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Multinational corporations use intellectual property (IP) to avoid taxes on a massive scale, by transferring their IP to tax havens for artificially low prices. Economists estimate that this abuse costs the U.S. Treasury as much as $90 billion each year. Yet tax policymakers and scholars have been unable to devise feasible tax-law solutions to this problem. This Article introduces an entirely new...

The struggle over marijuana regulation is one of the most important federalism conflicts in a generation. The ongoing clash of federal and state marijuana laws forces us to consider the preemptive power of federal drug laws and the appropriate roles for state and federal governments in setting drug policy. This conflict also creates debilitating instability and uncertainty on the ground in those...

Long-running debates over military privatization overlook one important fact: The U.S. military’s post-2001 contractor workforce is composed largely of migrants imported from impoverished countries. This Article argues that these Third Country National (TCN) workers—so called because they are neither American nor local—are bereft of the effective protections of American law, local regimes, or...

The United States incarcerates a larger percentage of our population than any other country. Minority populations make up a substantially disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated. For a variety of reasons, violence perpetrated against incarcerated persons, including sexual assault, is endemic and inmates have very limited opportunities to protect themselves. The state has an obligation...

The Voting Rights Act passed fifty years ago and its success at curbing electoral discrimination is unquestioned. Section 5’s preclearance, which requires specific jurisdictions to seek federal preapproval of election laws, was central to this success. Yet the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the formula that selected preclearance jurisdictions. Without the formula...

Substantial reductions in global power sector emissions will be needed by midcentury to avoid significant disruption of the climate system. Achieving these reductions will require greatly increased levels of financing, technological innovation, and policy reform. In the United States, the scale and complexity of the overall challenge have raised important questions regarding prevailing regulatory...

This Article proposes that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) consider promulgating an Open Access Distribution Tariff (OADT) to open the nation’s electric grid to new products and services at the consumer (distribution) level. Design of the OADT would be comparable to the Open Access Transmission Tariff that the FERC has used previously to open the nation’s transmission wires. This...

This Article proposes a hypothesis: By linking a reduction in reliance on fossil fuels to the value of promoting national security, what I have called the Military-Environmental Complex has the potential to change individual attitudes and beliefs, and therefore behavior and political debate, about energy use and climate change. Studies have shown that individuals with certain values or political...

Addressing climate change will require the successful development and implementation of new energy technologies. Such technologies can, however, pose novel and uncertain hazards. Furthermore, the process of energy innovation is technically difficult and occurs in the face of powerful forces hostile to new technologies that disrupt existing energy systems. In short, energy innovation is difficult...

Governments are increasingly resorting to technology mandates to force development and commercialization of socially-desirable technologies that the market, for various reasons, seems unable or unwilling to provide in a timely manner. This Article analyzes three recent examples of government-imposed technology mandates, including explicit or de facto government requirements for electric vehicles...

This Article explores the feasibility of adding flexibility to mandates for existing power plants in order to foster technology innovation and reduce compliance costs and emissions. Under new and proposed EPA rules a significant portion of the coal-fired electricity generating capacity will require multi-billion dollar investments to retrofit and comply with emissions standards on SO2, NOx, PM...

Despite a growing sense of urgency to improve energy systems so as to reduce fossil-fuel dependency, energy system change has been slow, uncertain, and geographically diverse. Interestingly, this regionally heterogeneous evolution of energy system change is not merely a consequence of technological limitations, but also and importantly a product of complex socio-political factors influencing the...

Much of energy policy is driven by concerns about climate change. Views about the importance of carbon emissions affect debates on topics ranging from the regulation of electricity generation and transmission to the need for incentives to develop emerging technologies. Government efforts to fund and communicate climate science have been extraordinary, but recent polling suggests that roughly half...

The vast majority of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades is expected to come from outside of the developed world. Yet on the whole, scholars have made only modest headway in identifying the distinctive features of effective environmental regulation in the developing world. This Article argues that a particular feature of the emerging economies—sharp regional economic...