Washington's Taxes

This morning KUOW compared the tax systems in Washington (no income tax) and Oregon (no sales tax, no business & occupation tax).

And today's installment of The Economics Daily from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Washington State and Oregon have, respectively, very low and very high concentrations of tax preparers.

Map showing concentrations of tax preparers by state, 2015
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Coincidence? I doubt it.

Pigeon Smuggling as Art and U.S.-Cuba Relations

It's not every day you come across a news article that affords you an opportunity to blog about an art exhibit featuring pigeons smuggling Cuban cigars, how to research trade relations between the United States and Cuba and to comment on the end of the government shutdown in one fell swoop.  TGIT, indeed.

Brooklyn artist Duke Riley's exhibition "Trading With the Enemy" showcases his years-long project to train homing pigeons to fly from Havana to Key West, Florida.  Apparently, as Mr. Riley explains it, some of the pigeons smuggled Cuban cigars to the United States while the others were outfitted with special cameras to document the experience, all of which were fastened by "bright bra straps with adorably embroidered smuggling pockets..."

Is this legal?  Does the United States' trade embargo with Cuba have anything to do with this pigeon art?  These are excellent questions.  There are are number of resources in the law library and beyond that can help you research these issues. 

You might start by researching the state of trade relations between the United States and Cuba on the United States Treasury Department's website and reading President Obama's continuation of the Trading With the Enemy Act relating to Cuba.  And, you won't even have to use the Wayback Machine because the government shutdown has (finally) ended! 

Law students and faculty at the UW School of Law also have access to BNA materials, including the International Trade Reporter via the law library's website under "Selected Databases."  Try running a search for Cuba and see what you can learn.  You can click right in to BNA, but be sure to log in via the off-campus access link on the top right corner of the page if you are not on campus when you are doing this fascinating research.  And don't forget about the Foreign Law Guide, also accessible from "Selected Databases" on the library's website for information about the Cuban legal system generally and trade with the United States.

World Intellectual Property Day



WIPO's poster for World IP Day



Today is World Intellectual Property Day. The member states of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, started "World IP Day in 2000 to raise public awareness about the role of IP in daily life, and to celebrate the contribution made by innovators and creators to the development of societies across the globe. World IP Day is celebrated annually on April 26, the date on which the Convention establishing WIPO entered into force in 1970."

This year's World Intellectual Property Day, Designing the Future, "celebrates the role of design in the market-place, in society and in shaping the innovations of the future." Visit the World Intellectual Property Day Facebook page to see comments from participants around the world.




Canada's posters for World IP Day





A World IP Day poster from Ecuador



Speaking of IP, did you know that the law library has several research guides to help you get your bearings in this field?

• Trademark Law Resources: Primary Sources (follow the links in the upper right corner for Foreign & International, Online Sources, and Secondary Sources)
• Patent Law Resources
• Research in Copyright Law

 For a general discussion of Intellectual Property Research in an international context, see Jonathan Franklin's ASIL Guide to Electronic Resources for International Law: International Intellectual Property Law.

BNA has a number of great resources (UW restricted) for keeping up with and researching IP law.





BNA's IP databases



Most of these are newsletters where you can browse or search recent developments.  UW law school users may also subscribe to them via email.

The Intellectual Property Law Resource Center is, as the name suggests, a site with lots of different resources. You can search cases, statutes, regulations, secondary materials, and "BNA Insights" (commentary by practitioners).  There are even a few short videos! 

BNA has recently added some of its treatises to its online service.  In IP, you can search Robert L. Harmon, Patents and The Federal Circuit (9th ed. 2009) and its 2010 supplement and Harmon on Patents: Black-Letter Law and Commentary.



BNA's Quick Tax Reference App

BNA's Quick Tax Reference Guide app is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android users. This pocket-sized guide includes the following 2009, 2010 and 2011 tax rates:

• Standard Mileage Rates
• Corporate Tax Rate Schedule
• Individual Tax Rate Schedules
• Standard Deductions/Personal Exemptions
• Capital Gains and Dividends Taxed as Net Capital Gain
• Income Tax Rates for Estates
• Trusts/Estate and Gift Taxes
• ERISA
• Tax Code Pension
• Retirement Plan Limits

See BNA's Quick Tax Reference App page for installation information.

CRS Reports on BNA

The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), a commercial database to which the Gallagher Law Library subscribes, is now another source for finding Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports.

Some recent CRS reports available on BNA are the following:

• Tax Reform: An Overview of Proposals in the 112th Congress (April 20, 2011)
• Overview of Health Care Changes in the FY2012 Budget Proposal Offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan (April 13, 2011)
• Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) (March 31, 2011)
• The Proposed U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreement (March 29, 2011)
• Should the United States Levy a Value-Added Tax for Deficit Reduction? (March 22, 2011)
• Advertising by the Federal Government: An Overview (March 10, 2011)
• Religious Exemptions for Mandatory Health Care Programs: A Legal Analysis (Feb. 23, 2011)
• Intellectual Property Rights and International Trade (Feb. 17, 2011)

To locate CRS reports, click on the Search My BNA logo located on the navigation bar of a BNA publication site. Then enter "CRS report" in the search box. You may limit your search to a specific topic area at this point. Some of the results will be summaries of the reports, but others will provide the entire contents of the reports themselves. Still others will provide a link to the PDF of the CRS report. (These links are usually located at the very bottom of an article page.)

Remember to sign in to the proxy server if you're accessing BNA from off-campus.

See the Library's CRS research guide to locating CRS Reports via other sources.

Changes in Library Subscriptions Announced

Health Care Reform Law Turns One

March 23 is the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119. This 906-page act is also known as PPACA, the Affordable Care Act, or just ACA.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintains Healthcare.gov, a website about the law and its implementation. You can follow the site on Facebook, Twitter -- or even its YouTube channel.

That site is fine for the basics, but how can you find reliable reporting on new legal developments?

One great source is BNA's Health Law Reporter. Follow the BNA link from the library's homepage; if you are off campus, you'll need to click on the off-campus access link in the upper-right corner and enter you UW NetID before going into this subscription database. Once you're into the newsletter, you can read the latest issue or browse by date. Or you can click on Recent Topics at the top of the screen and choose a topic. I chose Health System Reform and found lots of articles about the latest developments.


You can also do a word search. For example, searching for "mckenna" will pull up articles that mention Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna's opposition to the law.

If you click on "BNA Insights," you'll see a list of analyses of current topics by lawyers—e.g., Webb Millsaps & Adam J. Rogers, Top 10 Things to Know About Accountable Care Organizations, Feb. 24, 2011, or Mark S. Hedberg, Health Care Reform After Florida v. United States: Now What?, Feb. 10, 2011.

Health law is just one of the many areas covered by BNA newsletters. You can also use BNA newsletters to follow new developments in fields from antitrust to the WTO.

—Mary Whisner

Credit Reports for Jobs - Learning More About a News Story

This evening I heard a news story on the car radio: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is considering a rule about employers using credit reports in hiring and promotion decisions. I decided to look up some more information when I got home. Here's what I did (and what you can do, too!).

First, I made it a point to remember what I could:

• The agency held a hearing (at least, I think a sound bite I heard was someone testifying).


• The National Consumer Law Center (I think) is concerned about the practice of using credit reports for employment.


• Someone in Congress is proposing (or has proposed?) legislation.

Next step: find the news story on the radio program's website. I knew it was on KUOW, but was it on All Things Considered (National Public Radio) or Marketplace (American Public Media)? The schedule indicates that Marketplace starts at 6:30, and I think I heard the story after that, so I clicked there. Sure enough, today's front page for Marketplace included a headline, Could Credit Affect Getting Hired for a Job?

Next step: see if my recollection of the story was correct and see if it links to other resources. Yes (pretty good recall) and no (no useful links).

Now what? See if the EEOC website has anything. Yes! There was a big headline: Commission Holds Hearing on Employer Use of Credit History as a Screening Tool -- with a box to click on to "Learn More." That led me to a page that linked to:

• a press release from yesterday announcing today's hearing.
• a press release from today summarizing some of the testimony
• a list of nine speakers with links to their prepared remarks and bios. (One of them, Chi Chi Wu, was the person from the National Consumer Law Center I'd heard on the radio.)

So what about the National Consumer Law Center? I visited that website, clicked on the Issues tab, and saw Credit Reports. There was a link to testimony -- but not today's, something from May: Testimony regarding Use of Credit Information beyond Lending: Issues and Reform Proposals, May 12, 2010. That was Chi Chi Wu testifying before the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit -- a good lead to the Congressional action alluded to in the radio story ("Congress is considering a ban on credit checks for employees.")

Next stop: House Financial Services Committee. With just a few clicks, I got to a page about the May 12 hearing, with links to a webcast and the witnesses' prepared statements.

Finally, I looked for some good coverage of the issue in a legal newsletter: the Daily Labor Report (available to UW Law School users through our BNA web subscription). At the top of the screen, next to a big red box labeled "Latest Developments," I saw "EEOC Examines Potential Bias From Employers' Use of Credit Checks Posted: Oct 20, 2010, 4:03 PM EDT." The article summarized some of the testimony -- from both consumer advocates and industry advocates. It concluded:

[EEOC Chair Jacqueline] Berrien said EEOC plans no immediate actions based on the meeting, which she characterized as part of a series examining employment practices that potentially "unfairly screen out" applicants based on race, age, or other protected characteristics that are not job-related.

That leaves a different impression from the radio story, which said "Today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission looked at establishing a national policy." Maybe some sort of rule making will grow out of this, but the Chair's remark makes it clear that it'll be a while.

The Daily Labor Report story included a note: "A full report will appear in the next issue of Daily Labor Report. Click here for the latest issue." I clicked and found EEOC Examines Potential Bias Resulting From Employers' Use of Credit Checks -- also dated Oct. 20, but much longer. That article in turn linked to an article from three years ago, reporting on an EEOC hearing on potential bias in the use of selection tests and credit histories.

Searching the newsletter for "credit report*" turned up a lot of stories on this issue, including these recent ones:

• 09/27/2010: Privacy Rights: Schwarzenegger Vetoes Bill to Ban Employer Use of Worker Credit Reports
• 09/23/2010: Privacy Rights: House Panel Explores Discriminatory Use Of Credit Checks in Employment Decisions
• 09/01/2010: Privacy Rights: Bill to Limit Employer Use of Credit Data Clears California Assembly; Veto Possible
• 07/09/2010: Incipient Legislative Trend Toward ‘Credit Privacy' Compels Restraint in the Use of Credit Checks for Employment Purposes

There's a lot going on here!

Starting with an interesting but short news item, I was able to find testimony before the EEOC, testimony before a congressional subcommittee, and newsletter articles on the issue. You can use techniques like this to deepen your understanding of many news stories.