~ ↩︎ Feministing
“If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me” Barack joked ;-)
MEdia Dragon get 100% vote as we watch the Klub Latitude News ;-)
Former US president Barack Obama has warned against complacency in taking the benefits of liberal democracies for granted, saying rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association, protection of minorities and the rule of law have to be fought for and defended, sources say.
The exclusive invitation for the private Obama talk.Source:Supplied
In a speech that drew a standing ovation from guests at a private dinner at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Friday night, Mr Obama said he was by nature a congenital optimist, not an alarmist. But the world was at a “fork in the road”, a time when the international order established after World War 2, and the core values rooted in the enlightenment – pluralism, science and reason – were being tested Barak is gifted: Obama draws standing ovation at the Art Gallery of NSW
As announced on Taxprof Blog today, Surly blogger Sam Brunson has been named the Georgia Reithal Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago School of Law. Sam’s work focuses on how tax law affects various groups of taxpayers, with a particular focus on investors and families. He also write on tax administration. Sam also has a book, entitled God and the IRS: Accommodating Religious Practice in United States Tax Law, forthcoming at Cambridge University Press.
Congratulations, SamIU Tax Policy Colloquium: Ring, “Silos and First Movers In the Sharing Economy Debates”
By: Leandra Lederman
On March 1, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law welcomed Surly’s own Prof. Diane Ring from Boston College Law School as the fourth speaker of the year in our Tax Policy Colloquium. Diane presented a new paper, which I believe is not yet publicly available, titled “Silos and First Movers In the Sharing Economy Debates.” This interesting paper focuses on the classification of workers in the “sharing” or “gig” economy as employees or independent contractors, arguing that “[t]wo interacting forces create the most serious risk for inadequate policy formulation: (1) silos among legal experts, and (2) first-mover effects.” (Page 1 of the draft.) The silo argument is that lawyers operate in subject areas that are isolated from each other, such that tax experts, for example, fail to perceive the effects of tax-related worker-classification rule changes on non-tax (such as employment) law, and vice versa. The first-mover argument is that the first actors on the worker-classification issue can wield outsized influence, shaping the debate in legal contexts other than the one directly affected.
The paper and presentation provide interesting insights into how giants of the service-worker sharing economy—not just Uber and Lyft, but also TaskRabbit—influence the development of the law on worker status. And subject-matter silos are a common complaint among legal academics. That issue has arisen in administrative law, for example, where there may be different rules developed in the context of different agencies. Courts and policymakers may struggle with tax exceptionalism (in the parlance of Kristin Hickman). But I wonder both if the legal silos in the gig economy are as strong as the paper suggests, and whether the effects the paper observes are first-mover effects or something else. Continue reading