The Failure of the First Income Tax: A Tale of Commercial Tax Evaders?

This article constitutes a re-examination of the financial failure of the first income tax in Britain, introduced in 1799 in order to address the rising cost of the French revolutionary wars. In accounting for this failure, the existing literature has focused largely on failings in the administration of the tax, often blaming, for example, its emphasis on local responsibility for tax collection, and its reliance on the honesty of its contributors. This article furthers these interpretations by highlighting that such issues were particularly problematic in their application to the commercial sector of society. It argues that the preferential treatment of commercial interests in the substance of the tax, on account of their privileged position in the political sphere, led to the establishment of a culture of commercial evasion. The evidence for this is examined at length, through both detailed analysis of the yield of the tax, as well as the attitudes of contemporaries evident in the literature at the time. This analysis ultimately leads to the conclusion that commercial evasion of the first tax played a pivotal, and hitherto underplayed, role in the financial underperformance of the tax.     

Do Motivations for Malingering Matter? Symptoms of Malingered PTSD as a Function of Motivation and Trauma Type

Psychological disorders associated with traumatic events, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), may be prone to malingering due to the subjective nature of trauma symptomology. In general, symptoms tend to be inflated when an external reward (i.e., compensation) is associated with the claim. The present study was designed to test whether malingered claims of PTSD symptoms differed as a function of the type of trauma being malingered (accident, disaster, sexual assault) and the motivation for malingering (compensation, attention, revenge, no motivation). Participants were randomly assigned into conditions, given malingering instructions, and then asked to complete three measures of trauma symptoms (Impact of Event Scale??Revised; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist; Trauma Symptom Inventory). Results indicated that participants in the sexual assault condition produced higher symptom reports on nearly all scales. Revenge and compensation motivations yielded elevated symptom scores. Further, individuals rated high in fantasy proneness and dissociation produced elevated scores on atypical responding and most clinical scales. More research is needed to examine the extent to which different motivations and trauma types influence symptom reporting.     

Do Androids Dream of Electric Free Speech? Visions of the Future of Copyright,Privacy and the First Amendment in Science Fiction

Science fiction authors have long projected the future of technology, including communication devices and the way in which future societies may use them. These visions of future technology, and their implications on the future of media law and policy, are explored in three areas in particular – copyright, privacy and the First Amendment. Themes examined include moving toward massively open copyright systems, problems of perpetual surveillance by the state, rights of obscurity in public places threatened by wearable and implantable computing devices, and free speech rights of autonomous machines created by humans. The essay concludes with a rebuttal to recent critics of legal scholarship by suggesting the value in exploratory, forward-looking research that examines the problems judges and policymakers may be addressing in the near and distant future.     

Access to Documents,Accountability and the Rule of Law—Do Private Watchdogs Matter?

: The ECJ has not so far developed a single, consistent approach to cases in which the right to access official documents is exercised by individuals and organisations pursuing their individual cause (private watchdogs). While in some cases the Luxembourg jurisprudence has followed a restrictive approach, supporting interests and secondary law provisions conflicting with transparency, in other it has unconditionally endorsed a supreme character of the access right. This contribution confronts both of the approaches whenever the access right exercised by private watchdogs has clashed with confidentiality stemming from secondary law provisions: from state aid, staff rules, data protection, antitrust and beyond. The article argues that most often the judicial standard restricting the access right interferes with a feedback relationship between transparency, accountability and the rule of law. This relationship, when properly construed and appraised, may form a basis for an arguably more uniform and stable judicial standard.     

Do peer group norms moderate the expression of genetic risk for aggression?

Purpose

Using a genetically informed design based on 192 Monozygotic and Dizygotic twin pairs assessed in kindergarten, this study examined whether the expression of genetic risk for physical aggression or for relational aggression varies depending on the peer group’s injunctive behaviour norms.

Methods

Physical aggression and relational aggression, as well as injunctive peer group norms in regard to these behaviours, were measured via peer nominations in the twins’ kindergarten classes.

Results

Peer groups varied considerably in terms of the level of acceptability of both physical and relational aggression. Bivariate Cholesky modeling revealed a significant gene-environment interaction, indicating that a strong genetic disposition for physical aggression was much more likely to be expressed when peer group injunctive norms were favourable to such behaviour. In contrast, genetic factors essentially played no role in explaining inter-individual differences when peer group norms discouraged physical aggression. Relational aggression was generally less explained by genetic influences and more by environmental influences regardless of peer group norms, but environmental influences became even more important when peer group norms favoured such behaviour.

Conclusions

These findings speak to the importance of the peer group in shaping aggression already in young children by either condoning or penalizing such behaviour.     

Do all the pieces matter? Assessing the reliability of law enforcement data sources for the network analysis of wire taps

Law enforcement agencies rely on data collected from wire taps to construct the organisational chart of criminal enterprises. Recently, a number of academics have also begun to utilise social network analysis to describe relations among criminals and understand the internal organisation of criminal groups. However, before drawing conclusions about the structure or the organisation of criminal groups, it is important to understand the limitations that selective samples such as wire taps may have on network analysis measures. Electronic surveillance data can be found in different kinds of court records and the selection of the data source is likely to influence the amount of missing information and, consequently, the results. This article discusses the impact that the selection of a specific data source for the social network analysis of criminal groups may have on centrality measures usually adopted in organised crime research to identify key players.     

The Medical Exception to the Prohibition of Killing: A Matter of the Right Intention?

It has long been thought that by using morphine to alleviate the pain of a dying patient, a doctor runs the risk of causing his death. In all countries this kind of killing is explicitly or silently permitted by the law. That permission is usually explained by appealing to the doctrine of double effect: If the use of morphine shortens life, that is only an unintended side effect. The paper evaluates this view, finding it flawed beyond repair and proposing an alternative explanation. It is not the intention of the doctor that counts, but the availability of an “objective” palliative justification.     

Do privacy laws affect the location decisions of internet firms? Evidence for privacy havens

This paper empirically studies the location decisions of internet firms when they face high legal standards of privacy protection. Many factors might influence them: technological spillovers, lower taxation, and so on. Internet firms can also arbitrate national differences and many of them actually locate their activity in order to escape from national laws they consider over-stringent. In the current stage of development of the internet—the so-called Web 2.0—the ease of access to personal data proved to be strategic input. So the more a jurisdiction makes collecting and using these data easy, the more attractive the country is, if all other things remain constant. One way for a firm to avoid such legal restrictions is to locate or to expand its business in less privacy protective countries. Our empirical results support this ‘no-privacy haven’ hypothesis. In particular, we highlight a new privacy paradox according to which the more stringent certain online privacy laws are, the more they induce firms to locate their business in less stringent countries, and finally the weaker actual privacy protection on the internet is.     

Can Tax Authorities Scrutinise the Ideas of Foreign Charities? The ECJ's Persche Judgment and Lessons from US Tax Law

The European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) recent Persche judgment poses important questions about the relationship between taxation of gifts and charitable purposes in the light of EC law requirements. This article argues that by applying its established case‐law to the matter of donors to foreign recipient bodies, the ECJ takes a position on the social role of both charities and tax deduction. Moreover, the position of the ECJ clearly paves the way for tax authorities to check the objectives and the values pursued by recipient bodies seeking tax‐preferred status, a situation that recalls a similar power recognised under specific circumstances of the US Internal Revenue Services. Arguably, the ECJ case‐law has more profound consequences on charitable action, since it seems that the power accorded to tax authorities of the Member States to check the purposes of charitable organisations leads to a cosmopolitan apprehension of charitable action while it pushes charities to enhance transparency in their activities.     

Does the Controversy Matter? Comparing the Causal Determinants of the Adoption of Controversial and Noncontroversial Rape Law Reforms

Do the causal determinants of legal change differ for controversial and noncontroversial laws? Using rape law reforms as an example of legal change, I answer this question via a longitudinal examination of the intrastate characteristics and interstate processes that affect the adoption of both controversial and noncontroversial rape law reforms. The results show that the adoption of partial reforms significantly decreases a state's likelihood of passing a stronger version of the reform only for controversial rape law reforms. Other factors, such as women's economic power and the interstate process of diffusion similarly affect both controversial and noncontroversial reforms. Thus, contrary to the idea that the process of diffusion operates differently for controversial reforms, the results indicate that spatial proximity negatively affects the adoption of both controversial and noncontroversial rape law reforms. These findings have important implications for theoretical explanations of legal change, research on rape law reforms, and social movement research and activism.     

Etienne Laspeyres' History of the Economic Thought of the Netherlanders: A Law & Economics Classic?

Etienne Laspeyres (1834–1913) is today best known for the price index number formula named after him, but arguably his main contribution to economic literature is his Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederländer und ihrer Litteratur zur Zeit der Republik (1863). This sketch sets out to consider whether this work, the contents of which will be briefly outlined and placed into context, can be considered a Law & Economics classic, in the sense of the biographical part of the Elgar Companion to Law and Economics (1999), as well. While interesting in its own right, the discussion of this question also serves as an inroad into the discussion of exactly what type of combination of law and economics is necessary to be considered part of Law & Economics as a specific mode of scholarly inquiry.     

Marriage and Desistance from Crime in the Netherlands: Do Gender and Socio-Historical Context Matter?

Over the last two decades, research examining desistance from crime in adulthood has steadily increased. The evidence from this body of research consistently demonstrates that salient life events—in particular, marriage—are associated with a reduction of offending across the life course. However, previous studies have been largely limited to male samples in the United States. As a result, questions regarding the universal effect of these relationships remain. Specifically, research is needed to assess whether the desistance effect of life events like marriage varies by gender and/or socio-historical context in countries other than the U.S. The present research addresses these gaps by examining the relationship between marriage and criminal offending using data from the Criminal Career and Life Course Study (CCLS). The CCLS includes criminal conviction histories spanning a large portion of the life course for nearly 5,000 men and women convicted in the Netherlands in 1977. Because we assess change over multiple observations within and between individuals, we utilize hierarchical models to estimate gender and contextual effects of marriage on criminal offending (i.e., any, violent, and property convictions). Overall, we find consistent support for the idea that marriage reduces offending across gender and socio-historical context. Notably, we find that the reduction in the odds of offending due to marriage is significantly greater for individuals in the most contemporary context. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Probing the Depths of the Responsible Corporate Officer’s Duty

Many criminal law scholars have criticized the responsible corporate officer doctrine as a form of strict and vicarious liability. It is neither. It is merely a doctrine that supplies a duty in instances of omissions. Siding with Todd Aagaard in this debate, I argue that a proper reading of the cases yields that the responsible corporate officer doctrine is just duty supplying, and does not allow for strict liability when the underlying statute requires mens rea. After analyzing Dotterweich, Park, and their progeny, I probe the depths of this duty-supplying doctrine, including to whom the duty is owed, whether the duty is grounded in statute, cause of peril, or contract, and what the content of the duty is. Although the responsible corporate officer doctrine unveils questions we may have about duty generally, it is no more problematic than other duty-supplying doctrines in the criminal law.     

Do resemblance ratings measure the accuracy of facial approximations?

Since forensic facial approximations are used to promote recognition of a deceased person, an accurate forensic facial approximation (FFA) should be easily recognized as the person to whom the skull belonged (target individual). However, the accuracy of FFAs has been previously assessed by the direct comparison of an FFA to the corresponding target individual for similarity (i.e., a resemblance rating). Resemblance ratings may not indicate a facial approximation's accuracy since the resemblance of non-target individuals is not accounted for. This experiment tests the validity of using resemblance ratings to assess the accuracy of FFAs. The study indicates that there is no statistically significant difference between: (a) resemblance ratings of FFAs to target individuals and (b) resemblance ratings of FFAs to individuals incorrectly identified as the target individual. It is concluded that it is not possible from resemblance ratings to determine the accuracy and/or quality of a facial approximation since a non-target individual may receive a resemblance rating equal to, or higher than, the target individual.     

Is the Treatment of Economic Loss by the Australian Courts in Torts Cases Anomalous?

The well developed economic theory of tort liability has never been able to comfortably accommodate negligence cases causing pure economic loss as opposed to physical damage or injury. In fact, contrary to received opinion, Australian Courts at least, are increasingly allocating pure economic losses to achieve predominantly an efficiency objective, with corrective justice notions relegated into the background. Consequently, it is difficult to classify these cases as anomalous in the sense of falling outside the efficiency paradigm.JEL Classification: K13     

European Economic Governance and Parliamentary Representation. What Place for the European Parliament?

This article aims to analyse the European Parliament's (EP) position in the reform of the European economic governance, in particular after the adoption of the ‘six‐pack,’ the ‘two‐pack’ and the ‘fiscal compact.’ References are made to the involvement of the EP in the decision‐making process that led to the adoption of the new measures as well as to the substantive role assigned to this institution in the new regulatory framework. The article argues that the new provisions, which undermine the budgetary authority of national parliaments while, at the same time, designing a limited role for the EP—though strengthened compared to the previous version of the Stability and Growth Pact—can jeopardise the effectiveness of the landmark principle of ‘no taxation without parliamentary representation’ in the EU.     

Do Social Services Matter for Child Maltreatment Prevention?: Interactions between Social Support and Parent's Knowledge of Available Local Social Services

Despite wide recognition that increased social support is associated with positive parenting behaviors, there is limited understanding regarding the mechanisms through which the neighborhood context can increase or hinder social connections. In a sample of 1,050 parents in Franklin County, OH, this study examines the role of availability of social services in child maltreatment. Through negative binomial regression, the study finds that greater availability of social services is associated with lower levels of child abuse and neglect. Additionally, the availability of social services moderates the relationship between social support and child maltreatment, such that the relationship between social support and child maltreatment is weaker for parents in neighborhoods with greater availability of services. The findings suggest that increasing services and awareness of such services might be an opportunity for child maltreatment prevention.