This paper comprises a transcript of the oral addresses and discussion at a colloquium that compared the general anti-avoidance rule of income tax law with the civil law doctrine of Rechtsmissbrauch (abuse of law) and similar doctrines in eight jurisdictions: Germany, Croatia, New Zealand,...

Should we see major tax reform, taxpayers will clamor for guidance from Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service ('IRS') regarding new provisions, as they did after passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 ('1986 Act'). Indeed, the greater the degree of reform, the greater the need for guidance....

Despite accounting for a significant fraction of total litigation in Italy, small claims litigation has so far received little attention. Using a Ministry of Justice database that contains information disaggregated by subject matter, the paper provides a thorough description of the time trend...

A defendant who admits to having committed an offense may nevertheless be acquitted if he can provide a legally cognizable justification or excuse for his actions by raising an affirmative defense. This article explains how affirmative defenses generate social benefits in the form of avoided...

Juries are a fundamental element of the criminal justice system. In this paper, we model jury decision-making as a function of three institutional variables: jury size, voting requirement, and the applicable standard of proof. Changes in jury size, voting requirements, and standards of proof...

This paper uses panel data estimation techniques to examine the relation between the number of federal court civil filings by inmates and jail and state prison populations (and, hence, the relation between jail and prison inmate filing rates) both before and after the effective date, in 1996, of...

By applying computational linguistics tools to the analysis of US federal district courts' decisions from 1932 to 2016, this paper quantifies the rise of economic reasoning in court cases that range from securities regulation to antitrust law. I then relate judges' level of economic reasoning to...