Hellerstein & Appleby: State Marketplace Platforms — The Postscript

Walter Hellerstein (Georgia) & Andrew D. Appleby (Stetson), Platforms: The Postscript, 100 Tax Notes State 1365 (June 28, 2021):

With Missouri’s adoption of platform legislation in May 2021, every state with a sales tax has now adopted marketplace platform legislation. This article provides an updated and, for the moment at least, complete description of state marketplace platform legislation.

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Illinois Property Tax Board Votes 5-0 To Give Trump $1 Million Refund Due To Overvaluation Of Chicago Skyscraper; Democratic Attorney General Sues To Block It

Chicago Sun-Times, State Orders $1 Million Tax Refund For Trump, County Moves to Block It:

The Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board has decided former President Donald Trump is due a $1 million refund on his skyscraper’s 2011 tax bill, ruling last month that the Cook County Board of Review overestimated the value of the building’s hotel rooms and retail space.

But the Cook County State’s Attorney has filed suit with the Illinois Appellate Court, seeking to block the tax refund, which has yet to be issued. ... It’s the latest twist in the case originally filed by Ald. Edward M. Burke, whose law firm argued Cook County officials had over-assessed Trump’s skyscraper. Burke’s former law firm Klafter & Burke had won more than $14 million in tax breaks for Trump over a dozen years, but the alderman ended the relationship in 2018, citing “irreconcilable differences” between the Chicago Democrat who represents a predominantly Hispanic 14th Ward, where residents objected to many of the Republican president’s policies.

Burke has since been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he blocked businesses from getting city permits unless they hired his law firm. He has left the firm, but remains on the City Council while awaiting trial. ...

[T]he state agency’s board voted 5-0 on June 2 to reduce the assessments on the building’s commercial property, which would trigger a refund of $1.03 million for Trump. ...

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Emory Seeks To Hire Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof

Emory University School of Law invites applications from entry level and lateral candidates for a tenure-track or tenured tax professor at the rank of Assistant Professor of Law, Associate Professor of Law, or Professor of Law. Interested candidates should contact Dorothy Brown, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law.

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

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A Dean's Advice On Resuming In-person Law School Instruction In The Face Of The Delta COVID-19 Variant

Vikram David Amar (Dean, Illinois), Resuming In-person Law School Instruction in the Face of the Delta COVID-19 Variant:

Logistical planning for the upcoming academic year (nearly upon us) at America’s law schools is unquestionably challenging given the evolving effect of, and public-health guidance relating to, the COVID-19 Delta variant. At the University of Illinois College of Law (and I suspect at most of the nation’s other law schools) we still fully expect that our instruction this year will be overwhelmingly in person just as it was before the pandemic, even as we also expect (in light of recent CDC guidance and our university’s reaction to it) the likelihood that students and faculty will need to wear masks in the building, at least for the early part of the fall.

To be sure, having to teach and learn through masks is suboptimal.

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Gerken: Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?

Heather K. Gerken (Dean, Yale), Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, 119 Mich. L. Rev. 1059 (2021):

The famed book review issue of the Michigan Law Review feels like a reminder of better days. As this issue goes to print, a shocking 554,103 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, the country seems to have begun a long-overdue national reckoning on race,  climate change and economic inequality continue to ravage the country, and our Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists with the encouragement of the president of the United States. In the usual year, a scholar would happily pick up this volume and delight in its contents. This year, one marvels at the scholars who managed to finish their reviews on time.

The editors have asked me to reflect on how 2020, particularly the pandemic, will change legal education. Like most institutions, law schools have undergone a stress test over the past year. During the early days of the pandemic, every school put a centuries-old teaching tradition online, often within the space of a single week. Most thought that the pace of change would slow down in April. It didn’t. For months, COVID generated crisis after crisis.

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Lesson From The Tax Court: COGS Are Not Deductions

Today’s lesson is short, but not so sweet for the losing taxpayers in BRC Operating Company LLC, Bluescape Resource Company LLC, Tax Matters Partner v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2021-59 (May 12, 2021) (Judge Pugh).  The taxpayer had claimed $160 million in Cost of Good Sold (COGS) for tax years 2008 and 2009.  But the taxpayer had no sales of goods in those years.  Judge Pugh teaches us a seemingly simple lesson:  you don’t get to claim COGS without any actual goods being sold.  Once again we learn how the concept COGS differs from the concept of deductions.  I last discussed this three years ago in Lesson From The Tax Court: Into The Weeds on COGS, TaxProf blog (June 25, 2018).

The shortness of the lesson, however, belies a metaphysical murkiness lurking underneath it.  Just what the heck is COGS, anyway?  On the one hand it’s not a deduction because it comes in the process of adjusting gross receipts to determine gross income.  On the other hand, it functions like a deduction, to account for the expense of producing income.  Judge Pugh appears to believe it is required by the Constitution.  That may be true if accountants had written the 16^th Amendment.  But they didn’t.  So I’m not so sure there is any constitutional basis for the concept (pun intended).   I believe that murkiness is best explained by §1001.  Details below the fold.

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Lederman & Christians: Tax Papers Unlocked — Dan Shaviro

Tax Papers Unlocked offers a "micro-workshop." This video, the third in this series, features Prof. Daniel Shaviro from New York University School of Law discussing with us "The Economics, Law, and Politics of Seeking Increased Taxation of Multinationals."

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• DOJ Says Treasury Must Give Trump’s Tax Returns To Congress
• We’re Kidding Ourselves That Law Firms (And Law Schools) Function Well From Home
• Tax Panel Today At SEALS

Sunday:

• Why Christians Must Fight Systemic Racism
• Rabbi Hurt In 2019 Synagogue Shooting Pleads Guilty To Widespread Tax Fraud
• Love, Duty, And A Friend’s Death
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Why Christians Must Fight Systemic Racism

New York Times op-ed:  Why Christians Must Fight Systemic Racism, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton; author, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (2020)):

I wake up to messages on social media from other Christians calling me a racist, communist, false teacher. Such messages have become as ordinary as my cup of coffee before morning prayer. I receive them because part of my work as a Christian theologian addresses issues of systemic injustice. I never imagined such work would be controversial. Racism­ — personal and societal — still affects the lives of people of color in the United States. Part of the Christian witness involves addressing this among a host of other maladies.

Nearly every Christian of color I know who addresses these issues has been subject to similar attacks, no matter the nuance of our argumentation or the sources we cite. I have been accused of believing that all white people are irredeemably racist and of seeing humans as only victims or oppressors. None of this is true, but that does not seem to matter. They call us “woke,” but the disdain with which they use that word makes it feel like a stand-in for deeper and more cutting insults.

I remain puzzled as to why discussions of racism and injustice stir up so much venom from fellow believers. They do not simply disagree. They are angry. Despite this hysteria, there is simply no theological or historical reason for Christians to hesitate over acknowledging structural racism.

When people point out bias or racism in structures (health care, housing, policing, employment practices), they are engaging in the most Christian of practices: naming and resisting sins, personal and collective. A Christian theology of human fallibility leads us to expect structural and personal injustice. It is in the texts we hold dear. So when Christians stand up against racialized oppression, they are not losing the plot; they are discovering an element of Christian faith and practice that has been with us since the beginning. ...

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Rabbi Hurt In 2019 Synagogue Shooting Pleads Guilty To Widespread Tax Fraud

San Diego Union-Tribune, Rabbi Injured in Poway Synagogue Shooting Pleads Guilty to Tax Fraud Charge:

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who one year ago had part of his hand shot off in a lethal attack by a gunman at the Poway synagogue he founded and received an outpouring of support that included meeting President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax fraud and wire fraud Tuesday.

Goldstein, 58, pleaded guilty to his role in several long-running, multimillion-dollar schemes involving tax, real estate, insurance and grant frauds, some of which stretched back to the 1980s. Omer Meisel, the acting head of the FBI in San Diego, said the investigation uncovered $18 million in “complex financial schemes” by Goldstein and co-defendants, with the rabbi “at the center of illegal activity” that went on for years.

One such scheme, known as the “90-10" fraud, had donors make large contributions to Chabad of Poway but then secretly get most of the money back. Typically, Goldstein would keep 10 percent — then funnel the remaining 90 percent back to the donor, according to a charging document unsealed in San Diego federal court Tuesday.

With a charitable giving receipt on Chabad letterhead, the donor could then claim a large charitable contribution on their taxes, though he or she had only put out a fraction of the claimed amount. The conspiracy netted at least $6.2 million in fraudulent donations from 12 taxpayers, resulting in tax losses to the IRS of at least $1.5 million, according to prosecutors.

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Love, Duty, And A Friend’s Death

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Love, Duty and a Friend’s Death, by Mike Kerrigan (Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):

Amanda Neuhoff of Dallas was a close friend of my wife, Devin, as they grew up together in Knoxville, Tenn., and so she became dear to me. She was 51 and the mother of four children when she died of brain cancer in June. ...

Over the years I grew close to her husband, Byron. He had a quiet reserve about him. He cherished his wife and basked in her high-wattage glow, but dutifulness was his defining trait.

I thought they were opposites. But her suffering and death, and his reaction to them, taught me that while I wasn’t wrong about my friends the Neuhoffs, I wasn’t completely right. ...

Through the suffering, Amanda expressed a preternatural sense of peace. All who sat with her saw it. At her funeral, many testified to it. This, I believe, was the calm that came from knowing her journey, while turbulent, would end in heaven. Inspired by this confidence, when cancer became Amanda’s cross, she bore it dutifully.

Byron never left his wife’s bedside, not for the long months at home, and not in hospice at the end. When his friends tried time and again to offer him the respite of a ball game or bike ride, Byron simply said: “I’m right where I want to be.”

Duty brings a good man to such a vigil, but it doesn’t keep him there so ceaselessly and tirelessly. Only true love does that.

Amanda, so full of love, dutifully drew closer to God through her suffering. Byron drew closer to Amanda and also to God, driven not by his mind’s call of duty but his heart’s call to love.

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

There is quite a bit of movement in this week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads, with a new #1 paper and new papers debuting on the list at #3, #4, and #5:

1. [285 Downloads]  The History of International Tax Law, by Marilyne Sadowsky (University Paris 1, Sorbonne Law School)
2. [284 Downloads]  Taxing the Top 100: U.S. Estimates of Winners and Losers From Pillar One Amount A, by Lorraine Eden (Texas A&M; Google Scholar)
3. [156 Downloads]  Do Lawyers Need Economists?, by Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar)
4. [138 Downloads]  Biden’s Proposed Tax Increases in Simple and Multivariate Charts, by Libin Zhang (Fried Frank, New York)
5. [104 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)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: No Deduction For Under-The-Table Cash Payments
2. AAUP, Higher Ed Faces Existential Threat: Numbers And Salaries Are Down For Tenure-Track/Tenured Faculty, Way Up For Administrators; University Long-Term Debt Is Up 71%
3. Allison Christians (McGill) & Leandra Lederman (Indiana), How To Read A Tax Statute
4. The Daily Iowan, 8th Circuit Again Finds University Of Iowa Administrators Personally Liable For Deregistering Christian Student Group That Required Leaders To Affirm 'Basic Biblical Truths Of Christianity'
5. Jim Rosenblatt (Dean Emeritus, Mississippi College School of Law), The Median Length Of Service Of The 203 Law School Deans: 3.15 Years
6. NALP, Lawyer Career Satisfaction Remains Remarkably High Three Years After Graduation Despite Pandemic Challenges
7. Patricia Lee Refo (President, ABA), The American Bar Association Responds on ‘Woke Law Schools’
8. Karen Sloan (Reuters), 47% Of Law Schools Are Requiring Vaccinations This Fall; Indoor Mask Mandates Are Surging
9. Journal Of Legal Education Symposium, Gender Inequity Throughout the Legal Academy
10. Baylor Law Review Symposium, Vision For Law School Leadership Training

DOJ Says Treasury Must Give Trump’s Tax Returns To Congress

• Josh Blackman (South Texas), A Tale Of Two OLCs: The Biden OLC Disagrees With the Trump OLC on the House's Requests For Trump's Tax Returns.
• Bloomberg, Trump’s Tax Returns Can Be Released to Congress, DOJ Says
• New York Times, Treasury Must Turn Over Trump’s Taxes to Congress, the Justice Dept. Says.
• Wall Street Journal, Justice Department Advises Treasury to Release Trump Tax Returns
• Washington Post, Congress Should Get Trump’s Tax Returns, Biden Justice Department Says

Memorandum Opinion For the Acting General Counsel, Department of the Treasury, Ways and Means Committee’s Request for the Former President’s Tax Returns and Related Tax Information Pursuant to 26 U.S.C. § 6103(f )(1), 45 Op. O.L.C. __ (July 30, 2021):

Section 6103(f)(1) of title 26, U.S. Code, vests the congressional tax committees with a broad right to receive tax information from the Department of the Treasury. It embodies a long-standing judgment of the political branches that the tax committees are uniquely suited to receive such information. The committees, however, cannot compel the Executive Branch to disclose such information without satisfying the constitutional requirement that the information could serve a legitimate legislative purpose.

In assessing whether requested information could serve a legitimate legislative purpose, the Executive Branch must give due weight to Congress’s status as a co-equal branch of government. Like courts, therefore, Executive Branch officials must apply a presumption that Legislative Branch officials act in good faith and in furtherance of legitimate objectives.

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We’re Kidding Ourselves That Law Firms (And Law Schools) Function Well From Home

New York Times op-ed:  We’re Kidding Ourselves That Workers Perform Well From Home, by John Zavitsanos (J.D. 1987, Michigan; Co-Founder, Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing, Houston):

This March, my partners and I paid special bonuses to all employees at my law firm in the heart of this city. Unlike at many other firms around the country, this $395,000 in bonuses — in addition to the $2.7 million in year-end bonuses — was not some apology or atonement for cutbacks stemming from the coronavirus economy. We wanted to reward all 90 of our employees for their record-breaking work in 2020: Our small, specialized, 28-year-old firm had its best year yet, and we did it mostly together.

Not Zoom together — real together.

In March 2020, a tidal wave of stay-at-home orders from local and state officials turned downtown Houston into the kind of a ghost town one might imagine when a hurricane is about to hit. We closed our office along with most other city businesses.

Advocates of the move hoped that working from home would not slow productivity significantly and could obviate the need for office space in the future. But in a remote-work setting, we never matched the team creativity and production we had taken for granted at our office. On Zoom, some people were distracted and anxious to leave meetings, but in person, they were engaged and animated — there was just no comparison.

While lawyers at other Houston law firms claimed to be happy with remote work, I believe it prevented us from performing at our sharpest. There is a cost to working at home that goes beyond depression, disconnectedness and failing to bathe regularly: It can drain morale and diminish collegiality.

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Tax Panel Today At SEALS

Tax panel today at the 2021 SEALS Annual Conference on Amelia Island, Florida (program):

Workshop on Tax Law: Tax Law, Policy, and Human Beings
Sometimes we forget, but real live human beings (and dead ones!) are subject to the income tax. The presenters on this panel consider the myriad ways that the income tax responds to and is shaped by the choices human beings make. In particular, papers in this panel address the rise of telework, the effect of the tax system on the cost of death, tax and the cyborg, and the human factor in the economic calculus.

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Eyal-Cohen Reviews The Charitable Tax Deduction And Civic Engagement By Hayashi & Hopkins

This week, Mirit Eyal-Cohen (Alabama; Google Scholar) reviews Andrew T. Hayashi (Virginia; Google Scholar) & Justin Hopkins (Virginia; Google Scholar), The Charitable Tax Deduction and Civic Engagement.

It’s no wonder the federal income tax deduction of charitable contribution has been central theme in recent political debates. The tax expenditure to the U.S. government from the charitable contribution deduction in 2018 amounted to over $45 billion and projected to exceed $88 million in 2028. Recently, the CARES Act expended this tax benefit permitting taxpayers who take the standard deduction to deduct up to $300 for charitable contributions while increasing the maximum amount of deductible cash contributions for itemizers. Albeit its historical record as a social and economic policy by providing supplemental (sometimes primary) support for welfare and social services through wealth transfers from wealthy and their preferred charities to the poor, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden have all proposed limiting the charitable deduction and even abolishing it altogether. The current charitable deduction increases opportunities to influence political representativeness and appears to favor high-income taxpayers (who itemize their deductions) and their chosen charities while remaining unsuccessful in closing the inequity gap (not all 501(c)(3) organizations benefit lower-income households) and the decline of voluntary associations.

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• Bloomberg, Defund the Tax Police? Republicans Better Not
• Bloomberg, New IRA Product Allows for Tax-Free Bitcoin Mining
• Bloomberg, Senators Eye Cryptocurrency Taxes to Fund Infrastructure Plan
• Bloomberg, Tax Data Reveal Firms Shifting Profits and Paying Lower Rates
• The Boston Globe, Wealthy Americans Targeted by US in Panama Tax-Fraud Probe
• Center for American Progress, Summary of Proposals and Policy Actions To Reduce the Black-White Wealth Gap

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• April M. Barton (Duquesne), Teaching Lawyers to Think Like Leaders: The Next Big Shift in Legal Education
• Baylor Symposium, Vision For Law School Leadership Training
• Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Normalizing Struggle
• Darby Dickerson (Dean, Southwestern), Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Negotiating Your First Employment Offer in Legal Academia
• Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas), The Major Transitions in Professional Formation and Development from Being a Student to Being a Lawyer Present Opportunities to Benefit the Students and the Law School
• Stephanie Roberts Hartung (Northeastern), Book Review, 69 J. Legal Educ. 217 (2019) (reviewing Nancy Levit (UMKC) & Allen Rostron (UMKC), eds., Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law 2019)

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Wharton Is First Elite MBA Program To Enroll More Women Than Men

Wall Street Journal, Wharton Is First Elite M.B.A. Program to Enroll More Women Than Men:

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will mark a milestone this fall: A majority of incoming M.B.A. candidates will be women.

The business school, one of the most highly ranked in the U.S., said that 52% of its new fall cohort will be female, marking the highest percentage of women enrolled in its 140-year history.

The milestone makes Wharton the first of the so-called “M7” M.B.A. programs to admit more women than men. In addition to Wharton, those seven elite schools include Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Columbia Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

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Tax Panel Today At SEALS

Tax panel today at the 2021 SEALS Annual Conference on Amelia Island, Florida (program):

Workshop on Tax Law: Discussion Group: Tax Law
This discussion group is broadly concerned with issues of taxation. Discussants will address individual income tax, corporate income tax, state & local tax, estate & gift tax, tax expenditure policy, international tax, and entitlements. While these disparate themes might seem only loosely related, a common thread of the difficulties of balancing equity, simplicity, incentives, and transparency runs through all of them. These scholars grapple with the central tax topics of the day, and address the looming concerns that must be dealt with by all levels of government.

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ATPI Taxation And Gender Summer Series: The U.S. Pandemic Effects

ATPI Taxation and Gender Summer Series: The U.S. Pandemic Effects [registration]:

[The series] will continue on July 30 [at 1:00 PM ET] with a focus on the US pandemic effects, which disproportionately affected women, featuring Yvette Lind, Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Elaine Maag, Principal Research Associate at the Tax Policy Center, and Amy Matsui, Director, Income Security and Senior Counsel at the National Women's Law Center.

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47% Of Law Schools Are Requiring Vaccinations This Fall; Indoor Mask Mandates Are Surging

Karen Sloan (Reuters), Returning to Law School This Fall? Better Get Vaccinated:

Students at nearly half of the law schools in the nation will need to provide proof that they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19 if they want to set foot on campus this fall, including at all the so-called T-14 elite schools, according to a higher education publication's list of vaccine mandates at universities and colleges.

And with the Delta variant spreading fast, a growing number of schools are reversing course and announcing that mask use will again be mandatory while indoors — dashing hopes of a mask-free fall semester. Duke, Harvard and Georgetown are among the universities that have said they plan to retain or reinstate an indoor mask requirement when the new school year begins.

It appears that vaccine mandates for students are more common at law schools than at colleges and universities generally. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 611 colleges and universities have thus far adopted vaccine requirements, or about 20% of the nation’s approximately 3,000 degree-granting institutions. But at least 93 American Bar Association-accredited law schools are now requiring vaccinations, which amounts to 47% of such schools, the Chronicle's list shows.

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WSJ: Finance Chiefs Try To Wean Employees From Excel Without Much Success

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Wall Street Journal, Finance Chiefs Are Still Trying to Replace Excel With New Tools:

Finance chiefs are still trying to get employees to move away from Microsoft Excel, the ubiquitous spreadsheet program loved and loathed by accounting professionals.

While many still see it as a helpful tool, some CFOs say finance teams rely on it too much, often for tasks that Excel isn’t well-suited to handle. That can lead to mistakes and wasted time.

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Gale & Haldeman: Taxing Business — The TCJA And What Comes Next

William G. Gale (Tax Policy Center; Google Scholar) & Claire Haldeman (Tax Policy Center), Taxing Business: The TCJA and What Comes Next, 102 Tax Notes Int'l 1759 (June 28, 2021): 

In this article, the authors propose reforms that would repeal and amend various business tax provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and would raise revenue while making business taxation more efficient, equitable, and resistant to profit shifting. ...

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Gale & Haldeman: The TCJA — Searching For Supply-Side Effects

William G. Gale (Tax Policy Center; Google Scholar) & Claire Haldeman (Tax Policy Center), The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: Searching For Supply-Side Effects:

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) instituted the most substantial changes in taxation in decades and was designed to boost the economy via supply-side incentives. This paper reviews these changes and examines the impacts on economic aggregates through 2019. The Act clearly reduced revenue. The effect on GDP is difficult to tease out of the data. Investment growth rose after TCJA was enacted but was driven by trends in aggregate demand, oil prices, and intellectual capital that were unrelated to TCJA’s supplyside incentives. Growth in business formation, employment, and median wages slowed after TCJA was enacted. International profit shifting fell only slightly, and the boost in repatriated profits primarily led to increased share repurchases rather than new investment.

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ATPI Taxation And Gender Summer Series: The OECD

ATPI Taxation and Gender Summer Series: The OECD:

The series [started July 23] with the pathbreaking work the OECD has been doing on tax and gender, developing the notion that gender blind is not gender neutral, and will feature Grace Perez-Navarro, the Deputy Director of the OECD's Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, and Joanne Shelling, Senior Policy Advisor at the OECD's Forum on Tax Administration. Program will be moderated by Julie Divola, Chair-Elect of the ABA Tax Section.

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Can Continuing Legal Education Pass The Test? Empirical Lessons From The Medical World.

Rima Sirota (Georgetown), Can Continuing Legal Education Pass the Test? Empirical Lessons From the Medical World., 36 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol'y __ (2022):

Mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) takes millions of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars from American lawyers every year, with the burden landing in disproportionate fashion on new lawyers, public interest lawyers, and solo practitioners. CLE proponents insist that the system protects the public by maintaining lawyer competence. In the forty-five years since the first jurisdictions began requiring CLE, no evidence has emerged in support of this claim.

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Tax Panels Today At SEALS

Tax panels today at the 2021 SEALS Annual Conference on Amelia Island, Florida (program):

New Scholars Workshop: Corporate Law, Financial Markets, and Taxation II
This workshop gives New Scholars the opportunity to present a work-in-progress in a welcoming and supportive environment and to receive feedback on their presentation from more senior scholars in their fields. New Scholars are also assigned a mentor. The program is open to junior faculty at member schools. New Scholars are nominated to participate in the New Scholars Workshop by the deans of their respective law schools.

• John Anderson (Mississippi College) (moderator)
• Catherine Baylin Duryea (St. John's), Crumbs of Judicial Relief: Judicial Review of Price Controls During Wartime
  Mentor: Eric Segall (Georgia State) (mentor)
• Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Utah), Taxing Telework 
  Mentor: Tessa Davis (South Carolina)
• Jennifer Levine (Quinnipiac), Qualified Small Business Stock: A Proposal for Reform to Promote Business Formation and Growth 
  Mentor: Joan Heminway (Tennessee)
• Daniel Schaffa (Richmond), Payroll Subsidies as a Policy Tool
  Mentor: Colin Marks (St. Mary's)

Workshop on Tax Law: Tax Law and Policy - International, Federal, State
This panel addresses a variety of issues in tax policy, including the implications of complex sets of relevant tax rules in various contexts and scenarios. Papers included in this panel consider cross-border issues at the local, state, and international levels, as well as questions that arise around the coordination between the IRS and other agencies. Other panelists consider issues around the marriage penalty and the physical presence rules.

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Baylor Symposium: Vision For Law School Leadership Training

Symposium, Vision For Law School Leadership Training, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 1-248 (2021) (video):

• Leah Teague (Baylor), Making Progress in Legal Education: Leadership Development Training in Law Schools, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 1 (2021)
• Erwin Chemerinsky (UC-Berkeley), Remembering Deborah Rhode, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 64 (2021)
• Deborah L. Rhode (Stanford), Leadership in Times of Social Upheaval: Lessons for Lawyers, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 67 (2021)
• April Mara Barton (Duquesne), Teaching Lawyers to Think Like Leaders: The Next Big Shift in Legal Education, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 115 (2021)
• Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar), The Major Transitions in Professional Formation and Development from Being a Student to Being a Lawyer Present Opportunities to Benefit the Students and the Law School, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 139 (2021)
• Patrick Bryan (Systems Planning & Analysis) & Donald J. Polden (Santa Clara), Learning Lawyer Leadership from the Military Profession, 72 Baylor Law Rev. 170 (2021)
• Martin H. Brinkley (North Carolina), Teaching Leadership in American Law Schools: Why the Pushback?, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 194 (2021)
• Lee Fisher (Cleveland-Marshall), Change at the Speed of Leadership, 73 Baylor Law Rev. 211 (2021)

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Remote Bar Examinees Report Blank Screens, Lost Time, Panic, And Looking 'Death In The Eye'

Law.com, Remote Bar Examinees Report Blank Screens, Lost Time, Panic and Looking 'Death in the Eye':

Law school graduates taking the remote bar exam Tuesday and Wednesday are reporting technical failures, blank screens, tears and overwhelming stress.

Widespread reports detailed lost time ranging from a few minutes to an hour and a half. The problems centered on the ExamSoft program used for the test.

“I am not an emotional person at all, but ExamSoft’s software going black and turning off the camera during the bar exam a short while ago had me in tears,” Brooklyn Law School graduate MacKenzie Olson said in a Twitter post Tuesday afternoon. She added, “#abolishthebar.”

“Computer froze in the middle of bar exam essay question today,” Stanford Law JD Nicholas Wallace said on Twitter Tuesday. “Thankfully the exam started working after I restarted my computer, but it was fun to look death in the eye for a few minutes.” ...

The National Conference of Bar Examiners—the group that designed the test— acknowledged the problems Tuesday and hinted help would be on the way.

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ProPublica: The Number Of People With IRAs Worth $5 Million Or More Has Tripled, Congress Says

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  ProPublica, The Number of People With IRAs Worth $5 Million or More Has Tripled, Congress Says:

The number of multimillion-dollar individual retirement accounts has soared in the past decade, as more wealthy Americans use the tax-advantaged vehicles to shield fortunes from income taxes, according to new data released by Congress today.

The data reveals for the first time the staggering amount of money socked away in tax-free mega Roth accounts: more than $15 billion held by just 156 Americans.

The new data also shows that the number of Americans with traditional and Roth IRAs worth over $5 million tripled, to more than 28,000, between 2011 and 2019.

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The Effect Of Taxes On Where Superstars Work

David R. Agrawal (Kentucky) & Kenneth Tester (Kentucky), The Effect of Taxes on Where Superstars Work:

Prior studies show that taxes matter for the residential locations of high-income earners. But, states raise a significant share of income taxes from nonresidents, especially superstars. Using superstar athletes and variation in state tax rates, we provide causal evidence on the effect of the net-of-participation tax rate on the location of labor supply. 

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Calculating Conservation Easement Settlement Initiative Benefits

Beckett Cantley (Northeastern) & Geoffrey Dietrich (Cantley Dietrich, Las Vegas), Calculating Conservation Easement Settlement Initiative Benefits, 168 Tax Notes Fed. 2015 (Sept. 14, 2020):

Following its recent success against syndicated conservation easements (“SCEs”), the IRS announced a Settlement Initiative (“SI”) on June 25, 2020 to “bring finality” to taxpayers battling the IRS on SCE issues. The IRS has been suspicious of conservation easements since 2016, when it first designated SCE transactions as “listed transactions.” In 2019, the IRS announced a “significant increase in enforcement actions” related to SCE transactions as SCEs made the IRS’ “Dirty Dozen” list of tax scams. This increase in enforcement actions has primarily resulted in IRS victories in the Tax Court. Thus, the IRS announced the SI to leverage its favorable outcomes against the taxpayers. Some critics are skeptical of the SI, claiming that the IRS has only been winning SCE cases on technical grounds and that the IRS does not hold as strong of a position as it claims on the true issues surrounding SCEs.7 Accordingly, many suggest that few taxpayers will take part in the SI. However, the IRS urges taxpayers to take a “hard, realistic look at their cases” with independent counsel.

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Hartung Reviews Levit & Rostron's Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning And Making A Difference In Law

Stephanie Roberts Hartung (Northeastern), Book Review, 69 J. Legal Educ. 217 (2019) (reviewing Nancy Levit (UMKC) & Allen Rostron (UMKC), eds., Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law, Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2019): 

Scott Turow’s One L, the widely read account of his first year at Harvard Law School in 1975, is said to have “frightened, informed, and inspired a generation of lawyers-to-be”. Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law, published nearly 45 years later, is billed as a “collection of stories taking a further look at the often dramatic and sometimes traumatic experience of embarking on the study of law”. While One L ostensibly described “universal truths” (xi) about law school in the 1970s, Beyond One L illustrates how dramatically the law school experience has changed since Turow arrived at Harvard as part of a first-year class that was overwhelmingly “male, white, and straight”. At the same time, Beyond One L’s collection of essays, which includes entries from several well-known figures in legal education, reminds us how many aspects of legal education remain the same.

In the face of difficult and polarizing times, when lawyering and the rule of law are frequently perceived as under attack, Beyond One L offers “an antidote to disillusionment with the legal profession” through storytelling.

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Tax Panels Today At SEALS

Tax panels today at the 2021 SEALS Annual Conference on Amelia Island, Florida (program):

New Scholars Workshop: Corporate Law, Financial Markets, and Taxation I
This workshop gives New Scholars the opportunity to present a work-in-progress in a welcoming and supportive environment and to receive feedback on their presentation from more senior scholars in their fields. New Scholars are also assigned a mentor. The program is open to junior faculty at member schools. New Scholars are nominated to participate in the New Scholars Workshop by the deans of their respective law schools.

• Mark Drumbl (Washington & Lee) (moderator)
• Nicole Iannarone (Drexel), Faux Transparency
  Mentor: Constance Wagner (St. Louis)
• Carla Reyes (SMU), Limited Liability DAOs for Regular People
  Mentor: James Gibson (Richmond)

Call for Papers Luncheon
This luncheon is being held to honor the winners of SEALS' annual Call for Papers competition. Admission ticket required.

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NALP: Lawyer Career Satisfaction Remains Remarkably High Three Years After Graduation Despite Pandemic Challenges

NALP, Lawyer Career Satisfaction Remains Remarkably High Three Years After Graduation Despite Pandemic Challenges:

The NALP Foundation and NALP today released their joint study, Law School Alumni Employment and Satisfaction for the Class of 2017, their eighth such report. Reflecting the legal profession's increasing focus on diversity and inclusion, this year’s study includes new information about diverse and first-generation graduates, as well as data on educational debt and the impact of COVID-19 and the economic downturn.

Among the key findings:

• High employment and satisfaction rates: Even with a slight overall reduction in graduates’ employment rate three years out, both the employment rate (96%) and career satisfaction levels (85%) remain remarkably high.  
• High mobility levels: Over two-thirds of alumni have held two or more sequential positions since graduation.
• Limited impact of COVID-19 and the economic downturn:
• Nearly one-third of graduates reported no noticeable impact on their jobs and careers;
• Over one quarter of graduates reported these issues affected educational loan repayment;
• Less than a quarter experienced a reduction in their amount of work.
• Outstanding educational debt varied considerably: 
• Total educational debt ranged from none to $600,000 at the three-year mark;
• A sizable number of graduates had $100,000 or more in educational debt still outstanding. 
• Decline in overall satisfaction levels with current job: 
• 45% rated their overall satisfaction as “extremely satisfied,” down from 53% for the Class of 2016;
• Graduates reported one of the highest levels of “dissatisfaction” to date (10%).

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Leff: Marijuana Taxation—Theory And Practice

Benjamin M. Leff (American; Google Scholar), Marijuana Taxation: Theory and Practice, 101 B.U. L. Rev. 999 (2021):

Marijuana legalization creates a host of complex legal problems, not the least of which is how to best tax the emerging legal market. This Essay attempts to bridge the gap between tax theory and marijuana policy to make some modest claims. First, it roots the discussion of state-level marijuana taxation in the theoretical distinction between ordinary revenue-raising taxes and so-called “Pigouvian” or regulatory taxes. It makes the somewhat controversial claim that the best taxing strategy for states is to attempt to capture as much of the marijuana legalization premium as possible without driving consumers into the illegal market, and that other Pigouvian policy concerns are likely to be less important. Second, it roots the discussion of federal-level taxes in the many factors that will change if federal prohibition ends, again recognizing the importance of possible additional legalization surplus if marijuana is legalized at the federal level.

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Dickerson: Finding The Goldilocks Zone: Negotiating Your First Employment Offer In Legal Academia

Darby Dickerson (Dean, Southwestern), Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Negotiating Your First Employment Offer in Legal Academia, 69 J. Legal Educ. 48 (2019):

This WIP is for individuals, particularly women, who are about to negotiate their first employment offers in legal academia (whether tenure-line or non-tenure-line). The goal is to hit the "Goldilocks Zone" where you negotiate to strike the best balance to meet your needs and your law school's needs.

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Tax Trailblazers: Tax Careers On Capitol Hill

U.S. Tax Court's Diversity & Inclusion Series, Tax Careers on Capitol Hill:

Please join the United States Tax Court for the next in its series of monthly programs celebrating diversity and inclusion in tax law. Moderated by Judge Cary Douglas Pugh, July’s webinar [today at 7:00 PM ET] looks at tax careers on Capitol Hill [registration]

Tiffany P. Smith is Chief Tax Counsel for Senator Ron Wyden’s staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance. She has handled tax issues relating to international and corporate tax, tax exempt organizations and estate and gift taxes. Ms. Smith has also worked on small business/pass-throughs and individual issues, including the alternative minimum tax, and education tax incentives. Prior to working with the Senate Finance Committee, Ms. Smith worked with the Office of Chief Counsel for the Internal Revenue Service. Ms. Smith was also an Assistant Chief Counsel for the City of Chicago’s Office of Chief Counsel. She handled local tax issues in the Regulatory and Aviation Litigation Division. Ms. Smith received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and her LL.M in Taxation from Georgetown University.

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2022 Vault Law Firm Tax Rankings: Skadden Is #1 For 12th Year In A Row

Vault has released its annual ranking of the Top 100 Law Firms, based on prestige as voted on by associates (methodology here). The Top Tax Practices are:

Rank	Firm	Home City	% Vote
1	Skadden	New York	43.98%
2	Davis Polk	New York	21.76%
3	Kirkland & Ellis	Chicago	20.83%
4	Cravath	New York	20.37%
5	Baker McKenzie	Chicago	16.90%
6	Wachtell	New York	14.58%
7	McDermott, Will & Emery	Chicago	14.35%
8	Latham & Watkins	Los Angeles	13.19%
9	Cleary Gottlieb	New York	9.49%
10	Weil Gotshal	New York	9.26%
11	Sullivan & Cromwell	New York	9.03%
12	Caplin & Drysdale	D.C.	7.64%
12	Simpson Thacher	New York	7.64%
14	Morgan Lewis	Philadelphia	7.41%
15	Paul Weiss	New York	6.48%
16	Mayer Brown	Chicago	6.02%
17	Miller & Chevalier	D.C.	5.32%
18	Debevoise & Plimpton	New York	4.17%
19	Eversheds Sutherland	Atlanta	3.94%
19	Ropes & Gray	Boston	3.94%

For the twelfth year in a row, Skadden is #1. The city rankings are:

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Brown: How Race Plays Into Tax Policing

The Atlantic:  The IRS Is Targeting the Poorest Americans, by Dorothy Brown (Emory):

Senate Republicans recently killed a proposed increase in funding for the IRS that would have helped pay for the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. The beneficiaries of that omission will be wealthy taxpayers, who regularly manage to stay just beyond the law’s reach with their tax-avoidance strategies. This is all too familiar. As my research shows, rich white Americans tend to get tax rules designed for their benefit. Quashing the funding that could have helped the IRS more aggressively pursue elite tax fraud is yet another example.

Without increased funding, the IRS will continue targeting low-income taxpayers for audits, particularly those claiming the earned-income tax credit.

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Hayashi & Mitchell: Maintaining Scholarly Integrity In The Age Of Bibliometrics

Andrew T. Hayashi (Virginia; Google Scholar) & Gregory Mitchell (Virginia; Google Scholar), Maintaining Scholarly Integrity in the Age of Bibliometrics, 69 J. Legal Educ. 138 (2019):

As quantitative measures of scholarly impact gain prominence in the legal academy, we should expect institutions and scholars to engage in a variety of tactics designed to inflate the apparent influence of their scholarly output. We identify these tactics and identify countermeasures that should be taken to prevent this manipulation. The rise of bibliometrics poses a significant risk to the scholarly endeavor but, with foresight, we can maintain scholarly integrity in the age of bibliometrics.

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Guthrie & Lamm: The Aid Gap

Chris Guthrie (Dean, Vanderbilt; Google Scholar) & Emily Lamm (J.D. 2019, Vanderbilt), The Aid Gap, 69 J. Legal Educ. 123 (2019):

Women lag men in wages and wealth. Women earn 81 percent as much as similarly situated men, and they own only 32 percent of the wealth that men own. Lawyers are no different. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, female lawyers make 77 percent as much as their male peers, and according to the National Association of Women Lawyers, female equity partners make almost $100,000 less each year than their male peers. Because wage gaps lead to wealth gaps, female lawyers accrue less wealth than their male counterparts.

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Journal Of Legal Education Symposium: Gender Inequity Throughout The Legal Academy

Symposium, Gender Inequity Throughout the Legal Academy, 69 J. Legal Educ. 3-122 (2019):

• Kristen K. Tiscione (Georgetown) & Melissa H. Weresh (Drake; Google Scholar), Building Bridges Across Curricular and Status Lines: Gender Inequity Throughout the Legal Academy, 69 J. Legal Educ. 3 (2019)
• Sahar Aziz (Rutgers; Google Scholar), Identity Politics is Failing Women in Legal Academia, 69 J. Legal Educ. 14 (2019)
• Mary Nicol Bowman (Arizona State), Legal Writing as Office Housework?, 69 J. Legal Educ. 22 (2019)
• Leslie Patrice Culver (Utah; Google Scholar), No Matter How Loud I Shout: Legal Writing as Gender Sidelining, 69 J. Legal Educ. 31 (2019)
• Meera E. Deo (Thomas Jefferson), The Paradox of Faculty-Student Interactions, 69 J. Legal Educ. 36 (2019)
• Darby Dickerson (Dean, Southwestern), Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Negotiating Your First Employment Offer in Legal Academia, 69 J. Legal Educ. 48 (2019)
• Susan Hanley Duncan (Mississippi; Google Scholar), Reducing Gender Inequity in the Academy and the Legal Profession, 69 J. Legal Educ. 95 (2019)
• Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State; Google Scholar) & Kyle McEntee (Law School Transparency), Gender Equity in Law School Enrollment: An Elusive Goal, 69 J. Legal Educ. 102 (2019)

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Blank: United States National Report On Mandatory Disclosure Rules

Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), United States National Report on Mandatory Disclosure Rules:

This National Report was prepared for a conference titled Mandatory Disclosure Rules, hosted by the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in July 2021. This National Report addresses the mandatory disclosure rules that apply to “reportable transactions” under United States tax law. In responding to the conference questionnaire, this National Report describes the tax enforcement strengths and weaknesses of the mandatory disclosure rules that apply to reportable transactions in the US. It provides an overview of the types of transactions that taxpayers and advisors are required to disclose to the IRS, the persons that are required to disclose, and the process for disclosure.

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Williams: Law Schools As Gatekeepers Of The Profession

Christopher Williams (Chicago), Gatekeeping the Profession, 26 Cardozo J. Equal Rts. & Soc. Just. 171 (2020):

This article critically examines the structure of U.S. legal education and reveals how the structure of U.S. legal education serves as a racial gatekeeper that prevents black students from entering the legal profession in the United States. In addition, this article also reveals how the exportation of U.S. legal education to India resulted in a similar process, one in which legal education serves as a caste based gatekeeper that prevents dalit students from entering the legal profession in India. This connection is made by introducing and characterizing the model of U.S. legal education as an adaptive prejudice model whereby the model adapts and reproduces the prejudices of the society in which it is situated in. 

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Elkins: A Scalar Conception Of Tax Residence For Individuals

David Elkins (Netanya), A Scalar Conception of Tax Residence for Individuals:

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.

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Cui: What Does China Want From International Tax Reform?

Wei Cui (British Columbia; Google Scholar), What Does China Want From International Tax Reform?, 103 Tax Notes Int'l 141 (July 12, 2021):

The G-7 countries’ June 5 accord to implement a global minimum corporate tax rate promises to set off frenzied negotiations among nations regarding coordinated international tax reform. Finance ministers from the G-20 countries met in Venice on July 9-10, after this magazine went to press. Whether members of the G-7 club can persuade the larger group to endorse their minimum tax proposal will determine what mandate the OECD receives to continue the (re-)negotiations under pillars 1 and 2 of its program of work to develop a consensus solution. How will China respond to the G-7 proposal at the G-20 meeting? That question is especially intriguing, given the growing political antagonisms between China and some G-7 countries.

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Magical Thinking and Trusts

Bridget J. Crawford (Pace; Google Scholar), Magical Thinking and Trusts, 50 Seton Hall L. Rev. 289 (2019) (reviewed by Hayes Holderness (Richmond) here): 

At a time of monumental economic inequality in the United States, wealthy individuals and their tax-motivated behavior have come under significant scrutiny from all corners. In 2019, the Supreme Court issued its first major ruling in over sixty years on the state income taxation of trusts. In North Carolina Department of Revenue v. Kimberley Rice Kaestner 1992 Family Trust, the Court declined to close what some critics consider to be a major loophole that benefits the trusts that wealthy individuals create for family members. This Article makes two principal claims — one interpretative and the other normative. The Article explains why the Court’s decision in Kaestner Trust is correct as a matter of law. Just as trusts themselves are a type of magical thinking — legal fictions made real by law — so, too, is the hope that the judicial branch can play an active role in limiting the use of trusts by the wealthy. Because judges cannot disregard centuries of trust jurisprudence, critics of family trusts have directed their attention mostly to the tax law. This Article suggests that reformation of the substantive law of trusts might help achieve reform, as well.

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