Emerging Cryptocurrencies and IRS Summons Power: Striking the Proper Balance between IRS Audit Authority and Taxpayer Privacy

To protect the privacy and other civil liberties of its citizens, federal courts place limits on the power and actions of government. These limits create a need for balance between the IRS’s mission of tax law enforcement and taxpayers’ privacy rights. A much-watched contemporary lower court case intersecting cryptocurrencies, summons power, and taxpayer privacy is Coinbase v. U.S. There, the IRS sought to summons massive amounts of customer information from Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange platform. This article examines the history of the IRS summons power and argues that the Coinbase court correctly extended a wealth of summons enforcement case law by weighing the protection of taxpayer privacy with the tax compliance mission of the IRS. By allowing the IRS summons to stand, but limiting and defining the scope of relevant records allowed to be examined, the Coinbase court correctly balanced IRS tax enforcement with taxpayer data privacy.

Legal Reactivity: Correctional Health Care Certifications as Responses to Litigation

In 1976, the US Supreme Court established that incarcerated people have a constitutional right to health care, ratifying lower court decisions. Corresponding professionalization and standardization initiatives included the advent of third-party certifications of individual correctional health care (CHC) practitioners. Drawing on historical evidence about CHC reforms and contemporary data on certifications, incarcerated people’s lawsuits, and incarcerated people’s mortality rates, this study assesses relationships between certifications and key outcomes of incarceration. We find that corrections actors tend to adopt certifications when directly threatened by elevated rates of litigation in their states. This finding suggests that corrections actors are legally reactive, responding to filed lawsuits’ salient threat, rather than legally proactive, attempting to manage risk through anticipatory certification adoption. While early standardization and professionalization interventions reflected the legally proactive logic, our results indicate that contemporary corrections actors tend to “wait and see” about legal liability. Barriers to settlements or court rulings favoring incarcerated people—particularly the Prison Litigation Reform Act—help explain this tendency. Lawsuits’ observed influence on standardization and professionalization offer some support for litigation’s capacity to impel changes; litigation’s failure to predict mortality, however, gives pause regarding this capacity’s extent.

8. Summary justice in the magistrates’ court

This chapter focuses on the magistrates’ courts. It discusses the importance of the magistracy and the work that they do; the involvement (and funding) of lawyers in summary justice; major pre-trial decisions such as bail and whether a case can be dealt with in the magistrates’ court or is so serious that it needs to be sent to the Crown court (mode of trial/allocation); how magistrates and their legal advisors measure up to the crime control/due process models of criminal justice; and the future of summary justice (including the impact of managerialist and ‘victim rights’ reforms and trends that encourage dealing with much lower court business away from the courtroom itself).

Solicitors’ rights of audience, competence and regulation: a responsibility rights approach

This paper takes as its context the decision of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales to abandon before the event regulation of lower court trial advocacy. Although solicitors will continue to acquire rights of audience on qualification, they will no longer be required to undertake training or assessment in witness examination, by contrast with other, competing, legal professions. Their opportunities to acquire competence outside the classroom will remain limited. The paper first explores this context and its implications for the three key factors of rights to perform, competence and regulatory accountability. The current regulatory system is then displayed as a Hohfeldian network of rights and duties held in tension between stakeholders intended to inhibit the incompetent exercise of rights to conduct trial advocacy. The SRA's proposal weakens this tension field and threatens the competitive position of solicitors. The paper therefore finally offers a radical alternative reconceptualisation of rights of audience in terms of Waldron's ‘responsibility rights’ as a solution, albeit one with significant implications for the individual advocate. This model, applicable globally, is closer to notions of societal good and professionalism than to those of the competitive market, whilst inhibiting incompetent performance and remediating the SRA's approach.

REHABILITATION OF THE DEBTOR BEFORE THE OPENING OF BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS

Case Law shows that most bankruptcy cases end in liquidation, and restoring the debtor’s solvency and maintaining it as a business entity is the exception rather than the rule. Such trends clearly do not contribute to the development of the economy, so the development of recovery procedures applicable to the insolvent debtor seems relevant. One such procedure, which has appeared relatively recently in Ukrainian Law, is the pre-trial reorganization procedure. The purpose of the article is to analyze the provisions of current legislation governing the reorganization of the debtor before the opening of bankruptcy proceedings, study current issues that arise in the practice of applying the relevant provisions of the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine, and set out their views on the effectiveness of pre-trial reorganization. The case law on appealing the approval of the pre-trial rehabilitation plan, namely the appeal of the rehabilitation plan by creditors who did not participate in the voting or who voted against the approval of the pre-trial rehabilitation plan, is analyzed. Bankruptcy cases in the scientific doctrine are divided into two categories: 1) the bankruptcy case itself; 2) related cases, which are considered in the order of claim or declaration proceedings (invalidation of auctions, contracts, etc.). The author argues the possibility of supplementing this division of bankruptcy cases with another, third category — cases of pre-trial reorganization. It is emphasized that the Code of Ukraine on Bankruptcy Procedures provides for two types of reorganization: reorganization prior to the opening of bankruptcy proceedings (pre-trial reorganization) and reorganization as a court procedure applied to an insolvent debtor within a bankruptcy case. Both pre-trial reorganization and "judicial" reorganization pursue a single goal — to restore the debtor’s solvency and preserve it as a business entity. According to the results of the study, the author concludes that pre-trial rehabilitation has a number of advantages, which include: efficiency; profitability for creditors; write-off of a significant portion of tax debt and other mandatory payments: lower court costs in the form of court fees for both the debtor and creditors.

The Challenges to Improving Public Services and Judicial Operations

This chapter explores judicial perspectives on sentencing minor drug offenders in Indonesia. As a basis for the framework for this study, a concept of Goffman on dramaturgy was used to explain the dramaturgical competence of the panel judges in their attempts to show accountability to their audiences (i.e., the sphere of politics, the public, and religion). Conceptualisation of this study stems from this author former self-identity as a judge but also from the author biography since the author more familiar with the practical pressure and challenges of lower court judges. This chapter contributes to knowledge by considering that the judicial awareness of the issues surrounding justice and public acceptance led to the situation where they were attempting to present a unique balance between pursuing justice and public service.