We should have known that it would take someone on the Hill about ten minutes to go after Eduardo Saverin and tax renunciants after all the play his exit has been getting. Charles Schumer and Bob Casey are introducing legislation entitled the Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy Act to make renunciants pay more dearly for their inconstancy....
NYT's Room for Debate takes up the question of dual citizenship, with contributions from Ayelet Shachar, David Abraham, Mark Krikorian, Jose Itzigohn, and myself. Krikorian is predictably and harshly disapproving, on the old "it's like bigamy" model. Ayelet, Jose, and myself are all more or less in favor. In some ways, the most interesting contribution comes from David Abraham, a Marxist...
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has given up his US citizenship in the run-up to the Facebook IPO. Not that it didn't cost him. High net-worth folks like Saverin have to pay what is in effect an exit tax, under the mis-acronymed HEART Act. Under this 2008 legislation, renunciation is treated like a tax event, at which point your assets will...
Here's yet another long-ish story in the NY Times on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, and how it's cramping American citizens abroad. (How many tax stories get this kind of play? NYT must have some reader traction on this.) Remember: the US is the only country other than Eritrea that taxes its external citizens. Dueling takeaways: More AmCits abroad...
Michele Bachmann couldn't take a little bit of heat from a few restrictionists on the Right and has renounced her Swiss citizenship, apparently pursuant to article 42 of the Swiss nationality law. It wasn't clear that Republicans had such a big problem with her keeping it. Check out the comments to Mark Krikorian's "Swiss Miss" column over at National Review Online, in...
That's right, Michele Bachmann has acquired Swiss citizenship and is now a dual national. The news reports say she did it for her kids. (It doesn't appear that her naturalization was necessary for her children's, since her husband was already a Swiss citizen. For those interested in the finer points of Swiss nationality law, here is a primer. Note that although...
. . . your fourth-grader is being taught about the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Mine had a class last week in which the class was divided into groups, each one given a provision of the treaty, about which they had to develop responses and questions. His group got article 27, recognizing a child's right to an adequate...
Quite possibly. Here's the Third Circuit's merits opinion in United States v. Bond, involving a conviction under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998. The court upheld the conviction against a Tenth Amendment attack, this after the Supreme Court last year found Ms. Bond to have standing to press the federalism claim. After rehearsing the academic debates on Missouri...
Ian Hurd has a very interesting essay on law and international relations, "Law and the Practice of Diplomacy," which I'd strongly recommend to anyone with an IR/IL bent. It's maybe the only piece of IR theory that I've read that really seems to get the dynamic element of international law. It also centers international law to what I suspect is...
Uri Feldman and Josh Keating have this excellent piece now up over at Foreign Policy on the history and mechanics of diplomatic asylum, as now possibly playing out in the case of Chen Guangcheng. This in the wake of Wang Lijun, who got the Bo Xilai ball rolling and spent 30 hours holed up in the US consulate in Chengdu. In...
Transcript of today's argument before the Supreme Court here. Not a lot of fireworks. The key takeaway: the Court (including some on the left) didn't seem to have much problem with section 2 of the Arizona law, which requires law enforcement to undertake immigrant status determinations in the course of stops or arrests where there is reasonable suspicion that a person...
I've got an op-ed in the NY Times today on the SB 1070 case, the title of which might have been "Let Arizona Law Die a Natural Death." In 750 words there wasn't room to engage the key doctrinal foreign relations elements of the case. This is central to the Obama Administration's case against the law: Immigration inherently implicates foreign...
