Inga Ivson – Asset protection planning has gained in popularity and acceptance among estate planners over the past two decades, and is now a headline topic at national legal conferences and a featured subject in law school curricula. While the self-settled spendthrift trust was once considered the domain of a handful of offshore jurisdictions, sixteen […]

David Newfield – The pari passu clause is found in nearly every sovereign debt contract issued throughout the globe. In the private context, this clause is well understood to ensure fair distributions to all creditors in the event of bankruptcy and liquidation. As insolvency distributions are not an option when dealing with distressed sovereign debt, the […]

Data—actual facts—demonstrate that Texas’s Top Ten Percent Law (“TTPL”) is insufficient to achieve diversity in the state’s universities and colleges.1 A significant amount of TTPL students graduated from hyper-segregated schools where African-American and Latino/a students, combined, comprised 80% or more of the total school population. Also, a substantial amount of these hyper-segregated schools had an […]

Adam Lamparello – In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (“Fisher II”), the United States Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of the University of Texas’s (“University”) affirmative action policy, and the potential impact of the Court’s decision on affirmative action programs nationwide is being widely debated. Some commentators fear that the Court is […]