Taxation Law Books

The major categories of mass communication are presented with key cases under each. Prior to getting into the various cases, background on the legal system is explained. The readers are told about public communication and the law in general. There is an overview of the first amendment to the U.S. constitution. Logically flowing out of that is discussion of issues directly related such as libel and privacy. Graphically the design is such that the content is easy to digest. The book goes on to provide sections on intellectual property, corporate speech, advertising, and journalism. Matters of accessibility are included as well. This book is an excellent overview to mass media law.

The book is a mixure of textbook and cases book so it should be a good introductory textbook. Probably practitioners may find it convenient. However, it will be better if the authors would consider to give further academic and practical discussion about the difficult areas such as Internet jurisdiction. The only disappointment is the authors did not give sufficient dicussion about the Choice of Law on Internet, especially after the influential argument put forward by Johnson and Post relating to the nature of Internet as a borderless environment. Good coverage anyway.

Prof. Block speaks clearly and understandably. Her speaking pace is not too fast, or too slow. She explains the federal income tax fundamentals well. When I emailed her, Prof. Block told me that the recording was completely revised in 2005. Unfortunately, she did not use as many hypos as some of the other audio speakers in the Law School Legends series and Sum & Substance series.

On a technical note, the first disk repeats for less than a minute, but all the material appears to be present. I did not bother trying to get another copy. Also, like most Law School Legend recordings, this disk set does not have short sections tied to topics. I like Finz's Torts for short audio chunks much better.

This is a useful and comprehensive book on the taxation regime in Hong Kong. Good for the student as well as practitioners.

This book offers insight into the the conditions of agreement between owner, architect, and contractor, by offering a number of court decisions as presidence, and stating objectively why consideration to the language of the contract is so important. After discussion and commentary on each of the four cornerstone AIA documents, an alternative language chapter is provided. These chapters aid the reader in tayloring the agreement to specific conditions while giving suggestions to the provision. The glossary and table of cases are welcome references for drafting agreements.

At the outset let me say that the author should not have titled his book with the word "living" included. Living wills are not testamentary wills at all, and to refer to testamentary wills as living wills is inaccurate and misleading to say the least.

The other problem I had with the title was that it really did not help me understand what the book was really about and who the intended audience is. After reading the book I think it is fair to say that the book is about options a living person has when planning his estate (no will, wills, trusts, and other will substitutes), and the processes (probate and transfer taxes) that must be dealt with after his death. I suppose the intended audience is someone who is about to undertake some estate planning. Maybe an executor might get something out of this book since part of the book discusses the probate and transfer taxes processes.

The book has 12 chapters:

1. Intestate Succession
2. Testators and Trustees
3. Features of a Will
4. Features of a Trust
5. Wills and Trusts Compared
6. Executor, Trustee Roles
7. Other Living Options
8. Knowing Your Property
9. Identifying Distributees
10. The Probate Process
11. The Taxation Process
12. Writing Your Own Will

I would have liked the book a lot better if it had been organized differently. I think chapters 3, 12, 8, 9, 10 had a lot in common and I was looking for a chapter just on executors (but did not find one). I think chapters 4 and 7 had a lot in common and I was looking for a chapter just on trustees (but did not find one). Then I would follow those chapters with chapters 5, 2, and 11. Where should Chapters 1 and 6 go? Probably out the door! And a new Chapter 1 should be added that would summarize the book and act as a good introduction to the material to follow.

Without the new Chapter 1 that I just described I have trouble giving this book a "4 star" rating. However, there is quite a bit of good content in this book. It would be a shame to trample all over it by giving it only 3 stars.

It's not like anyone who's not in Law school would ever buy this book. I think that the cases are well edited to cut out the stuff that's just not relevant to the legal principal gained from each. However, if you're not in law school briefing cases to please a professor, just go to a law library and read the cases. Or, hire me in three years and I'll do it for you.
Happy Reading,
Adam

The mining law passed in 1872 during Grant's administration did not keep pace with changes in the scale of mining and mining technology nor address environmental concerns arising long after it came into effect. The Mining Law of 1872 saw the miners of the California Gold Rush in 1849 as representative of what mining was like more or less in the wide open spaces of the Western prairies and mountains. Mindful of the growth of a region following an appreciable discovery of a valuable metal as well as the wealth the metal and related economic activity added to the still-growing U.S., lawmakers and presidents wanted to encourage growth in unpopulated, but potentially thriving areas as quickly as possible. Not discouraging searching for gold or other valuable metals and not placing restrictions on mining of them when they were discovered was a way to do this, as happened in California. Thus the Mining Law of 1872 for the most part encouraged and favored miners and mining rather than placed any precautionary or involved constraints on them.

Later in the following century, this nineteenth-century mining law allowed for the largely unregulated building of hunting shacks and before long the sprouting up of ski resorts and housing projects. These and similar commercial developments having nothing to do with mining were justified by land-use provisions and ideas of the 1872 law. It was environmentalists who first raised concerns about the questionable or harmful effects being done to the land and the local way of life. They were often joined by Native American groups and local residents. Environmental considerations are now routine with large-scale industrialized and property-development projects. But the first generation of activists trying to prevent widespread, lasting environmental damage from little-regulated mining and projects misusing the Mining Law of 1872 met with little sympathy or understanding.

Bakken--a teaching lawyer and Western historian--follows how the Mining Law of 1872 and by implication other old mining laws came to be looked at differently from the activism of environmentalists and their allies and from new social perspectives toward the environment. Relatively academic and legalistic, his book is timely in light of attention being given to environmental damage such as global warming from heedless, large-scale industrial activities. As with global warming, the environmentalists and allied groups have had only limited success in opposing traditional application of the Mining Law of 1872 supported by decades of legal rulings in favor of mining companies and developers. While Bakken cannot claim final success for ones working to change or replace the Mining Law of 1872, he defines the challenges facing them and describes strategies and paths leading to some substantive change.

Books of this nature help to capture the regulatory flavor of an era. These four authors are to be commended for describing the climate of the FCC as television and radio were dominant forces of mass communication in the days before the internet. The marketplace was much more limited at the time and the era of deregulation was not in full blown force. In fact, the Commission took its watchdog role seriously in seeking to do what was in the best interest of the American people, not the players with the largest amount of dollars in the marketplace. In spite of all this, the agency misregulated the medium. The stage was set for the process to evolve as it has in subsequent decades. The authors contend "governmental policies virtually precluded entry by additional networks." While the Commission's policy statement would mention one item such as diversity, there was no actual way it could be measured. A considerable discussion focuses on the network/affiliate relationship. This book helps to show the evolution of what became the "marketplace model" of regulation of the FCC of the early 21st century.

This is an ambitious work which investigates how ideas which justify particular interests are adopted into law and influence intellectual presumptions. Bowman wants to know how we got to the point where "increasingly, transnational corporate power, not state power, constitutes the formative agent of change in world development."

He begins by reviewing how the republican tradition, which emphasized the responsibilities of citizen and statesman in maintaining social balance, was gradually replaced by the rise of classic liberalism, which affirmed the rights of the individual and justified the rise of capitalism by conceiving of economics as a matter of contracts between individuals. Economic activity came to represent the realm of freedom and the pursuit of self-interest. The coercive powers of the state were limited to preserving the realm of freedom and social efficiency. The ideological precept of corporate autonomy grew out of legal doctrines which reified the corporation as a citizen, thus, serving both to legitimize and to disguise corporate power as an inviolable part of the natural order. Corporate liberalism rose as an alternative to laissez-faire liberalism and statist socialism.

Jurists moved from thinking of the corporation as an artificial construct of the sovereign to a regulated citizen. The rights of due process aided corporate power by providing constitutional rights that could be invoked against state attempts to regulate. With the rights of legal persons, came an expectation of corporate social responsibility, consistent with the ideological concept of citizenship. The western frontier and the "invisible hand" gave way to faith in technological advance and a pragmatic role for government support and regulation.

Bowman's historical journey leads through exponents of the Progressive Movement such as Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Thorstan Veblin who argued that corporate hegemony constituted the central problem of modern society. In place of the automatic balance of the marketplace, a conscious social balance would have to be imposed. The rights of property would be reduced but freedom would be retained through the separation of political and economic realms. Our concept of democracy shifted from the belief that sovereignty resides in the people to a more instrumental approach, dependent on rule by experts and faith in technology.

At the beginning of the Progressive Movement most large corporations were controlled by the majority stockholder. With the publication of Berle and Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property in 1932 that assumption changed and the economic/political dichotomy fell. Peter F. Drucker, Adolph A. Berle and John Kenneth Galbraith "viewed the corporation as an autonomous or self-sufficient entity capable of generating its own capital and therefore no longer dependent on the capital markets." The objective of managerial theory shifted from preserving democratic institutions by regulating enterprise, to limiting the regulatory powers of government in deference to the value of corporate autonomy.

Each wave of populism was marked by pushing regulation of corporations to a more abstract level. Bowman speculates on the future of the adoption of an international companies act or a supranational corporate charter. Behind the political decisions of corporations, Bowman sees the work of a dominant class. His is not the simple class warfare of Marx; the owners of the means of production pitted against the masses. Instead, for Bowman, control lies with the corporate executives and board members of the top 200 industrial and 50 financial corporations. Power based on relationships of control over the corporate bureaucracy superseded power based on property ownership, as the corporation developed into a political institution.

So where does Bowman look for salvation from a world dominated by a few hundred corporate executives? Clearly, he believes that large corporations must be held accountable for policies that affect society and that increasingly, corporate accountability will be defined in global terms. He rejects any movement to destroy the corporate form or rewrite their charters after the fashion of the 19th century. Instead, he seems to turn to public interest groups organized around environmental, health and consumer issues. According to Bowman, America's tradition of civic activism has "found its most potent voice when it has arrayed itself against corporate power or class privilege." Yet, even here Bowman appears pessimistic since he believes corporate social responsibility is unlikely to become a salient political issue except in cases of gross negligence or blatant disregard for the public welfare. In addition, through the media and political influence, corporations have taken the lead in redefining the parameters of corporate social responsibility.

However, the reforms public interest groups seek are dependent on government regulation. If, as Bowman argues, corporations are so dominant they control government, it seems that little would change. Perhaps Bowman is too quick to dismiss those who seek to reform the corporations themselves. He sees the dominant struggles for control in merger battles not in a resurgence of stockholder democracy. "Tender offers, an essential strategy of the merger movement, have supplanted proxy fights as the favored means of seizing control of large corporations."

While tender offers and diversified mergers have played a significant role in increasing asset concentration, there has also been a significant resurgence of shareholder democracy. As more money moves to the indexes and to institutional investors with large holdings, shareholder democracy becomes increasingly important; shareholders who cannot sell must become active in corporate governance if they wish to increase the value of their holdings. In 1992 the Securities and Exchange Commission changed the rules regarding shareholder communication. After this limited deregulation, the United Shareholders Association estimated the cost of a target mailing to a corporation's 1,000 largest shareholders was reduced from $1M to between $5,000 and $10,000.

Bowman does an excellent job of drawing from concepts in law, political thought and the social sciences in making a case for a revised form of class analysis to explain the character and evolution of corporate power. He is clearly right that civic activism reaches its peak when it focuses on "corporate power or class privilege." Each wave of reform in the past has been immediately preceded by public outrage. Upton Sinclair's portrait of the meatpacking industry, Ida Tarbell's condemnation of Standard Oil, Rachel Carson's cry for the environment and Ralph Nader's research into unsafe cars each stirred the middle class to action. Each crisis is answered with a new set of regulations for business.

Perhaps if shareholder democracy can take root, corporations will build democratic mechanisms into their own structures. Power would then shift from the dominant class of Bowman's concern to a more broadly based group of shareholders and employees. Arguably, such a shift would be consistent with both republican and liberal democratic traditions. Social balance would be restored, while preserving the realm of freedom and social efficiency, by relying less on the coercive powers of the state.

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