In a forthcoming article in the Boston College Law Review (“Jurisdiction to Tax Corporations”), University of Florida Law Professor Omri Marian proposes a new policy-perspective for international corporate taxation, questioning whether foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies, such as many of Apple’s, should indeed be viewed as “foreign.” The paper can be downloaded at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2245802.

“Apple’s strategy is perfectly legal,” Marian notes. “It simply highlights the U.S. tax code failure in treating companies incorporated offshore as ‘foreign’ for tax purposes, even though many of such companies, wholly owned by U.S. parents, do not exist except on a piece of paper in some tax haven jurisdiction.”

Marian suggests that the United States should adopt a functional approach to corporate taxation by defining corporations “domestic” for tax purposes using a two-pronged corporate tax-residence test: the place where the corporation’s securities are listed for public trading, or the place of the corporation’s central management and control.

Affirming that corporations are nothing more than imaginary entities, this approach asks what the policy purpose is for taxing corporations rather than becoming bogged down in the usual question of a “territorial system” or of “worldwide consolidation.”

Since we primarily care about the taxation of publicly traded corporations, Marian suggests making the public listing the test for residency of the parent, and to treat the subsidiaries managed by the parent as domestic. Under the approach, all “foreign” subsidiaries where the earnings are trapped will become domestic, and as such subject to tax in the United States. This will be an important first step toward a much necessary broadening of the U.S. corporate tax base, whether the U.S. keeps its global system of taxation, or adopts a territorial one.

Marian specializes in international taxation, comparative taxation and taxation of financial instruments. He joined the UF Law faculty in 2012 after leaving the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York.

Contact:
Omri Marian, Assistant Professor of Law
352-273-0975 or marian@law.ufl.edu

Six UF Law students were inducted into the UF Hall of Fame – the highest recognition given to student leaders at UF – and UF Law third-year student Amanda Harris has been nominated to receive a 2013 Burton Distinguished Legal Writing Award.

“I feel very blessed and humbled to receive the award,” Harris said. “It’s a pleasant surprise to have such exciting news at the end of my law school career, and I’m so excited to represent UF and see where my future leads.”

The Burton Awards were established to acknowledge and reward effective legal writing, from “publications to the greatest legal reforms in law,” according to the Burton Awards website.

Harris’ article, “Surpassing Sentencing: The Controversial Next Step in Confrontation Clause Jurisprudence,” published in the Florida Law Review, addresses the issue of the right to confrontation and whether it applies during capital and noncapital sentencing.

Harris will graduate in the top five percent of her class and has a clerkship lined up with Chief Justice Karen K. Caldwell in the Eastern District of Kentucky in Lexington. She will receive the award at the Burton Awards ceremony in June in Washington, D.C.

The UF Law students who were inducted into the University of Florida Hall of Fame are:

Laura Beard

Mitchell Cooper

Ashley Dunnigan

Brock Hankins

Wesley Maul

Dana Somerstein

Award recipients were honored earlier this month by President Bernie Machen and Vice President for Student Affairs Dave Kratzer at a ceremony in front of family and friends.

This year, 123 University of Florida students applied for the award and 27 were selected. A committee composed of faculty, staff and two former award recipients reviewed the applications.

Since 1921, UF Hall of Fame recognizes seniors and graduate students who have consistently demonstrated an outstanding commitment to improving the University of Florida through campus and community involvement, participation in organized campus activities, and scholastic achievement.

The Division of Student Affairs coordinates the award. Applications are available at the beginning of February every year.

Past award winners include George Smathers (1937), Stephen O’Connell (1938), Ralph Turlington (1942), Marshall Criser (1950), Steve Spurrier (1967), Susan Jacobs (1971), Danny Ponce (1973), Maruchi Azorin (1976), Dean Cannon (1990) and Jason Rosenberg (1990).

For more information and a complete list of past award winners, please visit http://www.ufsa.ufl.edu/students/honors_awards_scholarships/hall_of_fame/.

For more information:
Matt Walker, UF Law Communications
352-273-0650, mlwalker@law.ufl.edu

UF Law Professor Dennis Calfee stands with Florida Bar Tax Section Chair Michael Lampert (left) and UF Law alumnus and founding partner at Comiter, Singer, Baseman & Braun, Richard Comiter. Calfee was honored as The Florida Bar Tax Section Gerald T. Hart Outstanding Tax Attorney of the year Saturday, April 27 at the section’s 35th annual meeting held at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center in Gainesville.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The Florida Bar Tax Section recognized University of Florida Law Professor Dennis Calfee as the Gerald T. Hart Outstanding Tax Attorney of the Year on Saturday at the section’s 35^th annual meeting.

Participants repeatedly praised Calfee for his energetic assistance to students and colleagues during his career on the UF Law Graduate Tax faculty that began in 1975. During his tenure, Graduate Tax has evolved into the top ranked public school tax program in the nation, as measured by U.S. News and World Report. Calfee was selected based on the significant impact he has made in improving the quality of tax law practice in Florida and the United States.

“We know Dennis in a lot of different ways, wearing a lot of different hats in the program,” said UF Law Graduate Tax Director Michael Friel during the ceremony at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center. “He is – as we all know – an extraordinary scholar with a leading treatise in the country in estate gift tax. He is … a truly extraordinary teacher.”

Friel was among many speakers, including UF President Bernie Machen and UF Law Dean Robert Jerry and numerous UF Law alumni, to acknowledge Calfee’s vast influence and reputation in the tax world.

Friel said in addition to being an extraordinary friend and colleague over the years, Calfee has provided an incredible degree of service to UF Law’s graduate tax program, the Law Center Association and the Florida Law Review, where Calfee serves as faculty adviser.

Calfee matriculated through the UF Law graduate tax program’s inaugural class and after earning his LL.M. in taxation in 1975, was asked to remain in Gainesville as an interim professor for one year, which led to his many subsequent years as an integral part of the tax program.

Throughout his career, Calfee has served as a mentor to, and influenced, many tax attorneys in Florida, across the country and around the world. He has served as associate dean at UF Law, been nominated twice as Professor of the Year and in 1998 was appointed an Alumni Research Scholar. He has also taught at Peking University in Beijing, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the Academy of International Tax in Taiwan, and the University of Montpellier in France. In 2006, the Republic of China Ministry of Finance honored him with a third level public finance specialty medal in recognition of his guidance in developing Taiwan’s public finance system and training tax officers.

At the end of the ceremony, Dean Jerry and UF Law alumnus Richard Comiter announced the successful completion of the campaign to endow the Dennis A. Calfee Eminent Scholar Chair in Taxation.

“That hundreds of alumni contributed to making this chair a reality is a testament to Dennis’s impact on so many students through not just the years, but the decades,” Jerry said.

Approximately 240 alumni and guests attended the tax section dinner honoring Calfee, including many of Calfee’s former students and research assistants.

The first Gerald T. Hart Outstanding Tax Attorney of the Year award was given to UF Law emeritus faculty member James Freeland in 1982. Other UF Law faculty recipients include Richard Stephens in 1985, current adjunct Samuel Ullman in 1994, and David Richardson in 2000.

For more information:
Matt Walker, UF Law Communications
352-273-0650, mlwalker@law.ufl.edu

UF Law Dean Robert Jerry said he is proud of UF Law’s annual performance and points out that February’s small sample sizes can be misleading. He noted that UF Law is consistently among the top schools in the state when the handful of UF Law February results are combined for an annual average with the hundreds of UF Law July test takers. (For more details, see the Dean’s Message at http://tinyurl.com/bmtjtfz.)

“I’m always surprised how results on the spring bar exam are sometimes described since so few graduates take the February test compared to the July test. Any mathematician knows the law of small numbers makes these results highly unreliable as a basis for comparing schools,” said Jerry. “I am particularly disappointed that publicity tends to stress percentages rather than numbers, since that gives underserved validity to the results by implying that similar numbers of test-takers participate in the February and July exams.”

To ensure consistency in evaluating bar exam performance, Jerry recommends that February and July exam results in the same year be combined to ensure accurate class-by-class comparisons. These results are what the American Bar Association asks law schools to report for accreditation purposes.

“Frankly, it’s like evaluating how well a baseball player hits in a 162-game season by only counting his at-bats in 10 games,” Jerry said. “That’s essentially what it is like to look at the February bar results in isolation.”

And overall, Jerry is happy with UF Law’s recent “seasons,” which put the school’s annual bar passage rate in first place among Florida law schools two out of the last three years, and second place the other year.

“Numerical analysis can be a helpful tool when evaluating the quality and progress of a school,” said Jerry. “But it is only one tool among many, and great care must be taken to understand the origin and context of any numbers used, particularly in rankings such as U.S. News and World Report, and to realize that numbers alone will never convey the true value of any institution.”

For more information:
Matt Walker, UF Law Communications
352-273-0650, mlwalker@law.ufl.edu

UF Law Professor Leonard Riskin sits with a meditation bell, a tool used in teaching mindfulness practices that help students and lawyers deal better with stress and enhance performance and satisfaction. Riskin received the ABA’s Section of Dispute Resolution award for Outstanding Scholarly Work last weekend in Chicago.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – University of Florida Levin College of Law Professor Leonard Riskin was honored last weekend with the American Bar Association’s Section of Dispute Resolution award for Outstanding Scholarly Work.

Riskin, who is the Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law, accepted the prestigious award at the section’s 15^th annual spring conference in Chicago.

Since coming to UF Law in 2007, Riskin has served as professor, mentor and director of the Initiative of Mindfulness in Law and Dispute Resolution, and senior fellow of the Institute for Dispute Resolution. The ABA honored him based on his extensive work in alternative dispute resolution with a focus on the perspectives that lawyers bring to the work.

“When I first started teaching in law school I noticed that there was a huge amount of suffering among law students, lawyers and clients. Some of the suffering, I thought, resulted from extreme adversarial perspectives and behavior,” Riskin said. “I thought that mediation was a way to reduce unnecessary adversarialism and suffering.”

Riskin began to write about and teach mediation in the early 1980s, and from that he became interested in mindsets lawyers use when addressing problems.

“A lot of my work has been designed to encourage or help law students, lawyers and mediators become more aware of what mindset they are using, and how that mindset affects the way they understand problems and the way they might try to deal with them,” Riskin said.

Riskin is the third recipient of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section’s award for Outstanding Scholarly Work since its creation in 2011. Harvard Law School professor Frank E.A. Sander and Georgetown University professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow received the award in years past.

“I feel honored because I very much admire the two previous recipients,” Riskin added. “I’m very lucky to have studied and worked with wise and thoughtful people from whom I learned a great deal. I especially appreciate working with my UF faculty colleagues and students.”

For more information:
Matt Walker, UF Law Communications
352-273-0650, mlwalker@law.ufl.edu

Black Law Students Association President Brandon Campbell (2L) speaks during a presentation at a UF Law Board of Trustees meeting. UF Law’s BLSA chapter has been named best in the nation. (Photo by Haley Stracher)

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The University of Florida Levin College of Law Black Law Students Association took home two prestigious awards at the annual National Black Law Students Association Convention in Atlanta March 6-10.

UF Law BLSA, also known as the W. George Allen chapter, was recognized as the national chapter of the year, beating out over 200 other groups. It is the National Black Law Students Association’s highest award and honor given to any chapter.

“This award shows yet again that UF is among the top law schools in the country, and that UF’s excellence is consistent in many areas,” said BLSA President Brandon Campbell (2L).

The group submitted a three-part application then competed for the title of regional chapter of the year. After being named chapter of the year for the southern region, UF Law BLSA went on to compete nationally.

The last step in the process included an interview in which Campbell answered questions posed by two NBLSA board members.

Campbell highlighted all of the community service outreach that BLSA spearheaded throughout the year, including the state of the Black Law Student town hall meeting, diversity initiatives with pre-law students across the country, the 50-year anniversary celebration of W. George Allen, UF Law’s first black graduate and UF BLSA’s namesake, and a professionalism week program.

“The leadership of our UF Law BLSA chapter has been superb these past years, so the chapter being recognized as the national chapter of the year is a well-deserved and exciting honor,” said UF Law Dean Robert Jerry.

Meanwhile, BLSA’s negotiations team won first place in the international negotiation competition held during the convention. The winning team consisted of Atiya Munroe (2L) and Laselve Harrison (2L).

“Getting one national title is a rare achievement for any law school, so the BLSA Negotiations Team also winning the national championship creates an extraordinary combination of awards, demonstrating that UF Law’s students have succeeded in making our BLSA chapter one of the very best, and I would argue the number one chapter, in the country,” said Jerry.

Campbell believes the awards are also representative of the movement toward diversity in education.

“This award is a major step in the right direction, not only for BLSA, but for the advancement of diversity at UF,” he said.

As for what the future has in store, BLSA has already established a conference in September, which will include every chapter in Florida and chapters in Puerto Rico and other states.

“I am fully confident that those coming after me will be able to continue BLSA’s model of excellence,” Campbell said.

The members of BLSA give special thanks to Donald Pritchett and Eugene Pettis for their annual endowments to UF BLSA. BLSA would also like to thank its graduate adviser, Katheryn Russell-Brown; the Center for Race Relations; the Law College Council; and the Center for Career Development for sponsoring its trip to Atlanta and supporting its activities this year.

For more information:
Matt Walker, UF Law Communications
352-273-0650, mlwalker@law.ufl.edu

6 – 9 p.m.

All day

2 p.m.

This year’s commencement speaker is UF Law alum and President-Elect of The Florida Bar Eugene Pettis.

6:30 – 8 p.m.

8:30 – 11:30 a.m.

Albie Sachs, retired Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and life-long freedom fighter in the struggle against apartheid, spoke about gay marriage at the University of Florida Levin College of Law Tuesday, March 26 – the same day the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging California’s ban on gay marriage.

“Gay Marriage and the Promise of Equality” was at noon in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180, with a book signing immediately following.

Sachs’ talk is co-sponsored by UF Law’s Center on Children and Families and UF’s Center for African Studies.

“Gay Marriage and the Promise of Equality” will be at noon in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180, with a book signing immediately following. The talk is free and open to the public. Parking restrictions in the green areas at the law school will be lifted for the event.

Sachs’ career as a human rights activist started in his student days at the University of Cape Town, when he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. He devoted his law practice to defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention. In 1988, Sachs was the victim of a car bomb attack carried out by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight in one eye.

During the 1980s and early 1990s Sachs was centrally involved in drafting the African National Congress’ proposed constitution for a new democratic South Africa. As a member of the Constitutional Committee and the national executive of the ANC he took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. He was appointed by President Nelson Mandela in 1994 to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court, and in 2005 he authored the court’s landmark decision requiring legal recognition of gay marriage in South Africa.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to have Albie Sachs speak at UF,” said UF Law Senior Legal Skills Professor Joseph Jackson. “He’s a remarkable person and a major player in the constitutional transformation of South Africa, who has helped that country heal the divisions of the past.”

Sachs’ talk is co-sponsored by UF Law’s Center on Children and Families and UF’s Center for African Studies.

Sachs will also be giving a talk at the Center for African Studies at 4 p.m. titled, “Combating Corruption: Kenya’s Efforts to Judge its Judges.” Visit the African Studies website for complete details, http://web.africa.ufl.edu/.

For more information:
Joseph Jackson, UF Law Senior Legal Skills Professor
352-273-0882, jjackson@law.ufl.edu

The Florida Law Review welcomed Professor Randy Barnett as the 32nd Annual Dunwody Distinguished Lecturer in Law. Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, discussed the recent United States Supreme Court decision upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at 10 a.m. on Friday, March 22, in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center. The event was free and open to the public.

Barnett has written and commented extensively on the Affordable Care Act and represented the National Federal of Independent Businesses as their case against the ACA was presented before the Supreme Court last spring. Barnett discussed the general implications of the court’s landmark decision, as well as fundamental misunderstandings he perceives among the legal academic community regarding the decision’s import. Barnett’s lecture, “Who Won the Obamacare Case (and Why Did So Many Law Professors Miss the Boat)?,” preceded an article of the same name to be published in an upcoming edition of the Florida Law Review.

For additional information, contact the Florida Law Review at www.FloridaLawReview.com or 352-273-0670.

More information about this event may be found here.