Campus News

States’ rights

Business Week magazine quoted Walter Hellerstein, a professor of tax law at the School of Law, in an article about an upcoming Supreme Court case that could limit states’ ability to allow investors to avoid paying taxes on municipal bonds. Things look good for the states, Hellerstein said. Referencing the case of United Haulers v. Oneida-Herkimer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court justices said that laws favoring local government shouldn’t be subject to the same scrutiny as laws favoring private businesses, Hellerstein said, “The court seems to have carved out an exception for public entities when they discriminate.”