Nonprofit Law Prof Blog

Brunson: God and the IRS

Samuel D. Brunson (Loyola University Chicago) has published God and the IRS: Accomodating Religious Practice in United States Tax Law. Here is a brief description:

Seventy-five percent of Americans claim religious affiliation, which can impact their taxpaying responsibilities. In this illuminating book, Samuel D. Brunson describes the many problems and breakdowns that can occur when tax meets religion in the United States, and shows how the US government has too often responded to these issues in an unprincipled, ad hoc manner. God and the IRS offers a better framework to understand tax and religion. It should be read by scholars of religion and the law, policymakers, and individuals interested in understanding the implications of taxation on their religious practices.

Lloyd Mayer

Update Memos Reflecting Tax Reform Available for Nonprofit Organizations Casebook (NOW WITH LINKS)

James Fishman, Stephen Schwarz, and I have written supplemental update memos for our Nonprofit Organizations casebook reflecting the recently passed federal tax legislation. One update is for students and the other is for teachers. Foundation Press should make them available shortly, but for those of you who need them urgently please email any of us and we can send them directly to you.

UPDATE: Here are the West Academic links to the 2018 Student Update and the 2018 Teacher's Manual Update (latter requires logging in as a faculty member).

Lloyd Mayer

Reiser & Dean: Social Enterprise Law (Oxford University Press)

Dana Brakman Reiser and Steven A. Dean (both Brooklyn) have written Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit and Capital Markets. Here is an overview:

• Controversial thesis: law can make corporations better citizens and make it easier for start-ups to raise capital by preventing insiders from selling out a social mission for increased profit
• Timely analysis: explores potential impact of new crowdfunding rules and increasingly popular hybrid legal forms such as the benefit corporation on the ability of start-ups to raise capital
• Provocative solutions: several chapters show how corporate governance, contract and even tax law can be harnessed to balance public good against private greed

Lloyd Mayer

Zelinsky: Taxing the Church (Oxford University Press)

Edward A. Zelinsky (Cardozo) has written Taxing the Church: Religion, Exemptions, Entanglement,and the Constitution (Oxford University Press). Here is an overview:

• Explores the taxation and exemption of churches and other religious institutions, both empirically and normatively
• Reveals that churches and other religious institutions are treated diversely by the federal and state tax systems
• Focuses on church-state entanglements with respect to taxing or exempting churches and other sectarian entities
• Discusses improvements that can be made in legal and tax policy trade-offs, such as the protection of internal church communications and the expansion of the churches' sales tax liabilities
• A clear, balanced, and comprehensive treatment of the topic that is broadly accessible to tax policymakers, lawyers, nonlawyers, judges, tax specialists, and even those with no background in the subject

For a review, see Peter J. Reilly on Forbes.

Lloyd Mayer

More Social Enterprise Articles & Book Chapters

Earlier this week I posted a link to the recently published Financing the Benefit Corporation article by Dana Brakman Reiser and Steven Dean, but there have been a number of other recent articles and book chapters relating to social enterprise that are worth mentioning, including several draft book chapters forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law: 

Seattle University Law Review: Benefit Corporations and the Firm Commitment Universe (sixteen articles, including the Reiser & Dean article )

Brian D. Galle (Georgetown), Self-Regulation of Social Enterprise, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

Andrew S. Gold (DePaul) & Paul B. Miller (McGill), Fiduciary Duties in Social Enterprise, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame), Creating a Tax Space for Social Enterprise, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

Brett McDonnell (Minnesota), Three Legislative Paths to Social Enterprise: L3Cs, Benefit Corporations, and Second Generation Cooperatives, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

Peter Molk (Willamette), Do We Need Specialized Business Forms for Social Enterprise?, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law

Emily Winston (NYU), Benefit Corporations and the Separation of Benefit and Control, forthcoming in Cardoza Law Review

Lloyd Mayer

 

Winer & Crimm: Gods, Schools, and Government Funding

Ashgate has released a new book by Lawrence H. Winer (Arizona State) and Nina J. Crimm (St. John's) titled God, Schools, and Government Funding.  Here is the description:

In recent years, a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, over vigorous dissents, has developed circumventions to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that allow state legislatures unabashedly to use public tax dollars increasingly to aid private elementary and secondary education. This expansive and innovative legislation provides considerable governmental funds to support parochial schools and other religiously-affiliated education providers. That political response to the perceived declining quality of traditional public schools and the vigorous school choice movement for alternative educational opportunities provokes passionate constitutional controversy. Yet, the Court’s recent decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn inappropriately denies taxpayers recourse to challenge these proliferating tax funding schemes in federal courts. Professors Winer and Crimm clearly elucidate the complex and controversial policy, legal, and constitutional issues involved in using tax expenditures - mechanisms such as exclusions, deductions, and credits that economically function as government subsidies - to finance private, religious schooling. The authors argue that legislatures must take great care in structuring such programs and set forth various proposals to ameliorate the highly troubling dissention and divisiveness generated by state aid for religious education.

Lloyd Mayer

California Historical Society Accepting Proposals for 2014 Book Award

The California Historical Society is accepting nominations for the 2014 California Historical Society Book Award.

According to today's Philanthropy News Digest, the Society will award a cash prize of $5,000  

to a book-length manuscript that makes an important contribution to California historical scholarship and adheres to high scholarly standards while being lively and engaging to general readers.  In addition to conventional works of historical scholarship, other works eligible for consideration include biographies, collections of letters or essays, photographic or artistic studies, creative nonfiction, and other ways of informing the mind and engaging the imagination in an understanding of California’s past.

The winning manuscript will be published in both print and e-book format, and the society will pay for an awards ceremony, promotion, and an author’s tour.

Eligibility and application guidelines are available at the California Historical Society Website.

VEJ

Updates Available for Schmidt's Nonprofit Law: The Life Cycle of a Charitable Organization

For those of you who use Betsy Schmidt's Nonprofit Law: The Life Cycle of a Charitable Organization in your class teaching materials, updates are available at  http://www.aspenlawschool.com/books/non_profit/default.asp under "Professor Materials." 

JDC

Updates for Fishman/Schwarz Casebook Available

For those who use Jim Fishman and Steve Schwarz's casebook, Nonprofit Organizations, Cases and Materials (4th ed. 2010), the 2013 Student Update is available here and 2013 Teacher's Manual Update is available here.  (Full disclosure: I collaborated on these updates.)

LHM

Karla Simon's New Book on Civil Society in China

Professor Karla Simon's new book on Civil Society in China is now in print.  The book is available for a significant early bird discount of $60 by logging on to www.oup.com/us and using promo code 31590.

JDC

 

Kentucky "Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit" Conference

The University of Kentucky College of Law hosted yesterday a conference on the recent book Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit: Provocative First Amendment Conflicts authored by Nina J. Crimm (St. John's) and Laurence H. Winer (Arizona State).  Commentators were Dean David A. Brennen, Joshua A. Douglas (Kentucky), Rev. Nancy Jo Kemper (Transylvania University) and Paul E. Salamanca (Kentucky).  The book is a comprehensive consideration of the constitutional and federal tax issues raised by religious leaders preaching politics from the pulpit and includes thought-provoking proposals for lessening the constitutional tensions in this area.

LHM

UK Charity Commission Urged to Allow Not-for-Profit, Charitable Newspapers

We have previously blogged about the trend in the United States toward the creation of nonprofit news organizations (see, for example, a Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism post, a federal legislation post, and a Texas Tribune post).  Now from across the Pond comes word that a group of journalists, academics, and charitable funders is asking the Charity Commission for England and Wales to make it easier for nonprofits there to qualify as charities.  The requests were apparently based upon a recent report prepared by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University titled Is There a Better Structure for News Providers?  The Potential in Charitable and Trust Ownership, which is summarized briefly on Oxford's website but is not yet available in full form.  The author is Robert G. Picard.  Here is the summary:

Charitable and trust ownership are frequently advocated as alternatives to challenges in commercial news organisations. This book adds information, evidence and knowledge to the dialogue taking place by exploring existing arrangements in UK, France, Canada, and US, looking at various structural arrangements and exploring advantages and disadvantages of various forms.

LHM

A Compelling Social Enterprise Story

The Community Development Law Clinic that I supervise recently represented Carolina for Kibera (CFK), a nonprofit organization that focuses on public health and community development in Kibera, a sprawling slum just outside of Nairobi, Kenya.  (For those who are curious, we performed a standard legal audit for the organization and determined that it is in fine legal condition.)  CFK was founded a decade ago by a UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate, Rye Barcott, with a decidedly grassroots approach.  Residents of Kibera told Rye and his collaborators that young people in the community needed healthy activities, so they founded a soccer league that has grown into an important institution.  Soccer provided a way into the lives of young people and their families, and today CFK is a thriving, million-dollar-a-year NGO that runs several heralded programs including an extremely successful health clinic.  As CFK grew, Rye became somewhat of a social enterprise celebrity.  It did not hurt his reputation that he entered the Marines after graduating from Chapel Hill and continued to act as a principal of the organization while he was on active service in Iraq.

Now Rye has written a book, It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace.  Available on Amazon, the book is being advertised as the next Three Cups.  I have not yet read the book, so I cannot endorse it (I hope it has more literary merit than Three Cups), but I can tell you that Rye's story is compelling and that, if he comes through your town to do a reading or a CFK fundraiser, it would be worth the trip.

TAK

Discussion of Hammack & Anheier's American Foundations: Roles and Contributions Hosted by Hudston Institute

On Tuesday, January 25th in Washington, DC, the Hudson Institute will be hosting a book discussion of American Foundations: Roles and Contributions, edited by David Hammack (Case Western Reserve) and Helmut Anheier (UCLA).  According to the announcement, the panelists will include co-editor David Hammack, as well as Leslie Lenkowsky of Indiana University, Steven Rathgeb Smith of Georgetown University, and Susan Ostrander of Tufts University.  Bradley Center Director William Schambra will moderate the discussion.

LHM

New Publication on Nonprofit Finance

A timely new book entitled Nonprofit Finance for Hard Times: Leadership Strategies When Economies Falter by Susan Raymond, has recently been publishedThe book is meant to be a tool for nonprofit organizations seeking to reassess strategies for managing their financial health.  It provides information and guidance on a variety of subjects including responding to the economic crisis, change in stability interests, financial support strategies, and a systems approach to revenue strategy. 

SS

Another Source on Nonprofit Performance Metrics

Yesterday I blogged about a joint project between The Urban Institute and Social Solutions to launch a web portal with information to help nonprofits improve performance.  Today, Root Cause, a nonprofit advisory organization, announced a new book recommending that nonprofits adapt for-profit data-driven performance measures to help judge and improve nonprofits' impact.  According to this story in Reuters, the book (entitled Building a Performance Measurement System: Using Data to Accelerate Social Impact) looks at the performance measurement system commonly used by the private sector to increase profitability, and modifies it "for a simplified, step-by-step customized system to help nonprofits improve operations and increase social impact."

A free PDF of the book and more information is available for download from the Root Cause web site.

JDC