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They're the Greatest
What's Wrong With This Picture
The Tax Man Cometh

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 04:41 PM PST

From Bloomberg Law: the 10 Greatest Movie Lines (US and British films only). Comments from Legal Blog Watch here. Which are your favo(u)rites? Some of the choices:

"Here's a dime..." (The Paper Chase)
"I hate lawyers. I just work for them." (Erin Brockovich)
"You can't handle the truth!" (A Few Good Men)

What's Wrong With This Picture

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 09:30 AM PST

The New York Times explains how the University of California, Berkeley, lost, and the Huntingdon Library gained, a wonderful piece of art by the noted sculptor Sargent Johnson, all for the want of some money and care, and oh, yes--the fact that the federal government does not control WPA art "affixed to nonfederal buildings."

The Tax Man Cometh

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 09:23 AM PST

Assaf Likhovski, Tel Aviv University School of Law, is publishing Chasing Ghosts: On Writing Cultural Histories of Tax Law, forthcoming in the UC Irvine Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This article discusses the use of arguments about "culture" in two debates about the imposition, application and abolition of income tax law: A debate about the transplantation of British income taxation to British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, and a debate about tax privacy in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain. In both cases, "culture," or some specific aspect of it (notions of privacy) appeared in arguments made by opponents of the tax. However, it is difficult to decide whether the use of cultural arguments in these debates simply reflected some "reality" that existed prior to these debates, whether "culture" was actively constituted in these debates to further the specific interests of the participants, or whether the cultural arguments that appeared in the debates combined reflection and constitution in some determinable way. Using legal debates to learn something about culture, the article concludes, is sometimes problematic. The article therefore suggests an additional approach to the study of law and culture, one which focuses on the rhetorical level, seeking to map the ways in which arguments about "culture" (and related terms referring to the traditional and particular), appeared in tax law debates.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.