Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

Black Craftspeople Digital Archive – Discovering • Interpreting • Digitizing: “From 1619 to beyond, Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. 

The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive seeks to enhance what we know about Black craftspeople by telling both a spatial story and a historically informed story that highlights the lives of Black craftspeople and the objects they produced. 

The first and second phases of this project focus on Black craftspeople living and laboring in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry and mid-nineteenth century Tennessee.”

Addressing The U.S. Tax Gap Through Participatory Budgeting: A Comparative Approach

Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Saito Reviews Sarkar’s Internal Revenue’s External Borders

Number of public holidays annually: Nepal: 35 Myanmar: 32 Iran: 26 Sri Lanka: 25 Bangladesh: 22 Egypt: 22 Cambodia: 21 India: 21 Argentina: 19 Lebanon: 19 Colombia: 18 Philippines: 18 Iceland: 16 Indonesia: 16 Japan: 16 Pakistan: 16 Kazakhstan: 16 Thailand: 16 Austria: 14 Chile: 14 Denmark: 14 Norway: 14 South Korea: 14 Turkey: 14 Venezuela: 14 Czechia: 13 Finland: 13 Poland: 13 Spain: 13 Italy: 12

Shayak Sarkar (UC-Davis; Google Scholar), Internal Revenue's External Borders, 112 Calif. L. Rev __ (2024):

The mandate of tax agencies seems clear: to secure revenue for the government and ensure taxpayer compliance. Yet for decades, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has regularly facilitated violent immigration enforcement. Scholars and the public have paid significant attention to the state and local policing of immigration law. But the role of tax bureaucrats as generals—no mere foot soldiers—has largely been overlooked.

This Article corrects that oversight. Building on emerging critiques of the tax system, I first describe tax-agency leadership in immigration raids, holding the dry mechanics of agency procedures against stark examples of IRS complicity in civil rights violations. I then raise several concerns about tax-agency involvement in immigration enforcement. After describing the tax-law origins of immigration raids’ constitutional exceptionalism, I assess residual constraints on tax-agency involvement: taxpayer privacy, regulatory suppression, and civil rights liability.

How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research

Chronicle of Higher Education [read free]: “Over the past 20 years, a wave of improbable-sounding scientific research has come under the microscope. 

Are Asian Americans really prone to heart attacks on the fourth day of every month? Do power poses really increase testosterone? Do men really eat more pizza when women are around? Are people named Brady really more susceptible to bradycardia (a slower-than-normal heart rate)? As early as 2005, alarm bells were going off over unrigorous social-science research — that was the year John P.A. Ioannidis, a Stanford professor of medicine, published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in PLOS Medicine. 

Since then, self-appointed “data thugs” have championed more transparent research practices, watchdog projects including the Center for Open Science and the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford have attempted to tackle the problem, and reproducibility efforts have gained steam in disciplines ranging from medicine to psychology to economics. 

And yet, after decades of awareness efforts, dubious research still finds a home in scholarly journals. 

Surgeries are more likely to be fatal if they are done on the surgeon’s birthday, argues a medical paper. Fatal motorcycle accidents are more common when there is a full moon, claims a paper by a medical researcher and a psychologist. Bitcoin prices correlate with stock prices in the health-care industry, posits an economics paper.

 To understand the persistence of dodgy research, it helps to consider the motivation and methods.”