The Arithmetic of Justice: Calculating Restitution for Mortgage Fraud
The Mandatory Victims Restitution Act requires restitution for federal crimes involving property. In particular, the defendant is required to return any property taken, or, if return is impossible, to pay for the victim’s loss, which may be offset by a partial return of the property. In mortgage fraud cases, this usually entails calculating the lender’s loss — an unpaid loan — and offsetting that loss by the value of the collateral for the loan, which the lender recovers. The circuits disagree about how to value the recovered collateral as an offset to restitution: Should its value be determined by its appraised fair market value or, conversely, by its final foreclosure price when the victim-lender sells it? This Note concludes that courts should presumptively use the foreclosure price, except when that price can be shown not to approximate the value at the date of return.
The New Textualism
An analytical conundrum besets a court's interpretation of a statute: The statute's text is the most important consideration in statutory interpretation, and a clear text ought to be given effect. Yet the meaning of a text critically depends upon its surrounding context. Sometimes that context will suggest a meaning at war with the apparent acontextual meaning suggested by the statute's language. How should the judge proceed? Is contextual evidence even admissible in such cases? How can it be excluded? The Supreme Court's traditional resolution of this conundrum has been to consider virtually any contextual evidence, especially the statute's legislative history, even when the statutory text has an apparent "plain meaning." This traditional approach has been challenged by a few commentators and, now, from within the Court itself. Consider the case of Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Cardoza-Fonseca.' Luz Marina Cardoza-Fonseca, a citizen of Nicaragua, entered the United States in 1979. She had fled Nicaragua with her brother, after he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Sandinista government. The Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) subsequently initiated deportation proceedings to return her to her country, and she sought refuge through two provisions of the Immigration & Nationality Act of 1952. Section 243(h) of the 1952 Act requires that the Attorney General withhold deportation of an alien who demonstrates, through specified factors, that her "life or free-
CAUSES OF FLUCTUATIONS IN R&D EXPENDITURES A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Introduction 124 The stylised facts of R&D in OECD economies 124 The determinants of business R&D expenditures 127 Modelling R&D expenditures 130 Conclusion 135 Bibliography 137 Annex: The model 138