to “attribute to tribal courts jurisdiction that is not apparent.” But power often exists even if it is not apparent at first glance. Unwilling to do even a cursory examination to determine whether tribal courts might nonetheless possess general jurisdiction, the Court decided that it would be “surely [ ] simpler… to conclude that tribal courts cannot entertain” claims arising under federal law. This article objects to the legal principle that tribes cannot exercise their inherent sovereign powers because it would “simpler” for the Supreme Court.
In Hicks, the Court abdicated its responsibility by not engaging in an analysis of the origins of the judicial power exercised by tribal courts. Under the principles of inherent sovereignty it is the tribal sovereign and not the Supreme Court that controls the jurisdiction of tribal courts. If a tribal government vests in its judicial department the authority to interpret federal law, then the tribal court maintains that power until withdrawn by the tribal sovereign. This article further argues that the Court in Hicks exceeded its Article III exercise of the judicial power to attempt to limit – against the will of the tribal sovereign – the general jurisdiction of tribal courts. It concludes by encouraging tribal governments to decide for themselves whether they want their courts to interpret federal law. If the tribal sovereign assigns that power to its courts, then tribal courts should begin affirmatively exercising general jurisdiction despite the Hicks precedent.