Monthly Archives: June 2026
Jun 5, 2026 Susan MorseTax Law
Does the Seventh Amendment provide a taxpayer with the right to a jury before the government imposes tax penalties? This issue is live at the Tax Court, at Courts of Appeals, and at the Supreme Court. Fortunately, the tax literature includes two entries on this topic, one by Professor Steve Johnson and another by Professor Bryan Camp. Both are somewhat skeptical about a jury trial requirement, thought they emphasize different aspects of the question. Their work should illuminate the conversation, and inform the litigation.
Few thought tax penalties attracted jury rights prior to the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Jarkesy v. Securities and Exchange Commission. But after the Court decided that jury rights attached to securities fraud penalties, an analogous question arose in tax. A cert petition is pending in Hirsch v. U.S. Tax Court, where the Eleventh Circuit refused petitioner’s request for a writ of mandamus on the grounds that the Tax Court had unconstitutionally denied them a jury trial. Tax practitioners are following Hirsch closely. Continue reading "Jury Rights in Civil Tax Cases??"
Jun 4, 2026 Anita BernsteinTorts
In 2019 the phrase “a world designed for men” saw print when the Brazilian-English activist Caroline Criado Perez put it into the subtitle of a book. Criado Perez may not have been the first to notice the pattern of extraordinary unfairness documented in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men but she wrote the most devastating report on the phenomenon I’ve ever seen, and I have been paying attention. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men by Melissa F. Wasserman connects this problem of gendered “who benefits? who pays?” with a careful, well-argued, and scientifically informed call for law reform.
The neutral-on-the-surface biases favoring men that Professor Wasserman examines in this article fit within design defect as a subset of products liability doctrine. The category may seem narrow. It’s not. Products Liability in a World Designed for Men takes 52 pages to document the issue it addresses, review the governing law, and offer recommendations. Limited space rather than any lack of urgent examples, I am sure, shortened what Professor Wasserman shares here. Continue reading "Male Supremacy as a Products Liability Defect"
Jun 3, 2026 Ezra RosserLexPoverty Law
Heather R. Abraham,
Sheltering Discrimination: Fourth Amendment Challenges to Voucher Inspections, __
U.C. Davis L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2027), available at
SSRN (Feb. 06, 2026).
Professor Heather Abraham’s new Article, Sheltering Discrimination: Fourth Amendment Challenges to Voucher Inspections, embodies the sort of practical, important work that often comes out of the clinical trenches. The Article focuses on what Professor Abraham describes as a second-generation effort by landlords to avoid renting to low-income tenants whose rent is partly covered by a housing voucher. As the Article notes, landlords in recent years have had some success arguing that laws prohibiting source-of-income (SOI) discrimination violate their privacy rights when such laws are combined with the inspection regimes that accompany vouchers. Through careful doctrinal analysis, Professor Abraham convincingly pushes back on this Fourth Amendment claim while also suggesting reasons other tenant-side arguments are likely to fail.
What stands out about the Article is how forward-looking it is. In recent years, SOI laws have proliferated such that Professor Abraham reports that “at least 24 states and 150 localities have banned SOI discrimination,” which protects “approximately 60% of all Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) voucher holders nationwide.” (P. 5.) In areas without SOI laws, landlords are free to openly state that they will not accept vouchers. But in areas with SOI laws, landlords have had to be creative. One emerging argument is that because of the inspection regime built into voucher programs—typically involving a pre-tenancy inspection and the possibility of subsequent inspections of both the premise and related written and electronic documents—SOI laws are unconstitutional. This Fourth Amendment-based challenge is gaining traction; a few courts have bought this privacy argument and have sided with landlords on their facial challenges to SOI laws. Sheltering Discrimination offers practitioners a roadmap for responding to such claims. Continue reading "Do Landlord Privacy Rights Trump Voucher Inspections?"
Jun 2, 2026 Abdurrahman AtçilLegal History
In his famous 1957 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the renowned British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart presented a vision of law as a system of rules validated through institutional procedures and not dependent on moral merit for their validity. Later that year, his American colleague Lon Fuller countered that only an “inner morality” imbues law with its binding force; normative statements lacking moral merit do not qualify as law. This debate, states Allan C. Hutchinson in Hart, Fuller, and Everything After, defined the agenda of Anglo-American jurisprudence for decades afterward; but, closely bound up with the historical and intellectual conditions of its day, he argues, it offers a poor framework for discussing the diversity of legal practices beyond the postwar liberal societies of Britain and the United States. As an historian of Ottoman law, I’m inclined to agree.
One of the great challenges that historians in fields like mine face is the difficulty of connecting the literature on modern legal theory with the normative worlds of societies far different from the ones that figures like Hart and Fuller addressed. By unpacking the seemingly timeless questions at the center of the Hart–Fuller debate, Hutchinson instead presents law as an ongoing social activity shaped by interpretation, institutional practices, and political and moral struggles. In doing so, he makes legal theory speak to these other worlds, and thereby makes it more useful for a much broader audience. Continue reading "Legal Theory, Law, and Politics: Making Theory Useful"
Jun 1, 2026 Albertina AntogniniFamily Law
John Morley & Yair Listokin,
What Should You Owe Your Ex? A Survey of Attitudes About the Law of Married and Cohabiting Relationships (Mar. 14, 2026) (unpublished manuscript),
available at SSRN.
Law has mostly dealt with unmarried couples by adopting a wait-and-see approach. Rather than states passing legislation ex ante, courts address issues that arise ex post. Among the most commonly litigated questions is property ownership – where courts are asked to sort out who owns what and who owes what to whom. While much scholarship has considered how law should distribute such property, there is precious little information on what cohabitants themselves want. John Morley and Yair Listokin’s article, What Should You Owe Your Ex? A Survey of Attitudes About the Law of Married and Cohabiting Relationships, provides a timely and important intervention, offering an empirical assessment of what cohabiting couples, as compared to married couples, desire when their relationship ends.
Morley and Listokin thus seek to fill a gap not primarily in law (although that too), but in knowledge: “We bring these wishes into focus by directly asking people in a systematic way for the first time what they want for themselves.” (P. 37.) To do so, they surveyed a nationally representative sample of around 3,000 American adults, half of whom were married and half of whom lived with a partner in a nonmarital relationship. Continue reading "Who Wants What?"
