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This text provides an alternative narrative to the humble and often exclusively male voices of first generation Chinese migrants. Despite Chinese migrants having migrated to the Netherlands since 1911, particularly after World War Two, and female migrants outnumbering male migrants, their everyday life and transnational motherhood experiences have remained largely unknown. Based on the narratives of 38 Chinese migrant women from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, this book brings women, their lives and opinions to the center of Dutch migration history.

When a debtor goes bankrupt and limited assets have to be divided between competing creditors, should unpaid taxes owed to the government be paid before the debts owed to other creditors? This Article defends the notion that some tax debts should be awarded priority. Insofar as bankruptcy protection transfers the risk of financial distress from a debtor to her creditors, the tax priority debate should be understood as a fight about how much debtor default risk the government should have to assume relative to other creditors. This Article argues that the government's share of debtor default risk should be limited through the grant of tax priority because, contrary to the claims of critics, the government is constrained in its ability to diversify against such risk via both substantive tax policy and changes in tax administration. Tax priority therefore serves as an important structural limit on the government's bankruptcy risk burden and safeguards the myriad important functions of government.

Since the nuclear bomb attack against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world has advanced in nuclear technology. Today, a nuclear bomb could target a large-scale attack, at a longer range, and with much greater destructive force. People are increasingly concerned about the potential destructive humanitarian outcomes. We discuss actual conditions detonation of an atomic bomb would create, radiation injuries, and diseases. We also address concerns about functionality of medical care systems and other systems that support medical systems (i.e., transport, energy, supply chain, etc. systems) following a massive nuclear attack and whether citizens able to survive this.

Tax statutes have long been derided as convoluted and unreadable. But there is little existing research about drafting practices that helps us contextualize such critiques. In this Article, we conduct the first in-depth empirical examination of how tax law drafting and formulation decisions are made. We report findings from interviews with government counsels who participated in the tax legislative process over the past four decades. Our interviews revealed that tax legislation drafting decisions are both targeted to and controlled by experts. Most counsels did not consider statutory formulation or readability important, as long as substantive meaning was accurate. Many held this view because their intended audience was tax experts, regulation writers, and software companies, not ordinary taxpayers. When revising law, drafters prioritize preserving existing formulations to not upset settled expectations, even at the cost of increasing convolution. While members of Congress ("Members"), Members' staff, and committee staff participate in high-level policy decisions, statutory formulation decisions are largely left to a small number of tax law specialists. Our findings carry important implications for statutory interpretation, affirming prior research, but also calling into deeper question arguments for textualism and the validity of certain interpretive canons. Our findings also have important implications for the design of our tax system, illuminating the distributive tradeoffs inherent in drafting practices. Finally, our findings reveal a contrast between public expectations about the legislative process and how the process actually works, underscoring underexplored questions about what makes this process legitimate.

In 2017, Congress passed major tax legislation at warp speed. After enactment, it fell to the Treasury Department to write regulations clarifying and implementing the new law. To assure democratic legitimacy in making regulations, administrative law provides that an agency must issue a notice of proposed rulemaking, followed by an opportunity for the public to comment (so called "notice and comment"). But, after the 2017 tax overhaul, many sophisticated actors did not wait until the issuance of a notice of proposed rulemaking to comment, instead going to Treasury immediately with comments designed to influence the regulations. In this Article, we examine empirically this phenomenon of post-enactment commenting by studying the making of the Code Section 199A regulations—some of the most important regulations implementing the 2017 tax reform. We examined the inputs into the regulatory process from legislative enactment through the regulations' finalization. We find extensive engagement by sophisticated parties and industry groups prior to the official notice-and-comment period, which helped shape and anchor rulemaking outcomes. Subsequent comments submitted in the official notice-and-comment period led to technical and other discrete changes, but did not fundamentally change the initial rulemaking approach. Throughout the rulemaking process, there was little direct, public-interested engagement. Our study underscores how unorthodoxies in the legislative process bleed into the rulemaking process. Hasty legislation puts pressure on administrative law notice-and-comment procedures, exacerbating problems of unequal access and transparency already endemic to rulemaking, and potentially compromising democratic legitimacy. We propose solutions that may help ameliorate these problems and improve governance.