This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Jason Kilborn, UI-Chicago Law School Settle Controversy Over December 2020 Civ Pro Final Exam Question
2. Amia Srinivasan (Oxford), What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors And Students?
3. Randall Kennedy (Harvard), Is It Ever OK To Enunciate A Slur In The Classroom?
4. Amna Khalid & Jeffrey Aaron Snyder (Carleton College), The Data Is In: Trigger Warnings Don’t Work
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Admissions Data At 75% Of The U.S. News Top 50: Higher LSATs, UGPAs, And Enrollment
6. U.S. News & World Report, 2022 College Rankings
7. Brian Frye (Kentucky), Letter to the Yale Law Journal Forum
8. Washington University Law School, Russell Osgood Named Interim Dean
9. Philip Wolf (Belcher, Smolen & Van Loo, San Francisco), Manoj Viswanathan: The Professor Who Inspired Me to Love Tax
10. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Retirement Plan Drafting Error Loses Taxpayer $51k Deduction

Why Are Some Law Teachers Called 'Instructor' Rather Than 'Professor'?

ABA Journal, At Some Law Schools, Why Are Those Who Teach Called 'Instructor' Rather Than 'Professor'?:

At Rutgers, everyone who teaches law is called a professor, but that is not true at many other institutions, where faculty who teach topics including legal writing, academic success and clinical work are often given titles including “instructor” or “director.” They are usually paid less than tenure-track professors and sometimes have little if any job security, according to academics interviewed by the ABA Journal.

According to 2019 article by Renee Nicole Allen, Alicia Jackson and DeShun Harris, men traditionally occupying faculty seats at law schools, while women work in skills positions, including libraries, legal writing, clinics, academic success. The article, titled “The ‘Pink Ghetto’ Pipeline: Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Legal Education,” states that women often enter legal education work through nontenured skills-based teaching jobs, which frequently are done on a contract basis and pay poorly, with heavy workloads.

Besides gender disparities, racial disparities exist, too, says says Rachel López, a professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University, who also directs its Andy and Gwen Stern Community Lawyering Clinic. “In the legal academy, so many who dispel racism and inequality in scholarship for some reason are blind to it at their own institution,” she adds.

López wrote an article, Unentitled: the Power of Designation in the Legal Academy, which is scheduled for publication in the Rutgers University Law Review. Law school titles can cement disparities for people who teach but are not given the professor title, according to the article.

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Early Signs Point To Lower July 2021 Bar Exam Pass Rates

Karen Sloan (Reuters), Ominous Early Signs Emerge For July 2021 Bar Exam Pass Rates:

Data from the July 2021 bar exam is starting to roll in, and test-takers' performance isn't looking great.

The average score on the Multistate Bar Exam, the 200-question multiple-choice portion of the test, fell to 140.4. That's a decrease of 0.7 from July 2019, which is the last time a national cohort of examinees took the same test, the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced Wednesday.

But more alarmingly for test takers and legal educators, pass rates are down year-over-year in all but one of the nine states that have announced results, some by large margins.

NCBE Releases National Means for July MBE, August MPRE:

The national MBE mean scaled score for July 2021 was 140.4, a decrease of 0.7 points compared to the national mean of 141.1 in July 2019, the most recent previous July administration when a full national group was tested. 45,872 examinees from 53 jurisdictions took the MBE in July 2021, a slight increase over the 45,334 examinees from 54 jurisdictions who took the exam in July 2019. ...

Jurisdictions have begun reporting their July 2021 results; bar examination pass rates as reported by jurisdictions are available on the NCBE website. Many jurisdictions are still in the process of grading the written components of the bar exam; once this process is completed, bar exam scores will be calculated and passing decisions reported by those jurisdictions.

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Christians & Lederman Launch Season 2 Of Break Into Tax

Allison Christians (McGill) and Leandra Lederman (Indiana) introduce Season 2 of their YouTube series, Break Into Tax (BiT):

Professors Leandra Lederman & Allison Christians summarize Season 1 & bring Break Into Tax into Season 2! Prof. Lederman will run Season 2, and it will feature some guest co-hosts. Prof. Christians will make some cameo appearances here and there!

Break Into Tax series is intended for anyone learning about tax, anywhere in the world. For more about our backgrounds, see the Season 1 Intro video. 

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Mason & Knoll Present Unbundling Undue Burdens Today At Florida

Ruth Mason (Virginia; Google Scholar) & Michael Knoll (Pennsylvania) present Unbundling Undue Burdens virtually today at Florida as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by David Hasen:

Criticizing dormant Commerce Clause doctrine for, among other reasons, involving arbitrary distinctions and inviting judicial legislation, jurists and commentators have advocated for its abandonment or severe curtailment. This Article shows that when dormant Commerce Clause cases are divided by the type of burden they impose on interstate commerce, the need for different approaches to different types of cases emerges. Unbundling the doctrine helps explain the Supreme Court’s various doctrinal approaches in the cases, making it less ad hoc and haphazard and more connected to its justifications, which lie in federalism and the need to preserve a smoothly functioning national market.

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Kim Presents A New Framework For Digital Taxation Today At Boston College

Christine Kim (Utah; Google Scholar) presents A New Framework for Digital Taxation (with Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar) & Karen Sam)) virtually at Boston College today as part of its Tax Policy Collaborative:

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a proposal to tackle these issues was announced, endorsed by more than 130 countries. This “Inclusive Framework” proposal sets forth two Pillars to reform the outdated international tax regimes by addressing digital taxation (Pillar One) and global minimum tax (Pillar Two). However, it is doubtful that the Inclusive Framework will reach a consensus, especially on Pillar One. As the details of Pillar One have become increasingly complex and degraded by political compromises and carve-outs, it risks being a framework without substance. Also, countries are unlikely to repeal an established tax instrument, Digital Services Taxes (DSTs), which is an adamant requirement of the United States in adopting Pillar One.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal,  At some law schools, why are those who teach called 'instructor' rather than 'professor'?
• Swethaa Ballakrishnen (UC-Irvine) & Carole Silver (Northwestern), A New Minority? International JD Students in US Law Schools
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Admissions Data At 75% Of The U.S. News Top 50: Higher LSATs, UGPAs, And Enrollment
• Alexa Chew (North Carolina) & Rachel Gurvich (North Carolina), Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud: Teaching Students How Law School Works
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE’s New Defense Fund Is Here to Save College Faculty Jobs. And We Just Closed Our First Case
• David Frakt (Independent), InfiLaw - The End of An Era (and good riddance)

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• Barron's, Democrats Are Leaving a Win-Win Tax Reform on the Table
• Bloomberg, House Democrats Set to Propose Corporate Tax Rate of 26.5%
• Bloomberg, More Than $279 Billion Sits In IRAs With At Least $5 Million ach. They Allow the Wealthy to Avoid Taxes and Pass on Their Fortune.
• Bloomberg, SALT Break Would Erase Most of House’s Tax Hikes for Top 1%
• Bloomberg, Top Democrat Says Biden Inheritance-Tax Plan Short of Votes
• Business Insider, Democrats May Leave a Tax Loophole Billionaires Love Untouched. Closing It Would Dent the Fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

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Next Week's Virtual Tax Workshops

Monday, September 20: Leslie Book (Villanova; Google Scholar), T. Keith Fogg (Harvard), & Nina Olson (Center for Taxpayer Rights) will present Reducing Administrative Burdens to Protect Taxpayer Rights virtually at Loyola as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. 

Tuesday, September 21: Gabrielle Pepin (Upjohn Institute; Google Scholar) will present How Would a Permanently Refundable Child and Dependent Care Credit Affect Eligibility, Benefits, and Incentives? virtually at Georgetown as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Brian Galle. 

Wednesday, September 22: Tessa Davis (South Carolina) will present Tax Narratives: A Critical Tax Perspective on the Biden Tax Plan virtually at Copenhagen as part of its Tax Colloquium Seminars. If you would like to attend, please register here. 

Wednesday, September 22: Ruth Mason (Virginia; Google Scholar) & Michael Knoll (Penn) will present Unbundling Undue Burdens virtually at UC-Irvine as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact gradtax@law.uci.edu. 

Thursday, September 23: Francine Lipman (UNLV; Google Scholar) will present Tax Audits, Economics, and Racism virtually at Indiana as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Leandra Lederman. 

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Brown: Congress Is Passing Up A Chance To Close A Tax Loophole — And The Racial Wealth Gap

Washington Post op-ed:  Congress Is Passing Up a Chance to Close a Tax Loophole — and the Racial Wealth Gap, by Dorothy Brown (Emory; Visiting at Georgetown):

The ‘step-up in basis’ rule benefits a small, mostly White, group of Americans.

The United States has a huge racial wealth gap: The median wealth of White families is almost eight times that of Black families and five times that of Hispanic families. One of the hidden drivers of this gap is tax policy, which has accelerated wealth-building by White families, while excluding most Black families. Congress recently had an opportunity to reform at least one lever of that inequality — only to reject it.

Earlier this year, as part of the American Families Plan, the Biden administration proposed closing a nearly century-old loophole called “step-up in basis,” saying it is “exacerbating inequality.” While many can take advantage of that rule, those who benefit the most are in the top 1 percent of income earners (earning more than $1 million of income). That group is disproportionately White: While 15 percent of White Americans are millionaires, only 2 percent of Black Americans are millionaires. A complete repeal of the stepped-up basis rule would raise an estimated $505 billion over 10 years. This week, though, the House Ways and Means Committee released its tax package, which drops that proposed reform. ...

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The Data Is In: Trigger Warnings Don’t Work

Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed:  The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work, by Amna Khalid (Carleton College) & Jeffrey Aaron Snyder (Carleton College):

The original proponents of trigger warnings on campus argued that they would empower students suffering from trauma to delve into difficult material. “The point is not to enable — let alone encourage — students to skip readings or our subsequent class discussion,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in The New York Times. “It’s about enabling everyone’s rational engagement.”

Now, about a decade after trigger warnings arrived on college campuses, it’s clear that an avoidance rationale is officially competing with the original lean-in logic.

A recent Inside Higher Ed piece by Michael Bugeja, an Iowa State journalism professor, is emblematic of this shift. In light of the tumultuous times (a “mental-health pandemic,” ongoing sexual violence and racism, the anxiety of returning to in-person instruction), Bugeja says that trigger warnings are needed now more than ever. All faculty members should follow his lead, he argues, and include detailed trigger warnings on their syllabi accompanied by the following note: “You don’t have to attend class if the content elicits an uncomfortable emotional response.”

Bugeja’s article prompted us to review the latest research on the efficacy of trigger warnings. We found no evidence that trigger warnings improve students’ mental health. What’s more, we are now convinced that they push students and faculty members alike to turn away from the study of vitally important topics that are seen as too “distressing.” ...

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Mark-To-Market (Or Wealth) Taxation In The U.S.: Evidence From Options

Paul Mason (Baylor) & Steven Utke (Connecticut; Google Scholar), Mark-to-Market (or Wealth) Taxation in the U.S.: Evidence from Options:

Recent U.S. tax proposals under various names (e.g., wealth taxes, estate tax reform, etc.) center on mark-to-market (MTM) taxation, which eliminates investors’ ability to defer or avoid capital gains taxes. To provide insight on potential effects of these tax proposals, we exploit a unique U.S. setting where “index” options on the S&P 500 Index (SPX) face MTM taxation whereas nearly identical “non-index” options on the exchange traded fund (ETF) tracking the S&P 500 Index (SPY) do not.

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Avi-Yonah: The International Tax Regime At 100 — Reflections On The OECD's BEPS Project

Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), The International Tax Regime at 100: Reflections on the OECD's BEPS Project:

This essay will consider the outcome of Pillars One and Two in light of the history of international taxation since the foundation of the international tax regime in 1923. Specifically, it will consider how Pillar One fits with efforts to redefine the source of active income in light of the digital revolution, and the ways in which Pillar Two implements the single tax principle, which can be traced back to the first model treaty from 1927. Both of those ideas were already articulated and developed in my own early writing on international taxation from the 1990s, when the Internet was in its infancy.

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How Does Removing The Tax Benefits Of Debt Affect Firms? Evidence From The 2017 U.S. Tax Reform

Ali Sanati (American; Google Scholar), How Does Removing the Tax Benefits of Debt Affect Firms? Evidence from the 2017 US Tax Reform:

Despite extensive efforts, the relation between tax incentives and corporate capital structure is an open question. The 2017 US tax reform creates an opportunity to directly estimate this relation. The reform limits the tax advantage of debt for all firms except for small businesses with average sales below $25 million. I use the exception threshold in a regression discontinuity design and show that corporate debt declines nearly dollar for dollar as the present value of the tax benefits of debt shrinks. Treated firms do not raise equity to replace debt, and they decrease investments and hiring, consistent with a rise in the cost of external financing. Confirming the tax channel, treatment effects are stronger in firms with more profits and smaller non-debt tax shields. Comparing the size of the debt tax shield across the firm size distribution suggests that the estimates likely provide a lower bound for the effects in large corporations.

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Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud: Teaching Students How Law School Works

Alexa Chew (North Carolina; Google Scholar) & Rachel Gurvich (North Carolina), Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud: Teaching Students How Law School Works:

Like the law we teach our students, legal education itself isn’t neutral. It is the product of both structural forces and individual decisions. Hierarchy and structural inequality permeate our society, so of course they permeate the institutions within our society, including law schools. But law schools are not only passive recipients of these permeating atoms of injustice. They have some agency in determining which inequities to nurture (or not) in the learning environment. As it stands, though, the environment that students learn the law in can be an incubator of inequality.

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Take Note: Teaching Law Students To Be Responsible Stewards Of Technology

Kristen E. Murray (Temple; Google Scholar), Take Note: Teaching Law Students to Be Responsible Stewards of Technology, 70 Cath. U. L. Rev. 201 (2021):

The modern lawyer cannot practice without some deployment of technology; practical and ethical obligations have made technological proficiency part of what it means to be practice-ready. These obligations complicate the question of what constitutes best practices in law school. Today’s law schools are filled with students who are digital natives but who do not necessarily leverage technology in maximally efficient ways, and faculty who span multiple generations, with varying amounts of skepticism about modern technology. Students are expected to use technology to read, prepare for class, take notes, and study for and take final exams. Professors might use technology to teach or assess student work, but students are often asked to leave technology out of the classroom because of professor expectations about distraction and notetaking. All of this is happening as we attempt to prepare students to enter a profession that is infused with both technological capabilities and obligations, including the rules of professional conduct. These capabilities and obligations will continue to evolve, grow, and change alongside companion changes in technologies.

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Tax Prof Donald Tobin To Step Down After Seven Years As Maryland Dean

For the second time in a month, a Tax Prof is stepping down after a successful 7-year deanship:

Donald B. Tobin, who has served as dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law since 2014, announced his decision to step down at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year and return to full-time teaching as a member of the Maryland Carey Law faculty.

“Serving as dean of Maryland Carey Law has been the greatest honor of my life,” says Tobin. “I will be forever grateful to this wonderful community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni who entrusted me with leading this fantastic law school over the past seven years.”

Beginning his tenure as dean in the wake of the Great Recession, Tobin is credited with uniting the law school community to achieve a full financial recovery while simultaneously expanding student opportunities and community engagement.

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Frye: Letter To The Yale Law Journal Forum

Brian Frye (Kentucky; Google Scholar), Letter to the Yale Law Journal Forum:

This essay is a legal scholarship in the form of a letter to the Yale Law Journal Forum, reflecting on the nature of the market for legal scholarships. ...

I want to tell you about my scholarship. Every year I write another article about the same thing, just like everyone else. It’s a drag, but the summer bonus makes it worth the effort, and at this point, the articles almost write themselves. Recycling the literature review sure helps!

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A New Minority? International J.D. Students In U.S. Law Schools

Swethaa Ballakrishnen (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Carole Silver (Northwestern; Google Scholar), A New Minority? International JD Students in US Law Schools, 44 Law & Soc.  Inquiry 647 (2019):

This Article reveals the significance of a new and growing minority group within US law schools - international students in the Juris Doctor (JD) program. While international students have received some attention in legal education scholarship, it mostly has been focused on their participation in the context of programs specially designed for this demographic (e.g. post-graduate programs like the LLM and SJD). Drawing from interview data with fifty-eight international JD students across seventeen graduating US law schools, our research reveals the rising importance of international students as actors within a more mainstream institutional context. Particularly, in examining the ways these students navigate their law school environments, we find that although international status often impacts identity and participation, not all students encounter its impact similarly. While some students use the identity to their advantage, others cannot escape negative implications, even with effort. This is consistent with other scholarship on minority students, and adds to a growing literature that uses their socialization experiences to better understand professional stratification.

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Choi: Democrats Should Finally Close The Carried Interest Loophole For The Wealthy

Washington Post op-ed:  Democrats Should Finally Close the Carried Interest Loophole for the Wealthy, by Jonathan H. Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar):

House Democrats on Sunday began circulating a preliminary proposal for tax reforms that could bring in as much as $2.9 trillion by raising taxes on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. The measures, intended to help pay for Democrats’ proposed $3.5 trillion budget package, include increasing the corporate tax rate and adding a tax on individuals making more than $5 million.

Lamentably, the proposal wouldn’t get rid of the carried interest loophole, which allows fund managers to receive a share of investment profits at the lower tax rate reserved for long-term capital gains. While the Democrats’ proposal includes minor tweaks to the holding period for carried interest, it mostly leaves the benefit intact.

As Democrats firm up the tax plan in the coming days, they should seriously look at a proposal introduced on Aug. 5 by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to get rid of the carried interest preference altogether.

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Christians Presents Tax Cooperation In An Unjust World Today At UC-Irvine

Allison Christians (McGill; Google Scholar) presents Tax Cooperation in an Unjust World virtually today at UC-Irvine as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium:

In this book [Tax Cooperation in an Unjust World (Oxford University Press Nov. 2021)], Professor Christians sets out to demonstrate the key role that the international tax system plays in achieving justice. To do so, we first establish that the international tax system currently allows states with great wealth to claim more than they are justifiably entitled to from the global economy. We then demonstrate that this status quo both facilitates and feeds off continued human suffering, and therefore violates even minimal conceptions of international distributive justice. Finally, we explain how this situation of ongoing injustice can be addressed through existing institutions and processes and show that a fairer international tax system could be achieved with incremental yet effective adaptation, that is, without requiring radical reform or a new world tax order.

In making these claims, the book connects theories about tax policy largely from the legal and economics literature to theories of international justice from philosophical literature. As with any interdisciplinary effort, doing so risks alienating both camps. We hope we have muted this risk by showing that foundational commitments of widely accepted conceptions of international justice are reflected in existing tax policy, even if norms and processes do not fully reflect those underlying principles.

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Hemel & Lord: Revitalizing The Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax

Daniel Hemel (Chicago; Google Scholar) & Robert Lord (Americans for Tax Fairness), Revitalizing the Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax:

Congress first enacted the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax in 1976 to protect the estate and gift tax base and to ensure that extraordinary fortunes would bear their fair share of the transfer tax burden. Nearly a half-century into the life of the GST tax, those goals remain unrealized. In recent decades, high-net-worth individuals have succeeded in shifting hundreds of billions of dollars to “dynasty trusts” that—under current law—are poised to escape federal wealth transfer taxation indefinitely. The rise of dynasty trusts reduces the revenue-raising potential of the estate and gift taxes and allows a privileged class to exert vast economic and political power based solely on an accident of birth.

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Submission Of Law Student Articles For Publication

Nancy Levit (Google Scholar), Lawrence MacLachlan, Allen Rostron, Drew Greaves & Staci Pratt (UMKC), Submission of Law Student Articles for Publication:

Each year law students collectively write a large number of papers that could become law review articles but that are never published. Most law schools require students at some point during their time in law school to research and write an academic paper of publishable quality or seminar paper. Some of these are law review notes and comments that are not selected for publication. Others of these are papers written for specific substantive classes or to fulfill research and writing requirements.

Most of these student papers — even very worthy ones — will never be published or posted online. The publishing route for law students who want to publish in a venue other than their home law journal is not clearly marked. And many law reviews simply will not accept submissions from students outside their own school. Often, the publishing opportunities for non-law review members in their home school’s law review are also not well known.

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Will Law Schools Follow Amazon And Use Tech To Measure Faculty Work Rate?

Wall Street Journal, The Way Amazon Uses Tech to Squeeze Performance Out of Workers Deserves Its Own Name: Bezosism:

More than a century ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford pioneered systems for speeding up work that we take for granted today. ... Amazon’s 21st-century, algorithm-driven successor to Taylorism and Fordism ... [is] a mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering, Jeff Bezos ’ trademark hard-charging attitude toward work, and an ever-growing array of clever and often proprietary technologies. Taken as a whole, this system is novel enough in the history of work that it deserves its own name: Bezosism.

At this very moment, Bezosism is diffusing through the world of work, rewriting the source code of the global industrial machine. If it proves as popular and durable as the systems of organization on which it builds—from Fordism to the Toyota Production System—it could be, along with the e-commerce and space companies he built, Mr. Bezos’ most important legacy.

Depending on how the company practicing Bezosism wields its power, this system of technologically supercharged management can be benevolent, or sinister, or both.

Take, for example, Amazon’s well-known metric for evaluating worker performance. ... In Amazon’s fulfillment centers, human productivity is measured by an overall pick or stow rate calculated for each worker at a robot-fed pick-and-stow station.

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Admissions Data At 75% Of The U.S. News Top 50: Higher LSATs, UGPAs, And Enrollment

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  with Spivey Consulting reporting the admissions statistics for 75% of the U.S. News Top 50 law schools, LSAT (+1.4) and UGPA (+0.4) medians are up, as well as enrollment (+29.0). (Yellow shading indicates law schools added since my August 30 post): 

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Hemel: Should An Excise Tax On Stock Buybacks Also Apply To Cash M&A Deals?

Daniel Hemel (Chicago; Google Scholar), Should an Excise Tax on Stock Buybacks Also Apply to Cash M&A Deals?:

Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced legislation this morning to impose a 2 percent excise tax on stock buybacks—a proposal that could serve as a significant “payfor” in the budget reconciliation bill moving through Congress now. An important decision in designing the excise tax is whether the tax should apply to transactions in which one corporation purchases another corporation’s stock (rather than repurchasing its own stock). The late William Andrews, a Harvard Law School professor and leading corporate tax scholar, considered this question in the early 1980s and concluded that the answer is “yes”—at least when the acquiring corporation ends up with majority control of the target. The current text of the legislation would not apply the tax to those transactions, though hopefully Andrews’s argument will persuade lawmakers to make a change.

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Manoj Viswanathan: The Professor Who Inspired Me To Love Tax

Philip Wolf (J.D. 2019, UC-Hastings; Tax Associate, Belcher, Smolen & Van Loo, San Francisco), Manoj Viswanathan: The Professor Who Inspired Me to Love Tax, 172 Tax Notes Fed. 1615 (Sept. 6, 2021):

Out of the thousands of different professions, how does one end up choosing tax? I can tell you exactly how it happened with me. During my second semester of law school, I was permitted to take one elective class. I selected basic income taxation. Although I knew nothing about the subject, I sensed it might somehow be helpful to my goal of starting a business one day. Little could I have imagined where the class would lead me!

In our first session, in walked the ebullient yet sincere professor, Manoj Viswanathan, or as he asked us students to call him, “Professor V.” Every lecture, Professor V. emphasized how everything we’d learn in his class would be practical and relevant in the real world. Time seemed to melt away in each Tuesday and Friday lecture, and I caught myself pondering what he’d said many hours after each class. It was Professor V.’s introductory tax class that would make me decide to change my career plans and become a tax lawyer.

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St. Mary's To Launch Nation's First Fully Online ABA-Accredited JD Degree In Fall 2022 With 25 Students

Following up on my previous post:  St. Mary’s Law Launches the Nation’s First Fully Online J.D. Program Approved by the ABA:

The online J.D. program will begin recruiting for Fall 2022 with accreditation by the American Bar Association.

St. Mary’s University and its School of Law today announced that it is the first law school in the nation to approve offering a fully online J.D. program that is accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA).

Following the ABA’s approval of the School of Law’s online program request in May, St. Mary’s University leaders this week announced their intention to move ahead with the innovative program and recruit a cohort of students who will begin their studies online in Fall 2022.

“As the only law school serving San Antonio and the southernmost school serving South Texas, St. Mary’s Law has a tradition of excellence in legal education stretching back to its founding in 1927,” said Patricia Roberts, J.D., St. Mary’s Law Dean and Charles E. Cantú Distinguished Professor of Law. “This new fully online J.D. program — the one and only of its kind — exemplifies how St. Mary’s Law continues to lead with tradition and innovation.”

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Brooks & Gamage Present The Indirect Tax Canon, Apportionment, And Drafting A Constitutional Wealth Tax Today At NYU

John Brooks (Georgetown; Google Scholar) & David Gamage (Indiana; Google Scholar) present The Indirect Tax Canon, Apportionment, and Drafting a Constitutional Wealth Tax virtually today at NYU as part of its Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium hosted by Daniel Shaviro:

The Constitution requires that “direct taxes” be “apportioned”—that is, that the revenues collected from each State be in proportion to population. Based on this obscure provision, prior scholarship has debated whether unapportioned wealth tax or related accrual-income tax reforms should generally be held constitutional, unconstitutional, or whether specific proposals should be held constitutional and others unconstitutional.

This Article takes a different approach. Recognizing the real uncertainty about how the Supreme Court might ultimately decide, this Article explains how Congress can draft a reform to navigate through that uncertainty. Specifically, this Article explains how Congress can draft a wealth tax or accrual-income tax reform that should survive constitutional scrutiny regardless of how the Supreme Court might ultimately rule on the disputed constitutional questions.

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Aslam & Shah Present Tec(h)tonic Shifts: Taxing The Digital Economy Today At Georgetown

Aqib Aslam (IMF) & Alpa Shah (IMF) present Tec(h)tonic Shifts: Taxing the 'Digital Economy' virtually today at Georgetown as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop Series hosted by Brian Galle:

The ever-increasing digitalization of businesses has accelerated the need to address the many shortcomings and unresolved issues within the international corporate income tax system. In particular, the customer or “user”—through their online activities—is now considered by many as being a critical driving force behind the value of digital services. Furthermore, the rapid growth of digital service providers over the last decade has made them an increasingly popular target for special taxes—similar to wealth and solidarity taxes—which can also help mobilize much-needed revenues in the wake of a crisis. This paper argues that a plausible conceptual case can be made to tax the value generated by users under the corporate income tax. 

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What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors And Students?

New York Times op-ed:  What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think., by Amia Srinivasan (Oxford; Author, The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (2021)):

Netflix’s new hit comedy “The Chair” revels in certain clichés of university life — mock-Gothic buildings, wood paneling, crusty old-timers who don’t know how to use a photocopier, and, of course, an ambiguous relationship between a professor and a student: Bill is a charismatic English professor who is in a tailspin after the death of his wife, and Dafna is a literature-loving undergrad who is desperate to get into Bill’s class. She gives him a ride; they quote T.S. Eliot to each other; he signs a copy of his book for her; she makes him a pie. We think we know where this is going, because we’ve seen it so many times before: in “Election” (1999), “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) and “Elegy” (2008), based on Philip Roth’s novel “The Dying Animal” — to take just a few recent examples. “The Chair” ultimately upends our expectations in a way that is both comic and poignant. Don’t have sex with me, Dafna in effect says to Bill: Teach me.

The cultural fascination with professor-student affairs seems to have grown in step with policies restricting them. (“Be careful,” the dean warns Bill in “The Chair.” “This department is hanging on by a thread.”) Policies prohibiting professor-student sex — “consensual relationship policies” as they are usually known — are now common in the United States. A 2014 study found that 84 percent of the American universities surveyed had some prohibitions on professor-student relationships. ...

Despite the bans’ origins in feminist activism, some feminists at the time denounced these prohibitions as a betrayal of their principles. To deny that women students could consent to sex with their professors, they argued, was infantilizing and moralizing. Were women university students not adults? Were they not entitled to have sex with whom they pleased? Did such policies not play into the hands of the religious right, which was all too keen to control women’s sex lives? ...

In many ways, the contemporary focus on consent is a victory. Historically, sexual assault was defined not by the absence of consent but by the presence of force, which meant that the countless women who froze with fear or chose to submit rather than face the alternative were not, legally speaking, raped. But in recent years our interest in consent has become single-minded. The habit of viewing all kinds of exploitative, creepy or troubling sex solely through the lens of consent has left us unable to speak, in many situations, about what is really going wrong.

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Scores Suggest Longer LSAT Was No Problem For August Test Takers

Reuters, Scores Suggest Longer LSAT Was No Problem for August Test Takers:

The Law School Admission Test just got longer, but aspiring attorneys still managed to do pretty well.

The average score earned by the 24,907 people who took the LSAT this August was 154.19, just 1.4 points lower than the 155.6 average score among August 2020 LSAT takers. Both exams used an at-home, online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the most recent test was four sections long—one section longer than the August 2020 iteration.

Officials with the Law School Admission Council, which designs and administers the LSAT, say the score difference between the latest tests is negligible and the data throws cold water on the theory that LSAT scores have soared over the past year because a shorter exam is inherently easier. (The number of people who applied to law school with LSAT scores of 160 and above last admissions cycle was up 25% or more in each five-point score band, and the number of applicants with the highest scores of 175-180 more than doubled.)

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Kennedy: Is It Ever OK To Enunciate A Slur In The Classroom?

Following up on my previous post:  Randall Kennedy (Harvard) & Eugene Volokh (UCLA), The New Taboo: Quoting Epithets in the Classroom and Beyond, 49 Cap. U. L. Rev. 1 (2021):  Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed:  Is It Ever OK to Enunciate a Slur in the Classroom?, by Randall Kennedy (Harvard; Author, Say It Loud: On Race, Law, History, and Culture (2021)):

Is it acceptable for pedagogical purposes to enunciate the epithet “[N-word]”?

The question is topical because of a string of incidents in which professors have been condemned, disciplined, even fired for enunciating in full the notorious N-word. Controversies have stemmed from a professor airing the word while discussing language from which courts have withdrawn the protection that the First Amendment typically accords to speech; a teacher mentioning the word while discussing a hate-speech prosecution; a teacher quoting a passage in which the term appears in a Supreme Court opinion; a professor quoting a statement attributed to a founding father who reportedly referred to Blacks as “[N-word]” during debate over the ratification of the Constitution; a teacher reading aloud from James Baldwin.

In my teaching I have done on many occasions the thing that has brought trouble to those and other fellow educators. I do not “use” “[N-word]” in the sense in which “use” is rightly condemned. I do not bandy it about gratuitously, much less to taunt, threaten, demean, or insult anyone. I enunciate “[N-word]” in full, out loud with some purpose in mind. Usually the aim is to drive home to audiences the pervasiveness of anti-Black prejudice and, more specifically, the way in which this troublesome word has been an integral part of the soundtrack of American racism.

Some thoughtful teachers determinedly avoid vocalizing “[N-word].” I think here of the distinguished University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, an eminent scholar of constitutional law and a stalwart champion of academic freedom. ... Stone’s new stance deferred to the proposition that, in these circumstances, a feeling of hurt upon hearing “[N-word]” is a reaction warranting accommodation. I disagree. I am skeptical of some of the claims of hurt. I suspect that some of them are the product of learned strategic ripostes. It is now well known that in certain settings, particularly those that strive to be socially enlightened (like colleges and universities), you can effectively challenge speech to which you object by claiming not only that it is socially abhorrent (racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., etc., etc.) but that it makes you feel insulted, offended, or endangered. ...

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Vanderbilt Seeks To Hire An Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof

Vanderbilt University: Law School — Assistant/Associate/Professor of Law:

Vanderbilt University Law School seeks applicants for up to three faculty positions. The Law School seeks a full-time tenured or tenure- track faculty member, at the entry or lateral level, in any field of study whose scholarship focuses on issues of race and the law. The Law School also invites applicants in any area of law, and especially with scholarship or teaching in torts, constitutional law (rights), civil rights, civil litigation, IP/patent, commercial law, and taxation.

Applicants should possess strong academic and professional qualifications. Lateral applicants must have a substantial record of legal scholarship and effective teaching skills. Please submit a cover letter, resume, research agenda, and references to http://apply.interfolio. com/91289. For questions only, please email lawfaculty.appts@vanderbilt.edu.

Law schools looking to hire Tax Profs to start in the 2022-23 academic year:

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Brian Leiter v. Richard Painter

Brian Leiter (Chicago), Richard Painter (Minnesota) Is An Astonishingly Dishonest Person:

Some readers will recall some posts from July about Twitter's most unhinged law professor. Remarkably, he continues to lie about me almost two months later, I guess because he's not used to getting any pushback on his unethical behavior. ...

Richard even tried to smear other law professors (including two of my colleagues) as racists; commenting on this paper about lax tenure standards in law schools by three younger scholars (one of whom, contrary to Richard, is untenured) [Adam Chilton (Chicago), Jonathan Masur (Chicago) & Kyle Rozema (Washington U.), Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards, 50 J. Legal Stud. 1 (2021)], he tweeted:

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Katherine Magbanua's Attorneys Seek To Disqualify Prosecutor In Dan Markel Murder Trial

Tallahassee Democrat, Dan Markel Murder: Magbanua Attorneys Look to Disqualify Prosecutors Over Evidence Exhibits:

Attorneys for Katherine Magbanua are seeking to disqualify prosecutors, who allege she was involved in the plot to kill Dan Markel, saying they intentionally provided the jury misleading evidence and left out information that was exculpatory during her first trial.

Less than a month before Magabnua goes back on trial for first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder, her Miami attorneys are asking a judge to oust the State Attorney’s Office from her prosecution.

Their claims, filed in Leon County Circuit Court Friday afternoon, lie in exhibits presented at Magbanua’s first trial in 2019. A hung jury was unable to decide her fate and a mistrial was declared. She will again face a jury October 4.

The exhibits include phone and bank records for Magbanua that they say not only were inaccurate but contained information kept from the jury that may have provided evidence in her favor.

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Alfani Presents Economic Inequality In Preindustrial Times Today At Loyola-L.A.

Guido Alfani (Bocconi; Google Scholar) presents Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times: Europe and Beyond virtually today at Loyola-L.A. as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium:

Recent literature has reconstructed estimates of wealth and income inequality for a range of preindustrial, mostly European, societies covering medieval and early modern times, occasionally reaching back to antiquity and even prehistory. These estimates have radically improved our knowledge of distributive dynamics in the past. It now seems clear that in the period circa 1300–1800, inequality of both income and wealth grew almost monotonically almost everywhere in Europe, with the exception of the century-long phase of inequality decline triggered by the Black Death of 1347–52. 

Regarding the causes of inequality growth, recent literature ruled out economic growth as the main one. Other possible factors include population growth (also as mediated by inheritance systems) and especially regressive fiscal institutions (also as connected to the unequal distribution of political power). 

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Elkins Presents A Scalar Conception Of Tax Residence For Individuals Today At NYU

David Elkins (Netanya, visiting NYU 2021-2022) presents A Scalar Conception of Tax Residence for Individuals at NYU today as part its Faculty Workshop Series:

Residence is one of the fundamental concepts in international taxation. As a rule, residents are taxed on their worldwide income while nonresidents are taxed only on their domestic-source income. The criteria for residence vary from country to country. Some countries look to physical presence. Other rely upon more obtuse concepts such as domicile, permanent home, ordinary residence, habitual abode, connections, or ties. Many countries use a variety of tests. Tax treaties typically employ a series of tie-breaking provisions to determine residency when each of the two signatories views an individual as a resident in accordance with its own domestic rules.

Despite the wide variety of tests for determining individual residence, all share a common underlying premise, namely that residence is a binary attribute. An individual either is or is not a resident. There are no shades of grey. An individual who barely satisfies the relevant test is classified as a resident, while an individual who just fails to do so is classified as a nonresident.

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2022 U.S. News College Rankings

U.S. News & World Report has released its 2022 College Rankings. Here are the Top 25 National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges:

Rank	National Universities
1	Princeton
2	Columbia
2	Harvard
2	MIT
5	Yale
6	Stanford
6	Chicago
8	Penn
9	Cal-Tech
9	Duke
9	Johns Hopkins
9	Northwestern
13	Dartmouth
14	Brown
14	Vanderbilt
14	Washington (St. Louis)
17	Cornell
17	Rice
19	Notre Dame
20	UCLA
21	Emory
22	UC-Berkeley
23	Georgetown
23	Michigan
25	Carnegie Mellon
25	Virginia

Pepperdine is ranked #49.

• Chronicle of Higher Education, Colleges Still Obsess Over National Rankings. For Proof, Look at Their Strategic Plans.
• Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘U.S. News’ Keeps ACT and SAT Scores in the Mix —For Now
• Inside Higher Ed, 'U.S. News' Makes Modest Tweak in Methodology

Prior Years' U.S. News National University Rankings:

• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2009

2022 U.S. News Liberal Arts College Rankings:

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Jason Kilborn, UI-Chicago Law School Settle Controversy Over December 2020 Civ Pro Final Exam Question

Following up on my previous posts:

• Controversy At UIC Law School Over Use Of 'N And B (Profane Expressions For African Americans And Women)' On Fall Civ Pro Exam (Jan. 16, 2021)
• Is This Law Professor Really A Homicidal Threat? (Jan. 20, 2021)

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE’s New Defense Fund Is Here to Save College Faculty Jobs. And We Just Closed Our First Case.:

When the University of Illinois Chicago suspended and launched an investigation into law professor Jason Kilborn, he initially didn’t know where to turn.

He had posed a long-used hypothetical question in a December 2020 law school exam using redacted references to two slurs. The question about employment discrimination included a plaintiff being called “a ‘n____’ and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women)” as explosive evidence of the discrimination. But even redacting the terms didn’t save him from criticism — or eventually being targeted by his school. ...

In January, just before the first class on the first day of spring semester, UIC’s administration abruptly suspended him. He said they refused to explain the basis for the indefinite suspension, despite being asked. ...

On Jan. 19, FIRE called on UIC Chancellor Michael D. Amiridis to reject “any intent to punish Kilborn over his protected expression.” FIRE gave UIC a good-faith opportunity to back off Kilborn and to reaffirm his academic freedom rights.

UIC responded to confirm that it was, in fact, conducting an investigation into Kilborn’s exam and rejecting our concerns about his academic freedom rights. The move earned UIC a spot on FIRE’s annual list of the 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech, as well as pointed criticism from outlets and commentators across the country.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman billed the situation as “punitive overreactions of university administrators grow[ing] ever more demented.” ...

Through the fund, FIRE connected Kilborn with a local attorney, Wayne Giampietro. With help from the FLDF team at FIRE, the pair reached a resolution with UIC. Kilborn agreed to alert the dean before responding to student complaints about racial issues, and the audio of his classes would be recorded — both stipulations Kilborn welcomed in order to protect himself against spurious complaints, and one he’d already decided to take independently. 

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Russell Osgood Named Interim Dean At Washington University

Following up on my previous post, Dean (And Tax Prof) Nancy Staudt To Leave Washington University On Oct. 1 To Be Dean Of RAND Graduate School:  Russell K. Osgood has been named Interim Dean (more here).

After earning his B.A. and J.D. at Yale, Russell was a tax associate at Hill & Barlow in Boston (1974-1978). He then was a Tax Prof at Boston University (1978-1980) and Cornell (1980-1988) before becoming Dean at Cornell (1988-1998) and President of Grinnell College (1998-2010). Since 2010, Russell has been a Visiting Professor at Washington University.

Russell has had an enormous influence on two generations of Caron men. I had absolutely no interest in tax as a Cornell law student before taking Russell's federal income tax class. I took other courses from him, served as his teaching assistant and research assistant, and helped shepherd his tax article to publication as a law review editor (Ages and Themes of Income Taxation: Savings and Investment, 68 Cornell L. Rev. 521 (1983)). Like Russell, I became a tax lawyer in Boston, tax professor, and dean. At every step along the way, Russell provided invaluable guidance and helped convince various hiring committees to take a chance on me. As if that wasn't enough, my son Reed attended Grinnell College while Russell was President and gave me the opportunity to re-connect with him and thank him for all he had done for both my son and me.

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Lesson From The Tax Court: Retirement Plan Drafting Error Loses Taxpayer $51k Deduction

As tax practitioners know, to err is human, but to forgive requires a new set of regs.  Gayle Gaston v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2021-107 (Sept. 2, 2021) (Judge Marvel), teaches us the lesson that if you want to get the §404(a) deduction for contributions to a profit-sharing plan, you need to be sure to properly link the plan to the taxpayer’s trade or business. In this case, the taxpayer received substantial deferred compensation payments from Mary Kay Cosmetics after her separation from that company and made substantial contributions to a retirement plan her tax advisor drafted for her.  Unfortunately, her one-participant profit sharing plan did not identify any trade or business as the source of the plan contributions.  That was error.  Both the IRS and the Tax Court were unforgiving.  Details below the fold.

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Iowa Seeks To Hire An Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof

Faculty Jobs@UIowa:

The University of Iowa College of Law anticipates hiring multiple entry-level or lateral faculty members in areas including tax, constitutional law, and a variety of other specialties. ...

Candidates should apply either through the AALS Faculty Recruitment Services or by submitting a letter of interest, CV, a list of three references, and a law school transcript through Jobs@UIOWA. ...

For questions, please contact Faculty Appointments Committee.

Law schools looking to hire Tax Profs to start in the 2022-23 academic year:

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• September 11th At Pepperdine
• 9/11 Near Miss Still Haunts Law School Admissions Community
• Arkansas-Little Rock Seeks To Hire An Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof (Eligible For Distinguished Professorship)

Sunday:

• Season 2 Of Ted Lasso Challenges Viewers To Seek True Joy Over Shallow Happiness
• Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, And The Path To American Unity
• Remember Todd Beamer Of United 93
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Season 2 Of Ted Lasso Challenges Viewers To Seek True Joy Over Shallow Happiness

Following up on my previous posts:

• Ted Lasso, Law School Deaning, And The Power Of Forgiveness (Jan. 24, 2021)
• Why Real Coaches (And Deans) Want To Be Ted Lasso (July 19, 2021)

Christianity Today, ‘Ted Lasso’ Won’t Settle for Shallow Optimism:

The show’s second season challenges viewers to consider true joy over hyper-positivity. ...

Released in 2020, Ted Lasso centers an out-of-his-depth American football coach who takes a job with an English soccer team. ... Ted’s vulnerable moments—a divorce, a disdainful team captain, and a boss who’s set him up for failure—have balanced his seemingly unflappable optimism, preventing him from being reduced to a symbol and revealing him as a human who, like us, is sometimes neglected, anxious, and in need of love. Even in the first season, writers attempted to make Ted more than a mustachioed Pollyanna by showing his panic attack at a karaoke bar and his procrastination in signing his divorce papers.

After a dark year that made many of us face our greatest anxieties and our mortality, watching Ted build an unlikely community felt satisfying. “Being nice, in ‘Ted Lasso,’ is not a naïve denial of the darkness of life. It’s a cleareyed adaptation to it,” wrote James Poniewozik at The New York Times. “The series recognizes that nice guys do sometimes finish last. It just argues that other things are more important than finishing first.”

And yet, what has haunted Ted Lasso’s second season is the chance that a good show centered on positivity, kindness, and joy might turn maudlin and trite. It offers us a glimpse of integrity without consequences and mirth without stakes. ...

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Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, And The Path To American Unity

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Jewish Tradition and National Unity: The High Holidays Offer Lessons That Can Be Helpful to All Americans, by Joe Lieberman (former U.S. Senator and author, The Centrist Solution: How We Made Government Work and Can Make It Work Again (2021)):

The ram’s horn, or shofar, is sounded throughout the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a call for Jews to reflect, reform and repent. Many of us are doing exactly that this month. The lessons associated with these holidays, which both happen in September this year, are more relevant than ever to all Americans.

The U.S. today is less unified and secure, less law-abiding, less respectful of government, and less confident in the future than at any point in my life. It needs to be jolted from its current course by the sound of the ram’s horn to find a better way forward.

The path Jewish tradition offers is through repentance, but not only in the way it is commonly understood. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, the root of the Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means to return. For a nation, he explained, it means to return “to our roots, our faith, our history.” This is the best first step the American people can take to overcome division, because it will show how far we have strayed from the source of our national values, unity and purpose.

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Remember Todd Beamer Of United 93

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Remember Todd Beamer of United 93, by Mene Ukueberuwa:

His heroism on 9/11 drew from a lifetime of faith and character. ...

My region, the state of New Jersey, and the country as a whole ought to know more about Todd Beamer.

A 32-year-old software salesman for Oracle, Beamer was among the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who attacked the hijackers and prevented them from crashing the Boeing 757 into the U.S. Capitol. His rallying cry, “Let’s roll,” rests in America’s memory. It is exalting to think of what he and his fellow passengers did on that short flight, and the people they saved on the ground.

Beamer remained poised under extreme pressure. Many passengers made phone calls during the flight, but Beamer’s call with Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson became the fullest account of what took place in the air that day. He remained on the line for 14 minutes, describing the direction of the plane, the hijackers’ behavior and, eventually, the passengers’ decision to revolt.

“His voice was devoid of any stress,” Ms. Jefferson later said. “In fact, he sounded so tranquil it made me begin to doubt the authenticity and urgency of his call.” ...

A strong Christian faith also carried Beamer toward his fate. Lisa recounts that their life together was founded on faith—at Wheaton, while rearing children, and teaching Sunday school at Princeton Alliance Church.

Before ending his call with Ms. Jefferson, Beamer asked, “Would you do one last thing for me?”

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

This week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads is the same as last week's list:

1. [414 Downloads]  Federal Tax Procedure (2021 Practitioner Ed.), by John A. Townsend (Houston)
2. [348 Downloads]  Serenity Now! The (Not So) Inclusive Framework and the Multilateral Instrument, by Yariv Brauner (Florida; Google Scholar)
3. [287 Downloads]  State Aid Prohibition — The New GAAR in Town, by Joachim Englisch (Muenster)
4. [175 Downloads]  Taxation And Law And Political Economy, by Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington; Google Scholar), Ari Glogower (Ohio State; Google Scholar), Ariel Jurow Kleiman (San Diego; Google Scholar) & Clint Wallace (South Carolina, Google Scholar) (reviewed by Hayes Holderness (Richmond) here)
5. [163 Downloads]  New Puzzles In International Tax Agreements, by Wei Cui (British Columbia; Google Scholar)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Fall 2021 Law School Admissions Season Was One For The Ages: Applicants Were Up 12.6%, With Biggest Increase (66%) Among The 170+ LSAT Band
2. Reuters, California Bar to Attorneys: Disable Alexa When Working From Home
3. U.S. News, Law School Rankings: Bar Exam Performance
4. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, University Of Arkansas Chancellor Removes President Clinton’s Name From Endowed Professorship At Law School
5. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: IRS Can Issue Multiple 'Final' Spousal Relief Determinations
6. Bryce Clayton Newell (Oregon), 2020 Meta-Ranking Of Flagship U.S. Law Reviews
7. ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Council Finds Cleveland-Marshall Law School Out Of Compliance With Financial Resources Accreditation Standard
8. New York Times, Why A Duke Professor With Stage IV Colon Cancer Will Not Make A Bucket List Before She Dies
9. Wall Street Journal, Can Congress Tax Wealth By ‘Deeming’ It Income?
10. AALS, New Deans Starting in the 2021-22 Academic Year

September 11th At Pepperdine

Today is a very special day at Pepperdine. For the 14th consecutive year, we displayed 2,887 American flags for each American life lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 90 international flags representing the home countries of those from abroad who also were killed.

Pepperdine University to Commemorate 20th Anniversary of 9/11 with Annual Waves of Flags Display and Remembrance Events:

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