Harvard Law School

This article is slightly edited from a public comment letter originally submitted to Treasury and the IRS. The article argues that the proposed elective expansion of a high-tax exclusion from the reach of GILTI is inconsistent with the statute, loses revenue, and exacerbates the TCJA’s failure to allocate and disallow expenses incurred to earn foreign income exempted from U.S. taxation. The article explains that allowing a deduction for expenses incurred to earn exempt foreign income is a subsidy for the foreign investment. Taxation of the income to which the expense would be allocated by another country does not alter the character of the expense allowance, against other taxable income, as an unjustified subsidy by U.S. taxpayers of U.S. multinationals’ foreign investments.

A safe food supply is essential for a healthy society. Our food system is replete with different types of risk, yet food safety is understood as encompassing only foodborne illness and other risks related directly to food ingestion. This Article argues for a more comprehensive definition of food safety, one that includes not just acute, ingestion-related risks, but also whole-diet cumulative ingestion risks, and cradle-to-grave risks of food production and disposal. This broader definition, which we call “Food System Safety,” draws under the header of food safety a variety of historically siloed, and often under-regulated, food system issues including nutrition, environmental protection, and workplace safety. The current approach to food safety is inadequate. First, it contributes to irrational resource allocation among food system risks. Second, it has collateral consequences for nutrition, environmental protection, and workplace safety, and, third, its limited focus can undermine efforts to achieve narrow food safety. A comprehensive understanding of food safety illuminates the complex interactions between narrow food safety and other areas of food system health risks. We argue that such an understanding could facilitate improved allocation of resources and assessment of tradeoffs, and ultimately support better health and safety outcomes for more people. We offer a variety of structural and institutional mechanisms for embedding this approach into agency action.

In this paper, we examine the actual and potential roles of silence as an element of jus ad bellum treaty law and customary international law. By silence, we mean a lack of a publicly discernible response either to conduct reflective of a legal position or to the explicit communication of a legal position. We focus here on the silence of States and the United Nations Security Council as the primary actors who are positioned to shape, interpret, and apply jus ad bellum. We evaluate how silence has been employed by various scholars in making legal arguments in this field, and how silence may have the potential to affect the formation, identification, modification, and termination of various doctrines.   We submit that there is no quantum of silence that has clear doctrinal force. We argue that, at least in relation to jus ad bellum, only certain forms of qualified silence — whether of States or of the Security Council — may be capable of contributing to legal effects. We further contend that, due in part to the nature and status of the norms underlying this field, those forms of qualified silence ought not to be lightly presumed. Arguably, there is a strong, if rebuttable, presumption that silence alone does not constitute acceptance of a jus ad bellum claim. Still, States and other international actors should be aware of the possible role that their silence could play in the identification and development of this field.   We complement our analysis with an Annex that offers the most comprehensive catalogue to date of communications made by U.N. Member States to the Security Council of measures taken in purported exercise of the right of self-defense. The catalogue records over 400 communications made since the founding of the United Nations in late October 1945 through 2018. These communications reflect the views of the submitting State(s) on the scope of the right to employ force on the purported basis of self-defense.

In a book chartered to demonstrate intellectual property in objects, what concrete thing can represent the Internet, a phenomenon that exists only as a well-elaborated idea? Perhaps the best physical representation of the genius of the Internet—and in particular, “Internet Protocol”—is found in an hourglass.

This chapter discusses the tension over recent decades in child welfare policy in the United States between two conflicting value systems, one focusing on parent and group rights over children, and the other focusing on child rights to grow up with nurturing parental care. It describes the leading legal and policy movements that have promoted keeping children with the family of origin and in the racial, ethnic and national group of origin. It contrasts these with some laws and policies that have instead prioritized protecting children against abuse and neglect, and placing them with nurturing parents including in adoption. It situates domestic US child welfare policy debates within the larger international context.

Of the diverse array of contemporary challenges around humanitarian access in armed conflict, a particular set of issues concerns the so-called “criminalization” of humanitarian action under counterterrorism frameworks. This presentation raises some key elements of that set of issues.