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, arms control law, insurance law, environmental law, criminal law, and commercial law, are also int...
Sep 09, 2021•15 min•Season 17Ep. 1
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 imports (customs duties) are administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). TTB is also pa...
Sep 08, 2021•17 min•Season 16Ep. 5
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 Carolina (2005), Oklahoma (2001), Oregon (2002), Texas (2005), and Florida (2009). Legislation has ...
Sep 07, 2021•14 min•Season 10Ep. 18
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 taking under the Fifth Amendment. Consequently, the regulation may not be enforced unless “just compensat...
Sep 06, 2021•6 min•Season 11Ep. 10
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 promote "shareholder value", most modern state laws empower directors to exercise their own "business ...
Sep 03, 2021•8 min•Season 15Ep. 5
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's best interests. Procedure. If the issue of child custody is not settled before trial and the paren...
Sep 02, 2021•8 min•Season 10Ep. 17
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 have a version of these commitment laws, which are referred to as "Sexually Violent Predator" (SVP) ...
Sep 01, 2021•12 min•Season 10Ep. 18
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 impose a tax on the value of property. Property tax is based on the fair market value of the subject pro...
Aug 31, 2021•14 min•Season 16Ep. 4
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 may be disruptive to the educational environment, in light of online communications. The case centere...
Aug 30, 2021•20 min•Season 11Ep. 9
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 direction of a board of directors, except as may be otherwise provided in this chapter or in its cert...
Aug 27, 2021•15 min•Season 15Ep. 4
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, scope, and type of habitual offender statutes vary, but generally they apply when a person has been co...
Aug 26, 2021•30 min•Season 11Ep. 17
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, including various special industry incentives. A few credits, such as the foreign tax credit, are avail...
Aug 25, 2021•15 min•Season 16Ep. 3
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 both their parents, and that no child should be separated from a parent. The term Shared Parenting is ...
Aug 24, 2021•9 min•Season 10Ep. 17
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 "for cause", violated the separation of powers; the FHFA shares a similar structure as the CFPB. The ca...
Aug 23, 2021•7 min•Season 11Ep. 8
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 typically appointed at the first corporate meeting by whoever the articles of incorporation identify as enti...
Aug 20, 2021•14 min•Season 15Ep. 3
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 criminal behavior and substance use disorders. Recidivism is a synonym for "relapse", which is more co...
Aug 19, 2021•27 min•Season 11Ep. 16
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 by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. federal income...
Aug 18, 2021•11 min•Season 15Ep. 2
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. Alimony is not child support, where, after divorce, one parent is required to contribute to the sup...
Aug 17, 2021•12 min•Season 10Ep. 16
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 Arthur Lange driving while playing loud music and honking his horn. Believing Lange to be in violation of...
Aug 16, 2021•8 min•Season 11Ep. 7
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 court, regardless of where the corporation's headquarters office is located, or where the transaction...
Aug 13, 2021•12 min•Season 15Ep. 2
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 otherwise considered to be deserving of them. Pardons are sometimes offered to persons who were either w...
Aug 12, 2021•17 min•Season 11Ep. 15
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 less as a share of their GDP. Taxes fall much more heavily on labor income than on capital income. Div...
Aug 11, 2021•7 min•Season 15Ep. 1
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 not only the financial and emotional costs of litigation but the uncertainty of how favorable or un...
Aug 10, 2021•12 min•Season 10Ep. 15
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-aside funds. Background. Twelve Alaska Native corporations (ANCs) were established in the 1971 Alask...
Aug 09, 2021•5 min•Season 11Ep. 6
United States corporate law regulates the governance, finance and power of corporations in U S law. Every state and territory has its own basic corporate code, while federal law creates minimum standards for trade in company shares and governance rights, found mostly in the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by laws like the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The U S Constitution was interprete...
Aug 06, 2021•9 min•Season 14Ep. 1
A miscarriage of justice, also known as a wrongful conviction, occurs when a person is convicted and punished for a crime that he or she did not actually commit. It can occur in both criminal and civil proceedings, which includes removal proceedings. The main contributing factors are eyewitness misidentification, faulty forensic analysis, false confessions by vulnerable suspects, perjury and lies told by witnesses, misconduct by police, prosecutors or judges and inadequate defense strategies put...
Aug 05, 2021•12 min•Season 9Ep. 20
In the United States, strict constructionism is a particular legal philosophy of judicial interpretation that limits or restricts such interpretation only to the exact wording of the law (namely the Constitution). Strict sense of the term. Strict construction requires a judge to apply the text only as it is written. Once the court has a clear meaning of the text, no further investigation is required. Judges—in this view—should avoid drawing inferences from a statute or constitution and focus onl...
Aug 04, 2021•8 min•Season 4Ep. 42
Grounds for divorce are regulations specifying the circumstances under which a person will be granted a divorce. Adultery is the most common grounds for divorce. However, there are countries that view male adultery differently than female adultery as grounds for divorce. Before decisions on divorce are considered, one might check into state laws and country laws for legal divorce or separation as each culture has stipulations for divorce. No-fault divorce is a divorce in which the dissolution of...
Aug 03, 2021•22 min•Season 11Ep. 14
HollyFrontier Cheyenne Refining, LLC v Renewable Fuels Association, (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with exemptions from blending requirements for small refineries set by the Renewable Fuel Standard program. The case dealt with the statutory interpretation of the congressional language for extending the exemption, if this allowed a lapse in the exemption or not. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that by the majority's interpretation of the law, the congressional l...
Aug 02, 2021•5 min•Season 12Ep. 5
A blind trust is a trust in which the trust beneficiaries have no knowledge of the holdings of the trust, and no right to intervene in their handling. In a blind trust, the trustees (fiduciaries, or those who have been given power of attorney) have full discretion over the assets. Blind trusts are generally used when a trust creator (sometimes called a settlor, trustor, grantor, or donor) wishes for the beneficiary to be unaware of the specific assets in the trust, such as to avoid conflict of i...
Jul 30, 2021•11 min•Season 8Ep. 24
