The distinction between property rules and liability rules has revolutionized our understanding of many areas of law. But scholars have long assumed that this distinction has no relevance to tax law. This assumption is flatly wrong. Tax law currently uses both property rules and liability rules, and the choice between them has real consequences. When a taxpayer violates a requirement for a favorable tax status, tax law either imposes additional tax proportionate to the harm (a liability rule) or imposes the draconian penalty of taking away the tax status entirely (a property rule). This recognition has three key implications. First, Congress can and should draw on the rich property and liability rule literature to draft better tax legislation and to reform the tax code. Second, novel variations on property and liability rules can be used to rethink the remedies given to the IRS. Third, tax law will enrich the literature on property and liability rules across many other areas of law.
Article
On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership
In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable in- vestors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty voters—investors whose voting rights in a corporation exceed their economic interests— and hidden owners—investors whose economic interests exceed their voting rights.
We present formal analysis that shows how, when financial markets are opaque, empty voting and hidden ownership can render financial markets unpredictable, unstable, and inefficient. By contrast, we show that when financial markets are transparent, empty voting and hidden ownership have dramatically different effects: they follow predictable patterns, encourage stable outcomes, and promote efficiency. Our analysis lends insight into the operation of securities markets in general and derivatives markets in particular. It also provides a new justification for a robust mandatory disclosure regime and facilitates analysis of proposed substantive securities regulations.
Against Religious Institutionalism
The idea that religious institutions should play a central role in understanding the First Amendment has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Litigation over the application of civil rights laws to ministers and the requirement that religious employers provide contraception coverage to their employees have elicited calls for a doctrine of church sovereignty based on an institutional conception of the Religion Clauses. In this Article, we present grounds for skepticism about this new religious institutionalism, especially the concept of “freedom of the church,” which we distinguish from the seemingly related but importantly distinct idea of church autonomy. We further explain why individual rights of conscience are sufficient to protect the free exercise and anti-establishment values of the First Amendment. Our argument, contrary to some recent scholarship, is that religious institutions do not give rise to a special set of rights, autonomy, or sovereignty, and that what might be called institutional or church autonomy is ultimately derived from individual rights of conscience. Indeed, for purposes of understanding religious liberty, we contend that any notion of institutional autonomy — to the extent it exists — can come from nowhere else.