Law School

Derivative suits. Because directors owe their duties to the corporation and not, as a general rule, to specific shareholders or stakeholders, the right to sue for breaches of directors’ duty rests by default with the corporation itself. The corporation is necessarily a party to the suit. This creates a difficulty because almost always, the right to litigate falls under the general powers of direct...

Space law is the body of law governing space-related activities, encompassing both international and domestic agreements, rules, and principles. Parameters of space law include space exploration, liability for damage, weapons use, rescue efforts, environmental preservation, information sharing, new technologies, and ethics. Other fields of law, such as administrative law, intellectual property law...

Tax administration. Taxes in the United States are administered by hundreds of tax authorities. At the federal level there are three tax administrations. Most domestic federal taxes are administered by the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the Department of the Treasury. Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms taxes are administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Taxes on i...

Parenting coordinator (PC) is a relatively new practice used in some US states to manage ongoing issues in high-conflict child custody and visitation cases by professional psychologist or a lawyer assigned by the Court. There are 10 states as of May 2011 that have passed legislation regarding parenting coordinators: Colorado (since 2005), Idaho (2002), Louisiana (2007), New Hampshire (2009), North...

Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving eminent domain and labor relations. In its decision, the Court held that a regulation made pursuant to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that required agricultural employers to allow labor organizers to regularly access their property for the purposes of union recruitment constituted a per se takin...

Directors' duties. While corporate constitutions typically set out the balance of power between directors, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, additional duties are owed by members of the board to the corporation as a whole. First, rules can restrain or empower the directors in whose favor they exercise their discretion. While older corporate law judgments suggested directors had to pr...

Custody evaluation (also known as "parenting evaluation") is a legal process, in which a court-appointed mental health expert or an expert chosen by the parties, evaluates a family and makes a recommendation to the court for custody matters, usually including residential custody, visitation and a parenting plan. When performing the custody evaluation, the evaluator is expected to act in the child'...

Some jurisdictions may commit certain types of dangerous sex offenders to state-run detention facilities following the completion of their sentence if that person has a "mental abnormality" or personality disorder that makes the person likely to engage in sexual offenses if not confined in a secure facility. In the United States, twenty states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia...

Property taxes Most jurisdictions below the state level in the United States impose a tax on interests in real property (land, buildings, and permanent improvements). Some jurisdictions also tax some types of business personal property. Rules vary widely by jurisdiction. Many overlapping jurisdictions (counties, cities, school districts) may have authority to tax the same property. Few states impo...

Mahanoy Area School District v B L (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the ability of schools to regulate student speech made off-campus, such as speech made on social media. The case challenged past interpretation of Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District and Bethel School District v Fraser, previous Supreme Court decisions related to student speech which m...

While the board of directors is generally conferred the power to manage the day-to-day affairs of a corporation, either by the statute, or by the articles of incorporation, this is always subject to limits, including the rights that shareholders have. For example, the Delaware General Corporation Law §141(a) says the "business and affairs of every corporation ... shall be managed by or under the d...

A habitual offender, repeat offender, or career criminal is a person convicted of a crime who was previously convicted of crimes. Various states and jurisdictions may have laws targeting habitual offenders, and specifically providing for enhanced or exemplary punishments or other sanctions. They are designed to counter criminal recidivism by physical incapacitation via imprisonment. The nature, sc...

Credits A wide variety of tax credits may reduce income tax at the federal and state levels. Some credits are available only to individuals, such as the child tax credit for each dependent child, American Opportunity Tax Credit for education expenses, or the Earned Income Tax Credit for low income wage earners. Some credits, such as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, are available to businesses, inc...

Shared parenting, shared residence, joint residence, shared custody or joint physical custody is a child custody arrangement after divorce or separation, in which both parents share the responsibility of raising their children, with equal or close to equal parenting time. A regime of shared parenting is based on the idea that children have the right to and benefit from a close relationship with bo...

Collins v Yellen, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with the structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). The case follows on the Court's prior ruling in Seila Law LLC v Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found that the establishing structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), with a single director who could only be removed from office "fo...

Delegated management and agents. Although a corporation may be considered a separate legal person, it physically cannot act by itself. There are, therefore, necessarily rules from the corporation statutes and the law of agency that attribute the acts of real people to the corporation, to make contracts, deal with property, commission torts, and so on. First, the board of directors will be typicall...

Recidivism (/rɪˈsɪdɪvɪzəm/; from recidive and ism, from Latin recidīvus "recurring", from re- "back" and cadō "I fall") is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have experienced negative consequences of that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense. The term is frequently used in conjunction with cr...

Income tax Taxes based on income are imposed at the federal, most state, and some local levels within the United States. The tax systems within each jurisdiction may define taxable income separately. Many states refer to some extent to federal concepts for determining taxable income. History of the income tax. The first Income tax in the United States was implemented with the Revenue Act of 1861 b...

Alimony (also called aliment (Scotland), maintenance (England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Canada, New Zealand), spousal support (U.S., Canada) and spouse maintenance (Australia)) is a legal obligation on a person to provide financial support to their spouse before or after marital separation or divorce. The obligation arises from the divorce law or family law of each country. Child support....

Lange v California, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the exigent circumstances requirement related to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court ruled unanimously that the warrantless entry into a home by police in pursuit of a misdemeanant is not unequivocally justified. Background. In October 2016, a California highway patrol officer witnessed Arthu...

Corporations are invariably classified as "legal persons" by all modern systems of law, meaning that like natural persons, they may acquire rights and duties. A corporation may be chartered in any of the 50 states (or the District of Columbia) and may become authorized to do business in each jurisdiction it does business within, except that when a corporation sues or is sued over a contract, the c...

A pardon is a government decision to allow a person to be relieved of some or all of the legal consequences resulting from a criminal conviction. A pardon may be granted before or after conviction for the crime, depending on the laws of the jurisdiction. Pardons can be granted in many countries when individuals are deemed to have demonstrated that they have "paid their debt to society” or are othe...

The United States of America has separate federal, state, and local governments with taxes imposed at each of these levels. Taxes are levied on income, payroll, property, sales, capital gains, dividends, imports, estates and gifts, as well as various fees. In 2010, taxes collected by federal, state, and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP. In the OECD, only Chile and Mexico are taxed le...

A parenting plan is a child custody plan that is negotiated by parents, and which may be included in a marital separation agreement or final decree of divorce. Especially when a separation is acrimonious to begin with, specific agreements about who will discharge these responsibilities and when and how they are to be discharged can reduce the need for litigation. Avoiding litigation spares parties...

Yellen v Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with the classification of Alaska Native corporations (ANCs) for purposes of receiving funds set-aside for tribal governments under the CARES Act. In a 6–3 decision issued in June 2021, the Court ruled that ANCs were considered to be "Indian tribes" and were eligible to receive the set-...