The House Ways & Means Committee is holding a hearing on corporate tax avoidance across international borders and into low-tax jurisdictions and the pros & cons of changing to a "territorial" tax system. This is a similar topic to the Senate hearing last month, at which the CEO of Apple testified.

Live video of the hearing is available, and an archived copy of the video will be available at the same website. (Update: archived video in .MP4 format available)

Testimony:

• Mr. Pascal Saint-Amans, Director, Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
• Mr. Edward Kleinbard, Professor of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
• Mr. Paul Oosterhuis, Partner, Skadden Arps Slate Meager & Flom LLP

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Lexis has recently announced two programs that will allow spring 2013 graduates to enjoy extended access to the full range of content and tools on Lexis Advance – perfect for those studying for the bar or job hunting.

All new JD and LLM graduates may apply for a special account through the Lexis Law School Graduate Program anytime between now and December 31, 2013. Once activated, the account will remain active through December 31, and may be used for educational, bar review, and job-search purposes only. Please note that this program will not extend existing Lexis Law School accounts, but rather create a new ID for each registered graduate.

Graduates conducting verifiable 501(c)(3) public interest work may instead sign up for the Lexis ASPIRE Program, which will permit job-related access to Lexis Advance for the duration of the public interest work, even if beyond December.

All May graduates’ Lexis Advance accounts will continue to function fully through July 31, and continuing students will also automatically enjoy full access to Lexis Advance throughout the summer. No application process is required for these extensions.

See the library's page on Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law for details on summer and new grad extended access on all of these platforms.

The John Wolff International and Comparative Law Library will be closed all day Saturday (May 25) and Sunday (May 26).  Our facilities management needs to make emergency repairs to an air handler in the Hotung building, where the library is located.  Because this means there will be no air conditioning, we are closing the library both days.  The E.B.Williams Law Library will be open normal hours on both of these days.

Note: Both library locations will be closed for Memorial Day on Monday, May 27.

A complete list of our library, circulation and reference hours is online on our website.

The Law Library is working with Georgetown Law alumnus Mr. Carl Coan, Jr. (L’1958) to bring together the papers of two generations of the Coan family and their fight to bring to reality the Declaration of National Housing Policy, set out in the Housing Act of 1949, of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.

Inspired by the Georgetown mission to engender social justice, Mr. Coan, Jr. has spent his entire career as a housing attorney and as an advocate for the principles espoused in the National Housing Policy.  Part of his legacy will be his work to help draft the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Fair Housing Act, which also became law in 1968.

His work complements Georgetown’s existing collection of his father’s papers, the Carl A.S. Coan, Sr. Collection.  The Carl A.S. Coan, Sr. Collection chronicles his work on the issues of public housing, after the Great Depression brought it into the national spotlight.  Mr. Carl A.S. Coan, Sr. is well known for his work as Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing for 16 years.  Prior to his work on the Senate Subcommittee he began his career of public service in 1939 working with the Works Progress Administration, where he specialized in housing research.  Housing issues were the focus of Mr. Coan, Sr.’s career during which he spent many years at the U.S. Census Bureau, including helping to develop the first Census of Housing, and with the U.S. Public Housing Administration.  His efforts can be seen through the legislation and policies that grew out of his tenure.  His papers paint the story of housing development over the period of 1954-1976.  It records the intimate details of leading reforms in providing Federal assistance to the development of affordable housing.

For more information on the Carl A.S. Coan, Sr. Collection, please contact Special Collections htm@law.georgetown.edu.

On Thursday, May 23, our library catalog vendor will perform a major upgrade to the system that runs GULLiver and GULLiver Discovery, our library catalog systems. During this time, off-campus access to databases will probably not work.  The outage is expected to last from 8am to 8pm on Thursday, May 23. Updates posted here.

These services will be unavailable: 

• Online catalog
• Remote database access
• Paging books within the library

These services will remain uninterrupted: 

• Our library website.
• Chat With a Librarian service (available during reference hours 9am-5pm)
• Library building will be open during normal hours.
• You can request books via Interlibrary Loan using our service for this purpose.

Sources for finding books while the catalog is offline: 

• WorldCat
• Georgetown Law Library Treatise Finder
• Georgetown Law Library Research Guides
• Georgetown University Library Catalog (doesn't include our law collection)

We will post updates to our Twitter account as well as on this page on our site.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is holding a hearing today on Apple, Inc.'s use of complex structures of foreign subsidiaries to minimize or avoid U.S. income taxes (e.g., "Dutch-Irish sandwiches") and subsidiaries that have no country of residence. 

The following documents are currently available: 

• Subcomittee memoradum by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ)
• Exhibits

Video of the hearing is available from the Subcomittee's website.

Witness List:

Panel #1:

• J. Richard Harvey (Villanova) Testimony
• Stephen E. Shay (Harvard) Testimony

Panel #2: 

• Timothy D. Cook (Chief Executive Officer, Apple) Testimony
• Peter Oppenheimer (Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Apple) Testimony
• Phillip A. Bullock (Head of Tax Operations, Apple) Testimony

Panel #3: 

• Mark J. Mazur (Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, U.S. Treasury Department) Testimony
• Samuel M. Maruca (Director, Transfer Pricing Operations, Large Business & International (LB&I) Division, IRS) Testimony

Westlaw has recently announced that spring 2013 graduates will be able to enjoy access to the full range of content on WestlawNext and Westlaw Classic through the end of November – perfect for those studying for the bar or job hunting.

Graduating students can extend their access by registering for Westlaw's Grad Program. Once registered, May graduates will retain access to Westlaw through November 2013. Although all content is included, please note that this extension will be limited in the number of hours allowed per month. All graduates will also automatically retain access to a number of career-related databases for 18 months following graduation.

Continuing students involved in academic or non-profit research can also take advantage of full Westlaw access through the summer by registering for a password extension.

See the library's page on Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law for details on summer and new grad extended access on all of these platforms.

Among the unique resources in the National Equal Justice Library are 74 oral histories of lawyers and other advocates who helped found and sustain criminal and civil legal services programs for the indigent. The goal of the oral history project is to capture the experiences of these lawyers and other advocates so that future generations can learn from these experiences. It is also designed to help inspire and guide lawyers to take on the goal of fighting for equal justice under law.

Since this is the 50th Anniversary of the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright case, we would like to highlight the video recordings of three critical figures in the Gideon case: Abe Krash, Bruce Jacob, and Anthony Lewis. Victor Geminiani conducted each interview as part of the 1993 celebration of the 30th anniversary of the case. Videos of all interviews as well as transcripts are available on the NEJL website.

Abe Krash, a Georgetown Law faculty member, worked for Arnold, Fortas & Porter at the time, and assisted Abe Fortas in researching the issues and writing the brief for the case. In the interview, Krash recalled his extraordinary experience of working for Fortas.

Bruce Jacob argued the case on behalf of the State of Florida as a young Assistant Attorney General. In the oral history interview, Jacob recalls the "brutal" oral argument in front of the Supreme Court. Following the Supreme Court's decision, Florida created its own public defender system, and Jacob volunteered as a special assistant public defender in Florida.

Another interview available in our collection is that of the late Anthony Lewis. He died just days after the 50th Anniversary of the Gideon’s case. Lewis covered the Gideon case as a Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times. He then went on to write the definitive history of the litigation. Gideon’s Trumpet, published in 1964 was also the basis of the film of the same name. The library screened the film during the recent Georgetown Law Library Equal Justice Film Festival. In the oral history, Lewis recalls how he became involved in the case after seeing Gideon’s petition in the Supreme Court file room on the day the Court agreed to hear the case. He also recalled the experience of meeting Clarence Gideon in the prison library of the Raiford Penitentiary.

In November, we posted about the IRS's digital release of 10 years' worth of tax-exempt organization returns, which contained more than 6.5 million documents.

ProPublica, a news organization that "produces investigative journalism in the public interest," has now launched an easy-to-use search engine for these returns. You can search by keyword, state, non-profit category, and organization type (e.g., 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4))

For example, if you're interested in the current IRS controversy, searching on "Tea Party", "constitution", or "patriot" will pull up information on numerious 501(c)(4) orgainizations and links to pdf scans of their Form 990 returns.