Legal Affairs

The Corporate Tax is Dying!

Articles — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 04:00:00 -0500

The corporate income tax has always had enemies. Introduced in 1909 as an effort to close the country's worst budget gap since the Civil War, economists and capitalists almost immediately began to argue that it was inefficient and slowed down business. More recently, Presidents Reagan and Carter, as well as conservative economist Milton Friedman and liberal economist Lester Thurow, have all recommended that the country scrap it. In May 2001, then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill called the tax system of the United States an "abomination" and proposed the abolition of the corporate income tax.

Efforts to repeal it,… more

A Crime with a Name

Articles — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Guy Horton has seen people doing forced labor in Burma's jungle, smelled the rotting corpses of villagers killed by bayonets, and heard the cries of a small child being tossed by government troops into a burning hut. But it was something seemingly trivial that convinced the 53-year-old British human rights researcher that he was witnessing genocide.

In 2000, Horton was trekking on a fact-finding tour through Karen state, in the Texas-sized country of Burma. He came upon a village of bamboo huts that government troops had torched. While picking through the ashes of the village, he found a metal cooking… more

Common Denominator

Articles — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Malaysia and Indonesia couldn't be called twins, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer.

Economists might explain these divergent paths by pointing to the countries' different responses to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Sociologists might find a cultural explanation in the close-knit community of Chinese immigrants who are the most powerful… more

Empty Suits

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The Association of Trial Lawyers of America has just lost New York senator Charles Schumer. It wanted his vote to block a major new tort reform bill. But the Democrat Schumer's gone and he does not want to be found. Not by ATLA and not by the media, whose calls he and his staff have avoided since he switched sides.

The Class Action Fairness bill, which Schumer long opposed and now supports, would move almost all class action suits, such as those filed over credit card overcharges or defective merchandise sales, from state courts to federal ones, even if all… more

The Sword of Spitzer

Articles — Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

A little-known law called the Martin Act gives New York's attorney general extraordinary power, yet for 75 years this Excalibur has been left to rust in its scabbard. Now, Eliot Spitzer is wielding it against the biggest players on Wall Street. Should such a powerful weapon be left in anyone's hands?

For three-quarters of a century, an unspoken gentleman's agreement bound the moneymen of Wall Street and the New York attorney general's office. The AG got to use an astonishingly powerful state securities law called the Martin Act, but not against the big boys. Acceptable targets through the years included… more

Your Cellphone is a Homing Device

Articles — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 03:00:00 -0400

If you purchased a new cellphone over the past 18 months or so, odds are that one of the features listed in small print on the side of the box was "E911 capable." Or, as in the case of my latest Motorola, "Location technology for piece [sic] of mind." Perhaps you asked the salesman to explain the feature, and he replied that it means that cops can home in on your phone in case of an emergency, a potentially important perk should you ever find your hand pinned beneath an immovable boulder in rural Utah, as Aron Ralston did recently.… more

For the Record

Articles — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In a drab room of a secluded office building in Ghana, 10 secretaries are engaged in a mundane task. They're sitting at wooden desks with huge stacks of paper piled in front of them, typing handwritten legal documents into their computers. When they complete a file, they send it downstairs for proofreading by lawyers in the firm that sponsors the work.

For a decade, those working on the project have entered and proofread 80,000 pages of legal records. They've entered every word from each year of the available Ghana Law Reports, the country's official record of high court, appeals, and… more

Last Words

Articles — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500

It was odd for a man to be pacing around his front yard in the wee hours of a chilly October morning. As Seattle police and paramedics pulled closer, however, they noticed something even stranger: The pacing man, 29-year-old Donyea Jones, was burned so badly, the flesh was literally melting off his frame. "My wife poured gasoline on me and lit me on fire," he explained calmly before being rushed to nearby Harborview Medical Center, where he died of his injuries several hours later.

Tonya Michelle Jones, who'd called 911 at least four times, was arrested at the scene. The… more

Under the Microscope

Articles — Mon, 01 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Frayed news clippings from murder trials, blowups of spent bullets, and collages culled from medical textbooks adorn the corridors of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory. One of the macabre mementos is a poster-sized array of photos connected to an old attempted homicide. In a corner of the frame is a snapshot of a state trooper's jacket, badly creased and caked with dirt; in the opposite corner is a close-up of a tractor-trailer that's also in need of a wash.

A prank gone awry made that truck's driver a cop killer. "There was a process called

From Russia with Lopht

Articles — Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Had Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov been born in Chicago rather than Chelyabinsk, he'd likely be well on his way to joining the geek elite. His three-page resume lists computer skills that would dazzle any Silicon Valley headhunter. According to his employment history, Ivanov began working at a regional telephone company in Russia while still in his mid-teens, installing Web servers and Cisco routers. His programming talents include tricky languages like C++ and Perl, and he has mastered 18 difference operating systems, from Linux to Solaris. But Chelyabinsk, a Stalinist burg located in the Ural Mountains, is a… more