EvidenceProf Blog
Evidence of the beliefs or opinions of a witness on matters of religion is not admissible for the purpose of showing that by reason of their nature the witness s credibility is impaired or enhanced.
So, for instance, an attorney couldn t ask whether a witness is a devout Catholic to enhance her credibility. On the other side of the coin, an attorney couldn t ask whether a witness is an atheist to impair her credibility. But what about questions regarding whether a defendant had a come to Jesus moment after committing the crime charged? That was the question addressed by the Court of Criminal Appeals of Tennessee in its recent opinion in
Nonprofit Law Prof Blog
Ian Murray (University of Western Australia) has published
Donor Advised Funds: What Can North America Learn From the Australian Approach? in the Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law. Here is the abstract:
Charity law is a public and private hybrid that seeks to balance donor intent with the achievement of public benefit. In supporting that balance, regulatory frameworks typically intrude less on donor intent when the recipient charity is a publicly controlled charity, rather than a private foundation. This approach is challenged by the rise of donor advised funds public charity intermediaries that behave in many ways like privately controlled foundations. The rise has been particularly marked in the United States, but is also apparent in Canada and Australia. Pertinently, while Australia took many years to regulate private foundations, it shortly afterwards also introduced specific rules for public charitable foundations. This article th
Business Law Prof Blog
Along with my co-authors J. Kelly Strader, Mihailis E. Diamantis, and Sandra D. Jordan, I am pleased to announce that the Fourth Edition of our textbook
White Collar Crime: Cases, Materials, and Problems has gone to press and is expected to be available through Carolina Academic Press by June of 2021, in plenty of time for Fall 2021 adoptions.
Professor Diamantis and I are excited to join Professors Strader and Jordan in the new edition. We hope that our unique practice experiences and theoretical perspectives will add value to what is already a popular White Collar casebook. We have posted the current drafts of Chapter 1 (Overview of White Collar Crime) and Chapter 5 (Securities Fraud) on SSRN as samples for review. Here, also, is an excerpt from the Preface summarizing our approach to the new edition:
Constitutional Law Prof Blog
The ruling in the frivolous case was not unexpected.
The case arose when Gohmert and self-appointed Trump electors from Arizona sued VP Pence, arguing that the Electoral Count Act violates the Electors Clause and the Twelfth Amendment, and that Pence has authority to determine which slate of electors to accept when he presides over the congressional count of electoral votes on January 6. The, er, novel argument turns on the plaintiffs , um, creative reading of the Electors Clause, the Twelfth Amendment, and the Electoral Count Act.
Start with the Electors Clause. It says that [e]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . . .
Business Law Prof Blog
The CliffsNotes version is that due to a dual-class voting structure, Shari Redstone was the controlling shareholder of CBS and Viacom, and for several years fought to combine the two companies. Her dreams were finally realized in 2019 when the two merged in a stock-for-stock deal. Former Viacom shareholders sued, alleging that this was a transaction in which a controlling stockholder – Redstone – stood on both sides, and that the deal sold out the Viacom shareholders to benefit CBS and Redstone.
Normally, of course, deals in which a controlling stockholder has an interest are subject to entire fairness scrutiny unless they are cleansed in the manner prescribed by