Professor Jeanne Fromer presents at Loyola's IP Theory Colloquium

Jeanne C. Fromer, associate professor of law, Fordham University School of Law, presented her paper, "Expressive Incentives in Intellectual Property," during Loyola Law School's IP Theory Colloquium.

In 2011, those serious about reducing the deficit will look to tax expenditures

By Professor Katherine Pratt

This is the year in which the president and the Congress should focus on reducing inefficient and out-of-control spending through the tax code, to reduce federal budget deficits without gutting worthwhile discretionary spending programs.

President Barack Obama deserves credit for speaking frankly in his recent State of the Union address about the critical need to cut "spending" in all parts of the federal budget, not just in the non-defense discretionary spending that makes up a relatively small part of the federal budget. Obama also deserves credit for suggesting that we eliminate tax "loopholes" - also known as "tax expenditures" (targeted tax subsidies that benefit a narrow group of taxpayers, reduce tax revenue and drive up tax rates for other taxpayers). However, the president missed an opportunity to call for reform of many of the loopholes in the individual income tax, to make the tax system more efficient and fair, and to contain the rapid growth of tax expenditures, currently estimated to total over $1 trillion a year.

Tax expenditures frequently are the economic equivalent of a federal spending program. Generally, in an income tax system, legitimate business expenses (e.g., the cost of renting an office) are deductible, but personal living expenses (e.g. the cost of renting an apartment) are not deductible. Our tax code provides generally that personal expenses are not deductible, but allows individual taxpayers to take certain types of itemized deductions (e.g., the home mortgage interest deduction) if the taxpayer's total itemized deductions exceed the "standard deduction" ($11,600 for married couples and $5,800 for individuals in 2011). The itemized deductions allowed by the tax code thus generally are the functional equivalent of a loophole-free income tax code plus a federal spending program. For example, the home mortgage interest deduction is a federal housing subsidy that disproportionately benefits upper-income homeowners. Our tax code also provides tax subsidies in the form of "exclusions," meaning that the excluded item is not treated as income and is not taxed. An example is the income tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance ("ESI"), which drives up the cost of healthcare and disproportionately benefits taxpayers whose employers provide "Cadillac" health insurance.

Loyola hosts meeting of Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law

Loyola Law School hosts the annual meeting of The Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL) on Friday, Feb. 11 and Saturday, Feb. 12. SEAL is a scholarly association dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary exploration of issues at the intersection of law, biology and evolutionary theory, improving the models of human behavior relevant to law and promoting the integration of life science and social science perspectives on law-relevant topics through scholarship, teaching, and empirical research. This annual meeting will be SEAL XII, and will include more than 15 presentations by scholars from various disciplines.

The keynote address at this year's SEAL annual meeting will be made by David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University. Professor Wilson is an evolutionist who studies all aspects of humanity in addition to the biological world. His books include: Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives; Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society; Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior; and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve my City, One Block at a Time, which will be published by Little, Brown in July 2011.

Professor Carol M. Rose to present at Faculty Workshop Series event

Today's Faculty Workshop Series speaker is Carol M. Rose, Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and Professorial Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School, Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources, University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. She will be presenting "Racial Covenants and Housing Segregation, Yesterday and Today.

Surfing jurors: Judges' instructions attempt to curb panelists' technological distractions

By Professor Peter Tiersma

During the past decade or so I have been heavily involved in California's effort to draft more comprehensible jury instructions. We've made a lot of progress. Previously, the state's judges solemnly informed jurors that, when evaluating the testimony of a witness, "failure of recollection is common" and "innocent misrecollection is not uncommon." Today, judges simply tell them that "people often forget things or make mistakes in what they remember." In the past, civil jurors were instructed to decide an issue in favor of the party whose evidence "preponderates." The new instruction requires that the evidence be "more likely to be true than not true."

Of course, the law contains many complex concepts that may not be easy to explain in ordinary language. The committees on which I serve (both civil and criminal) sometimes have lengthy debates on how to formulate such instructions. Yet perhaps the thorniest issue that we currently face is not an arcane legal doctrine, but what ought to be a relatively straightforward concept relating to juror behavior. Specifically, it is the principle that jurors are to base their decisions only on the evidence admitted during trial and not do research on their own. In the electronic age, this rule is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce.

Part of the problem is that a trial is an extremely artificial environment. The legal system demands that jurors strictly follow the law that the judge reads to them, setting aside anything they themselves know about the law as well as their own sense of justice and morality. And they must ignore anything they might know about the case or the issues raised by it. If you're an engineer, and the case involves an engineering issue, you are expected to have temporary amnesia and decide the issue purely on the testimony of the engineering experts. If you're not an engineer, you commit misconduct if you walk across the street to the library and consult an engineering textbook. It's hard to believe you're reaching a just verdict when you're told to ignore what you believe to be relevant information.

Loyola's Faculty Workshop Series hosts Prof. Ahmed White

Today, as part of Loyola's Faculty Workshop Series, Associate Professor Ahmed White of the University of Colorado Law School will be presenting his paper, The 'Little Steel' Strike of 1937: Class Violence, Law and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism.

Loyola earns top 50 spot in law school ranking

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles is ranked No. 44 out of 166 law schools on the "Omnibus Law School Rankings," a listing of law schools ranked on an amalgam of factors: the U.S. News & World Report peer evalutation score, Conglomerate's Crowdsourced ranking, all-time SSRN downloads and the Princeton Review. The ranking was created by Paul Caron, Charles Hartsock Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and Straus Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University School of Law. The complete rankings are available at TaxProf Blog.