The current controversy involving the IRS’s administration of the exempt organization (EO) tax laws is simply the latest in a long succession of similar questions spanning at least five decades. This essay proposes addressing the problem through increased transparency of the IRS’s administrative actions involving EOs. Opening up more decision-making to public scrutiny would tend to deter IRS misbehavior, reduce suspicions of such misconduct, and promote fuller communication both to establish impropriety and avert false charges against the agency.
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A Critique of the Corporate Law Professors’ Amicus Brief in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) effected numerous changes in the legal regime governing health care and health insurance. Among the ACA’s more controversial provisions is the so-called contraceptive mandate, which requires employer-provided health care insurance plans to provide coverage of all FDA approved contraceptive methods.
On March 25, 2014, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases, in which the shareholders of two for-profit, family-owned corporations argue that requiring them to comply with the contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Forty-four corporate law professors filed an amicus brief in these cases, arguing that the essence of a corporation is its “separateness” from its shareholders and that, on the facts of these cases, there is no reason to disregard the separateness between the shareholders and the corporations they control. The Brief is replete with errors, overstated claims, or red herrings, and misdirection.
Contrary to the Brief’s arguments, basic corporate law principles strongly support the position of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood. In particular, the doctrine known as reverse veil piercing provides a clear and practical vehicle for disregarding the legal separateness of those corporations from their shareholders, and thus granting those shareholders standing to assert their free exercise rights.
Ten Things the 2012–13 Term Tells Us About the Roberts Court
During the 2012–13 Term, the Court decided seventy-eight cases on the merits, an increase from the previous Term (when there were seventy-five such opinions), but still far fewer decisions than some years earlier. Almost half (49%) of the 2012–13 Term’s cases were unanimous. Harmony was not, however, the Court’s predominant mood. Nearly a third of the cases (29%) were decided by votes of 5-4—an increase of 9% from the previous Term. Another 8% of cases were decided 6-3. As has been true in previous Terms, Justice Kennedy was most often in the majority (91% of all cases and 83% in divided cases). The figures on agreement among various Justices are a bit more surprising. In prior years, we had seen the highest rate of agreement to be among pairs of Justices on the Court’s right. In the 2012–13 Term, however, it was the trio of female Justices—Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan—who most often agreed. Justice Kagan agreed with her sister Justices in 96% of cases, and Sotomayor and Ginsburg were in agreement in 94% of cases.
What does the 2012–13 Term tell us about the Roberts Court? No one Term can reveal the whole story, of course. But I venture a few observations. I style them as “Ten Things the 2012–13 Term Tells Us About the Roberts Court.”