LSAC: The Fall 2020 Law School Class ... And An Early Look At The Incoming Fall 2021 Class

Kellye Y. Testy (President & CEO, LSAC), Starting Law School Amid a Pandemic: The Incoming Class of 2020:

Not only did a class of law students graduate in 2020 amid the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new class also just began their studies during this “one-of-a-kind” year. What do we know about this intrepid group? Each fall, LSAC works closely with the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and law schools across the United States to compile enrollment data for the incoming class of law students. This aggregated “Standard 509” data provides a snapshot of the size and make-up of the incoming class, including number of students, full- and part-time status, racial, ethnic, and gender information, as well as LSAT score and undergraduate GPA by quartiles for each law school. This data also provides an opportunity to look at areas of progress and emerging trends that could affect the future of legal education and our justice system more broadly. ...

When using maximum reporting, LSAC’s preferred reporting method because it captures all the racial and ethnic categories in which a candidate self-identifies, Black/African American students comprise 9.7% of 2020 matriculants, compared to 9.5% in 2019 and 9.7% in 2018. Hispanic/Latinx students make up 12.4% of this year’s incoming class, up from 11.8% in 2019 and 11.5% in 2018. ...

It is still early in the 2021 application cycle, but according to LSAC data, we are seeing very significant growth in terms of the overall number of applicants and applications, with strong growth across all demographic groups.

As of today, the total number of JD applicants is up 38.2% compared to this time last year.

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More On The Controversy Over 'Dr.' Jill Biden

LawProfBlawg (Anonymous Professor, Top 100 Law School), Dr. Biden And That Op-Ed: Funny How the 'Dr.' Thing and the 'Hierarchy' Thing Are Related:

Dear Law Professors:

It started with yet another “Let’s not call her Dr.” hit piece. The kind that has been written before, many times. No, I’m not going to link to it.

Then came the style guides, which showed that only those with an M.D. should be called doctor. As if to say that makes it perfectly okay to publish the hit piece. I’m missing the part of the style guide where newspapers call Ph.D.s “kiddo.” Maybe you can help me find it. ...

Oh, just as an aside: I see law professors be dismissive of Ph.D.s every f**king day. I mean, unless they want to hire someone with a Ph.D./J.D. Then it’s OMG GUSH so IMPRESSIVE. Want to guess who that usually benefits? Want to guess where their J.D.s usually come from? ...

You see, this isn’t just about Dr. Biden. It is about the microaggressions that women face every day. The slights to their expertise. The fact that you’ll find any f**king excuse not to call her Dr. just because it offends you. But thanks for the nice discussion of disparate impact with your “I only call M.D.s doctors” standards. Want to look at THAT data? 

It’s about how when the hierarchy is challenged by minorities and women making inroads, it means somehow that the achievements mean less somehow because it isn’t the coveted prize of only white men.

Steven Lubet (Northwestern) & Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern), That Op-Ed About Jill Biden Is Awful. Northwestern’s Response Might Be Worse.:

Last week the essayist Joseph Epstein provoked an uproar by writing a silly Wall Street Journal piece saying that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education — formally, an Ed.D. — should stop using the honorific “Dr.” The essay was rude and condescending to the next first lady, referring to her as “kiddo” and calling her dissertation “unpromising.”

But what happened next is also “unpromising.” Northwestern University’s English department’s website published a poorly composed denunciation, obviously intended to retaliate for Epstein’s loutish opinion. A spokesman for the university saw fit to announce that “while we firmly support academic freedom and freedom of expression, we do not agree with Mr. Epstein’s opinion.” Most alarmingly, Epstein’s name abruptly disappeared from the department’s website. Epstein was a visiting lecturer at Northwestern from 1974 to 2002, and as late as last week he was listed on the department website as an “emeritus lecturer.”

As current law-school faculty members at Northwestern, specializing in constitutional law (Koppelman) and professional responsibility (Lubet), we believe that it is a serious violation of academic freedom to penalize a faculty member, including an emeritus one, for expressing unpopular views. ...

Almost every American university has distressing incidents in its history, such as the exploitation of enslaved labor and construction on stolen land. An honest accounting requires reckoning with history, not erasing it, and that includes even the trivial recognition of those who have held teaching positions. Northwestern’s own motto begins “Quaecumque sunt vera,” meaning “Whatsoever things are true.” It may be uncomfortable, but it is nonetheless true that Joseph Epstein is an emeritus lecturer in English at Northwestern University.

Chronicle of Higher Education, That Op-Ed About Jill Biden Was Sexist. But the Real Problem Lies Deeper.:

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The Paradox Of Faculty-Student Interactions

Meera E. Deo (Thomas Jefferson), The Paradox of Faculty-Student Interactions, 68 J. Legal Educ. ___ (2020):

Women of color in legal academia have a complicated relationship with students, as evidenced by empirical data. Most of these professors have strong positive relationships with students from all backgrounds. In fact, this accessibility can result in service overload with constant student meetings and events that are rarely acknowledged or rewarded by colleagues or administrators. Furthermore, the few students who push back in the classroom and on course evaluations not only drain the energy and effort of their women of color professors but also shroud the learning environment in tension and negativity.

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

There is a bit of movement in this week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads, with a new #1 paper and a paper returning to the list at #5:

1. [737 Downloads]  A Simple Regulatory Fix for Citizenship Taxation, by John Richardson, Laura Snyder & Karen Alpert (University of Queensland)
2. [513 Downloads]  State Aid: The General Court Decision in Apple, by Stephen Daly (King's College London) & Ruth Mason (Virginia) (reviewed by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Utah) here)
3. [360 Downloads]  Federal Tax Procedure (2020 Practitioner Ed.), by John Townsend
4. [343 Downloads]  Tax Treaty Negotiations: Myth and Reality, by Yariv Brauner (Florida)
5. [266 Downloads]  Is It Time to Eliminate Federal Corporate Income Taxes?, by Edward Lane (Albany) & Randall Wray (UMKC)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. William Jacobson (Cornell), Four Student Groups Demand That Harvard Discipline Law Prof Adrian Vermeule For Tweets Mocking Leftists
2. Julie Reuben (Harvard), Where Academic Freedom Ends
3. Wall Street Journal, Hit By Covid-19, Colleges Do The Unthinkable And Cut Tenure
4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Taxpayer Who Got $1.6m Assessment Reduced To $170k Not Entitled To Costs
5. Wisconsin Public Radio, Marquette To Cut 225 Faculty And Staff As Part Of 25% Reduction In Academic Spending; $12 Million Budget Surplus To Be Used For Strategic Priorities
6. David Hope & Julian Limberg (London School of Economics & Political Science), Fifty Years Of Tax Cuts For The Rich Didn’t Trickle Down
7. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), UCLA Dean Jennifer Mnookin Donates Kidney To Her Father
8. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Taxpayers Behaving Badly (2020)
9. National Jurist, Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam
10. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), A Year Of Lessons From The Tax Court (2020)

Fall 2020 Law School Enrollment Increased 2.4% (+1.5% JD, +7.4% Non-JD); 1L Enrollment Fell 0.2%

ABA Website Updates Data on Law School Admissions, Tuition and Other Matters:

Information about fall 2020 admissions and other matters reported by American Bar Association-approved law schools to the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is now publicly available. The information is required to be made public under Standard 509 of the Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools.

The spreadsheets, explanatory information and the ABA's database of Standard 509 reports, as they are known, are available at www.abarequireddisclosures.org. Some of this information has been collected and summarized on the section's website in its Statistics section under 2020 Standard 509 Data Overview. It shows that total J.D. enrollment for 2020 was up by 1.5% from the previous year. First-year enrollment was essentially flat, declining by 81 students.

2020 Standard 509 Information Report Data Overview (posted 12/18/2020):

ABA-approved law schools are required to post their Standard 509 Information Reports on their websites as part of their ABA Required Disclosures, annually by December 15. The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar website provides access to that information for all law schools, including downloadable spreadsheets of aggregate data that the law schools report. The Section is also providing spreadsheets on a school-by-school basis that report applicant data and LSAT and UGPA information for each school’s 1L matriculants, changes in the 1L classes on a school-by-school basis, and other information. These data come from the annual questionnaires that ABA-approved law schools file with the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar’s Managing Director’s Office.

As the chart below summarizes, 197 law schools that are approved by the ABA to confer the Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree reported total J.D. enrollment of 114,520 for the Fall 2020 term. This is an increase of 1,638 students (1.5 percent) from 2019. An additional 21,292 students were enrolled in other than J.D. degree programs (LL.M., masters and certificate programs). This is an increase of 1,473 (7.4 percent) from 2019. This brings the total law school enrollment for Fall 2020 to 135,812, an increase of 3,128 (2.4 percent).

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California Bar Flags Over 3,000 Applicants For Video Review Of Their October Online Exams; Deans Request That Applicants Be Permitted To Sit For February Exam As They Await Resolution

ABA Journal, Thousands of California Bar Exam Takers Have Video Files Flagged For Review:

More than 3,000 people who sat for the State Bar of California’s remote October exam had their proctoring videos flagged for review, and dozens report receiving violation notices from the agency’s office of admissions.

Applicants say the issues flagged are largely technological, and many claim they had no indication of a problem until they received violation notices. ...

During a Dec. 4 meeting of the California Committee of Bar Examiners, Tammy Campbell, a program manager with the bar, reported that 8,920 applicants took the exam online. Of that group, she said, 3,190—nearly 36%—of the test-takers had their videos flagged for review. ...

Megan Zavieh, an ethics lawyer who defends clients against State Bar of California charges, says she had signed on 19 clients who received Chapter 6 notices and fielded phone calls from many other prospective clients in the same situation as of late Thursday. ...

Several law school deans on Thursday sent a letter to the state bar, urging it to allow people to sit for the February 2021 bar while they are challenging the notices.

Above the Law, California Bar Exam Flagged A THIRD Of Applicants As Cheating

State Bar of California, Post Bar Exam FAQs

Letter to Donna S. Hershkowitz, Interim Executive Director, State Bar of California (Dec. 17, 2020):

Two issues relating to the Chapter 6 Notice of Violation of Examination Rules or Policies process, which was outlined at the December 10, 2020, Annual Law School Assembly meeting, have come to our attention. As discussed more fully below, we respectfully urge the State Bar to allow persons challenging notices of violation to sit for the February Bar Exam, and to allow such persons to view videos of alleged violations when responding to notices.

During the December 10th meeting, the State Bar notified attendees that its staff is in the process of reviewing 3,190 flagged proctoring videos from the October administration of the California Bar Examination—i.e., more than one-third of all test-takers were flagged for possible violations. The State Bar gave no indication of what standards it would impose to assess whether the flagged conduct warrants a Chapter 6 notice and we have no information as regards the number of candidates that have (or can be expected) to receive a Chapter 6 notice.

At the meeting, State Bar staff explained that upon receipt of a Chapter 6 notice, an applicant has ten days to respond in writing. After the State Bar receives the response, staff look into the matter further and decide whether the applicant should be sanctioned. If an applicant receives a sanction for a disputable violation, the applicant may request an appeal. According to Admissions and Educational Standards Rule 4.71(B), “An examination score may be held in abeyance pending resolution of the matter.” However, during the meeting, the State Bar staff stated that if an applicant requests an appeal, the applicant’s bar exam score will be held in abeyance. This means that the applicant will not know their score and the applicant will not be allowed to timely register for the February 2021 bar examination before the matter is resolved.

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Jensen: Valuing Tuition Waivers For Tax Purposes

Erik M. Jensen (Case Western), Valuing Tuition Waivers for Tax Purposes, 45 J.C. & U.L. 289 (2020):

Some tuition waivers provided by universities to employees or family members of employees are taxable benefits; that is often the case for waivers in graduate and professional programs. This article argues that the method used by many universities to value the benefit for tax purposes—treating the tuition sticker price as if it measured value—is an incorrect reading of tax law. Because sticker price generally exceeds fair market value, the result is more taxable income to employees who “benefit” from waivers than should be the case—to the obvious detriment of the employees but also to the detriment of the universities, which may lose good students and employees to other institutions.

Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Eyal-Cohen Reviews Tax Benefits, Higher Education and Race By Crawford & Gerzog

This week, Mirit Eyal-Cohen (Alabama) reviews Bridget J. Crawford (Pace) and Wendy C. Gerzog (Baltimore), Tax Benefits, Higher Education and Race: A Gift Tax Proposal for Direct Tuition Payments (Dec. 2020):

Amid recent nationwide protests and public condemnation of systemic racism, Americans are divided on whether this focus on the race and inequality gap will actually lead to major policy change. This product of collaboration between renowned tax crit Bridget Crawford and gift and estate tax expert Wendy Gerzog yields not only an admirable scholarly inquiry into the correlation between tax, race, and higher education, but also a practical proposal for policy reform to reduce race-based economic inequality. Using the case study of gift tax exemption for direct tuition payments, the Authors illustrate the ways tax rules can aggravate the racial wealth gap and put together a primer to fix the advantage most affluent taxpayers in the U.S. receive through educational tax benefits.  

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Tax Policy In The Trump Administration

• American Prospect, Can Corporate Tax Incentives Revive a Pandemic Economy? New Jersey Thinks They Can.
• American Prospect, The Day One Agenda for Corporate Taxes
• Bloomberg, Biden Gets Prodded From Left on Tax Hikes That Now Look Unlikely
• Bloomberg, Rich States Uncover Tax Windfall, Undercutting Push for Aid
• Bloomberg, What Happens When the 1% Go Remote

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal, Do law students, professors and administrators agree on challenges of online learning?
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), UCLA Dean Jennifer Mnookin Donates Kidney To Her Father
• Cleveland Scene op-ed:  The Case for Changing the Name of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
• Michael Conklin (Angelo State University), The Longer They Are, the More Citations They Receive: How Impact Factor Punishes Concise Scholarship
• Darby Dickerson (Dean, UIC John Marshall Law School), AALS President’s Message, Abolish the Academic Caste System

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Purdue Announces 10th Straight Year Of Flat Tuition

Purdue Announces 10th Straight Year of Flat Tuition:

“Unprecedented” has been used often in 2020. Purdue University is using it yet again – as the university announces it will keep its West Lafayette campus tuition frozen — at 2012-13 levels — through at least 2022-23, marking 10 straight years of no tuition increase — unprecedented at Purdue and in higher education during modern times.

President Mitch Daniels first announced that the university would not increase tuition in spring 2013, shortly after he became the 12th president of Purdue University. Before that, Purdue tuition had increased every year since 1976, and it rose an average of nearly 6% per year from 2002 through 2012.

Since 2013, Purdue students and their families have seen tuition remain flat and room and board rates drop from second highest in the Big Ten to the most affordable. Today, they pay less for total cost of attendance than they did in 2012.

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Syracuse Symposium: Online Learning And The Future of Legal Education

Symposium, Online Learning And The Future of Legal Education, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 1- 203 (2020):

• Nina Kohn (Syracuse), Online Learning and The Future of Legal Education: Symposium Introduction, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 1 (2020)
• Eric S. Janus (Former Dean, Mitchell Hamline), “The Worst Idea Ever!”- Lessons from One Law School’s Pioneering Embrace of Online Learning Methods, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 13 (2020)
• James McGrath (Dean, WMU-Thomas Cooley) & Andrew Morriss (Dean, Texas A&M School of Innovation), Online Legal Education & Access to Legal Education & the Legal System, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 49 (2020)
• Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indianapolis) & Yvonne M. Dutton (Indiana-Indianapolis), Lighting a Fire: The Power of Intrinsic Motivation in Online Teaching, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 73 (2020)
• Michael Hunter Schwartz (McGeorge), Towards a Modality-Less Model for Excellence in Law School Teaching, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 115 (2020)
• Victoria Sutton (Texas Tech), Asynchronous E-Learning in Legal Education: A Comparative Study with the Traditional Classroom, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 143 (2020)
• Noelle Wall Sweany (Texas A&M), From Theory to Practice: Evidence-Based Strategies for Designing and Developing Engaging Online Courses, 70 Syracuse L. Rev. 169 (2020)

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The Women In Economics Index 2020

The Women In Economics Index: Tracking Progression In Economics:

The Women In Economics Initiative was established to advance gender equality in the field of economics. Our goal is to encourage equal opportunity and balanced representation of genders in the economics profession across the academic, business and public sectors. 

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California Deans Ask That Students Who Passed California Bar Be Admitted To D.C. Bar

Letter to Shela Shanks, Director, Committee on Admissions and the Unauthorized Practice of Law, District of Columbia Courts (Dec. 17, 2020):

Dear Director Shanks,
We write in the hopes that you might reconsider this year’s rule prohibiting those who sat for and passed the California Bar Exam in October 2020 from obtaining licensure in the District of Columbia without sitting for the D.C. exam. We understand that the California Bar Examiners have not pursued reciprocity with the District, and that this may have influenced your decision.  We also understand that this year’s online exam format in many states, without a normal full MBE, may have factored into the recent rule change.

Given the unprecedented effects that the ongoing global pandemic is having on the careers of recent law graduates, we urge you to consider the burden this new rule places on individuals who took the most recent California Bar Exam.  Many students sat for the California bar expecting that, as in previous years, they would be able to waive into the District of Columbia using their MBE scores, and did not learn of the rule change until after registration deadlines had passed.  Compared to their peers who either passed the exam in another jurisdiction with which D.C. practices reciprocity, or who did not take an exam at all and are allowed to practice under supervision, those who are awaiting results from the October California exam must now devote additional time and money preparing for the next D.C. exam after just beginning jobs delayed by the pandemic.  While under normal circumstances we could appreciate your interest in allowing waivers only between D.C. and those states which practice reciprocity, or based on a normal transferable MBE score, these are not ordinary circumstances.  It also seems puzzling to allow supervised practice for those who have not taken and passed any bar exam, but to prohibit it for those who passed the California bar, notably one of the hardest bars to pass.  We would be very grateful were you to reconsider in order to avoid the inconsistencies and burdens that the current situation presents.

Sincerely,

Paul L. Caron
Duane and Kelly Roberts Dean and Professor of Law
Pepperdine University Rick J. Caruso School of Law

Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley School of Law

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Lipman: What National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson Did For America's Kids And Their Families

Francine J. Lipman (UNLV), Humanizing the Tax System: What National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson Did For America's Kids and their Families, 18 Pitt. Tax Rev. ___ (2020):

At their core, taxpayer rights are human rights. They are about our inherent humanity. — Nina E. Olson

The federal income tax system does not exist for statutes, regulations, codes, enforcement, assessments, collection, redistribution, procedures, publications, liens, levies, refunds, liabilities, litigation, compliance, or even revenue. At its core, the federal income tax system exists for people. People like you, me, and all our loved ones including spouses, partners, parents, kids, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, grandparents, grandkids, friends, and neighbors. The people who eat at our tables and sleep under our roofs. The tax system is about current and future generations who live and work in America, and even those who don’t but have the coveted prize of U.S. citizenship. It is about our shared vision of ensuring the well-being of all people, young, old, Black, Brown, White, Asian, Native, multiracial, religious, atheist, agnostic, male, female, transgender, straight, queer, or nonconforming. It is about ensuring that the people of and in America have what they need to survive and thrive, especially those who are vulnerable for any reason or no reason at all. Tax systems, like other government institutions, should be designed and administered to make life better for everyone. Because “we the people” are America, the beautiful, the federal tax system serves us. This is the truth that Nina E. Olson laid bare during her eighteen years of service as the longest-serving National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA).

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The Law Of High-Wealth Exceptionalism

Allison Anna Tait (Richmond), The Law of High-Wealth Exceptionalism, 71 Ala. L. Rev. 981 (2020):

No family is an island. But some families would like to be – at least when it comes to wealth preservation – and they depend on what this Article calls the law of high-wealth exceptionalism to facilitate their success. The law of high-wealth exceptionalism has been forged, over the years, from the twinned scripts of wealth management and family wealth law, both of which constitute high-wealth families as sovereign entities capable of self-regulation and deserving of exemption from the rules that govern ordinary-wealth families. Consequently, high-wealth families take advantage of complicated estate planning techniques and highly favorable wealth rules in order build walls around their family fortunes and construct bespoke governance systems. Hiding in plain sight, the law of high-wealth exceptionalism protects, privileges, and enables high-wealth families in their own particular form of organizational sovereignty.

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Property Tax Foreclosure And Predatory Cities

Bernadette Atuahene (Chicago-Kent), Predatory Cities, 108 Cal. L. Rev. 107 (2020):

Between 2011 and 2015, the Wayne County Treasurer completed the property tax foreclosure process for one in four properties in Detroit, Michigan. No other American city has experienced this elevated rate of property tax foreclosures since the Great Depression. Studies reveal that the City of Detroit systematically and illegally inflated the assessed value of most of its residential properties, which led to inflated property tax bills unaffordable to many homeowners. Extraordinary tax foreclosure rates and extensive dispossession resulted. Consequently, Detroit has become a “predatory city”—a new and important sociolegal concept that this Article develops.

This Article is the first attempt to understand the intersecting economic, social, and political factors that have caused these struggling cities to become predatory.

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The Longer They Are, The More Citations They Receive: How Impact Factor Punishes Concise Legal Scholarship

Michael Conklin (Angelo State University), The Longer They Are, the More Citations They Receive: How Impact Factor Punishes Concise Scholarship:

One does not need to be a highly cited legal scholar to conclude that — since impact factor is measured per article and longer articles are more likely to garner citations — impact factor incentivizes the publication of longer articles. And for anyone unable to make the connection, none other than the Washington & Lee Law Journal Rankings (W&LLJR) website explicitly spells this out. The second sentence of the impact factor methodology page explains, “Impact Factor rankings should be considered with caution, as they are biased against journals that publish a larger number of concise articles, such as book reviews.” The relationship between article length and impact factor — despite being significant and salient — receives no coverage in the literature on citation-count criticism. This Article first explains the significance of impact factor not only to law journal rankings but also to law school rankings. It then chronicles existing criticism of citation-count metrics.

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The Case For Removing John Marshall's Name From Cleveland State Law School

Following up on my previous post, Law Schools In Chicago And Cleveland Consider Removing Chief Justice John Marshall From Their Names:  Cleveland Scene op-ed:  The Case for Changing the Name of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, by Taru Taylor:

The City of Cleveland finds itself in the middle of our world reckoning over race. Ever since the death of George Floyd on May 25th, the right and wrong sides of history have come into focus. More Confederate monuments have fallen stateside, of course. But how about those images of British protesters throwing the statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century slave trader, into the River Thames? ...

Paul Dolan, owner of the Cleveland Indians, just announced on Monday that: “[Indians is] a name that had its time, but this is not the time now, and certainly going forward, the name is no longer acceptable in our world.” He probably took note of the Washington Football Team, formerly known as the “Redskins.” ...

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faces a similar reckoning. It is named for John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the Supreme Court, (1801 – 1835). Early in his tenure he authored the majority opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established judicial review. By giving the Court power to declare legislative acts and executive actions unconstitutional, he became a veritable unnamed co-author of all subsequent landmark decisions. Without Marbury, there could be no Dred Scott nor Brown. It's hard to overstate his influence.

But the Virginian slave lord owned 200 slaves and at one point auctioned off some of them to pay off his son’s debts. He heard roughly 50 cases involving slavery during his 34-year tenure as chief justice. His jurisprudence was always pro-slavery, even when stare decisis, the rule that judges should abide by decided cases and apply their rules, favored the Black litigant. Nor did public policy, insofar as it supported Black freedom, ever persuade Marshall to rule for the Negro. ...

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Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  National Jurist, Bar Exam Standouts: A New Study Identifies Law Schools Whose Graduates Overperform On That Crucial Test:

The bar exam is the price of admittance for those who want to practice law, and passing the dreaded exam, particularly on the first try, is far from a given.

In 2019, statistics show, 79.6% of first-time test-takers passed the bar in their states. That means more than 20% of law grads failed, and that’s a big number given how much time and money they had invested.

When Paul Caron became dean of Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, Calif., in 2017, improving the school’s bar passage rate was a top priority.

“Historically our students had done much better on the California bar exam than their incoming LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs would have predicted,” Caron said. “But around 2015, we had begun to see a slump.”

In an effort to turn things around, Caron hired a new director of academic excellence to expand the school’s bar prep efforts and provide additional support and mentorship to students.

And it worked. The school’s bar passage rate went from 87.2% within two years of graduation in 2015 to 91.4% within one year of graduation in 2018.

“While it helps to have entering 1Ls with top LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs, there is also a definite correlation between how well a school prepares its students and the school’s bar passage rate,” Caron said.

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Johnson & Johnson Debate Gitlitz

Point: Calvin H. Johnson (Texas), The Supreme Court’s Statutory Interpretation in Gitlitz: A Failed Approach to Interpretation and a Bad Decision, 40 ABA Tax Times (Fall 2020):

The Supreme Court’s decision in Gitlitz v. Commissioner is an irresponsible decision disrupting the logic of tax for the benefit only of abuse. In Gitlitz the Supreme Court gave the equivalent of a double deduction, both an appropriate exclusion of cancellation of indebtedness income for an insolvent Subchapter S corporation and also an inappropriate increase in shareholder basis. The combination of the exclusion and shareholder basis generated a tax loss that had no economic substance, a loss that in Judge Posner’s wonderful phrase “did not impinge on the world.” ...

The approach in Gitlitz allowing an absurd tax deduction shows a hostility to the tax system that is inappropriate for a court in its role as a faithful servant. There are fundamental principles underlying the tax law, including antagonism to double deductions and deduction of phantom losses. The Supreme Court has a duty to interpret tax law in favor of coherent principle, and Gitlitz violates fundamental principle.

Counterpoint: Steve Johnson (Florida State), The Constitution Is More Important than a Few Tax Dollars Squandered by Congress: Gitlitz Was Correctly Decided, 40 ABA Tax Times (Fall 2020):

Gitlitz was decided two decades ago, and its practical import was rapidly nullified when Congress amended the statute to remove the glitch in the statute Congress originally enacted. That being so, is Gitlitz worth our time and thought today? Yes, it is. In Gitlitz, the Supreme Court reminded us that the constitutional separation of powers principle is for the long term and should not be eroded by yielding to temptations of the moment.

My respect for Professor Calvin Johnson is great, but so is my conviction that, in this instance, his view is unwise.

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White Privilege, Fatal Flaws And A Plot Twist: A Dispatch From The American Dream

TaxProf Blog op-ed:  White Privilege, Fatal Flaws And A Plot Twist: A Dispatch From The American Dream, by Jeffrey R. Baker (Pepperdine) (reprinted with permission from the Mississippi Free Press):

My dad and his twin brother were born in a sharecropper’s shack in the summer of 1948. Nobody knew they’d be twins; if the family didn’t have indoor plumbing they for sure didn’t have prenatal care. They were the last two of four living children born to Frank and Etta Lee. Frank had a fourth-grade education, which was more than Etta Lee had. They would be the last of a long line of poor white farmers in the Arkansas Delta.

In 1951, my grandparents heard about better work from some migrant cousins, packed up and moved to Indianapolis for a job in a brass-pipe factory, the move that would change trajectories for generations. Grandpa joined a union, went to work inside and qualified for a FHA loan.

He and Etta Lee bought a house, 900 square feet with an indoor toilet for the first time in their lives. The kids didn’t have to chop cotton again. They all graduated from high school and stepped up some big rungs on the American Dream ladder. They owned diners, managed factory floors and became a sheriff’s deputy. Their kids, my cousins, built on those foundations as a Marine, Airman, nurse, educator, firefighter, manager and more.

My dad joined the Army, learned to fly helicopters, went to Vietnam, and came home with two purple hearts. He made his way back to the Delta and learned to fly crop-dusters, then joined his uncle dusting cotton fields over north Alabama. My mom met him while she was working at a department store when she was in college.

This is where it gets good for me. They got married, and I was born in a hospital, not in a cotton field.

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Cantley: Captive Insurance Companies

Beckett G. Cantley (Northeastern), FAQ: Anti-Avoidance Law & Estate Planning with Captives:

This article seeks to address how general judicial anti-avoidance law may be applied to estate planning with IRC 831(b) captive insurance companies.

Beckett G. Cantley (Northeastern), Calculating Captive Insurance Settlement Initiative Benefits:

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Fifty Years Of Tax Cuts For The Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says

David Hope & Julian Limberg (London School of Economics & Political Science), The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich:

This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reductions in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.

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Yin: Repairing The Tax Privacy Rules

George K. Yin (Virginia), Repairing the Tax Privacy Rules, 169 Tax Notes Fed. 1485 (Nov. 30, 2020):

For almost four years, the nation has experienced numerous governmental deviations from rules and norms that have exposed gaps or weaknesses in many areas of law. This article describes needed changes in three tax privacy areas: access and disclosure of presidential tax information; civil enforcement of congressional subpoenas; and confidentiality protections for tax return information obtained by subpoena.

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NALP: 2020 Summer Associate Programs Shrank, But 97% Offer Rate Near All-Time High

NALP Finds Offer and Acceptance Rates Remain High, Despite Virtual, Shorter Summer Programs:

New findings from the National Association for Law Placement, Inc. (NALP) show that despite the shift at law firms to virtual and shortened summer programs in 2020, offer and acceptance rates remained near or at historical highs, but summer program class sizes continued to shrink.

[T]he Report on the Survey of Legal Employers on Summer 2020 Outcomes and First-Year Associate Plans. ... includes analyses on summer programs and first-year associate plans from a survey administered in fall 2020, and a separate survey focused on recruiting outcomes and lateral hiring will take place in spring 2021. Below are
some key takeaways from the 2020 report.

Summer 2020 Programs: Format and Outcomes

• Over 86% of summer 2020 programs were entirely virtual, 8% were a hybrid model of some in-person and some virtual programming, and 6% were entirely in-person programs.
• The average summer program length in 2020 was 5.6 weeks, compared to 9.7 weeks for these same offices in 2019.
• The aggregate offer rate coming out of summer 2020 programs (inclusive of both summer programs that were held and those that were canceled) was nearly 97%, just below last year’s historic high of nearly 98%. Offer rates for summer programs that were held (97.0%) were somewhat higher compared to those that were canceled (93.3%).
• The overall acceptance rate on these offers reached an historic high of 87.8%, up slightly from 87.5% in 2018 and 2019, and remained significantly higher than the pre-Great Recession norms of 73% to 77%. Acceptance rates for summer programs that were held (88.0%) were slightly higher compared to those that were canceled (85.6%).

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Towards A More Ethical LL.M. Degree: Let's Give International Lawyers The Value They Deserve

Carrie W. Teitcher (Brooklyn) & Kathleen Darvil (Brooklyn), Towards a More Ethical LL.M. Degree: Let's Give International Lawyers the Value They Deserve, 31 Fla. J. Int'l L. 55 (2019):

Created for international lawyers seeking American credentials, LL.M. programs have proliferated, filling a need in an increasingly global market. Yet the American Bar Association offers no guidance as to how programs specifically designed for international lawyers should be structured. The road to a more ethical LL.M degree necessarily begins with the American Bar Association and the need for it to establish guidelines for such programs, at least for those programs which qualify international lawyers to sit for the bar exam.

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SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

SSRN has updated its monthly ranking of 750 American and international law school faculties and 3,000 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN database.  Here is the new list (through December 1, 2020) of the Top 25 U.S. Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and recent downloads (within the past 12 months):

		All-Time		Recent
1	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	194,887	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	7,703
2	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	121,838	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	4,901
3	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	118,829	Ruth Mason (Virginia)	4,561
4	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	117,744	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	3,825
5	David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.)	117,709	David Kamin (NYU)	3,399
6	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	110,971	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	3,395
7	David Kamin (NYU)	106,965	Diane Ring (Boston College)	3,335
8	Cliff Fleming (BYU)	105,449	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	3,312
9	Manoj Viswanathan (Hastings)	102,444	Shu-Yi Oei (Boston College)	3,213
10	Rebecca Kysar (Fordham)	101,351	Hugh Ault (Boston College)	2,849
11	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	100,202	Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indy)	2,413
12	Michael Simkovic (USC)	44,965	Richard Ainsworth (BU)	2,392
13	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	42,797	David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.)	2,139
14	Paul Caron (Pepperdine)	37,639	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	2,139
15	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	34,026	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	1,838
16	Richard Ainsworth (BU)	31,102	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	1,823
17	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	27,305	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1,699
18	Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine)	26,517	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1,505
19	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	25,565	Paul Caron (Pepperdine)	1,459
20	Jim Hines (Michigan)	25,434	Cliff Fleming (BYU)	1,345
21	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	25,400	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	1,255
22	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	25,216	Michael Simkovic (USC)	1,250
23	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	24,667	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	1,230
24	Gladriel Shobe (BYU)	24,248	Yariv Brauner (Florida)	1,158
25	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	24,015	Manoj Viswanathan (Hastings)	1,097

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Western State College Of Law Locks Down New Owner, Averting Closure

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Karen Sloan (Law.com), Western State College of Law Locks Down New Owner, Averting Closure:

Back in the spring of 2019, it looked like Western State College of Law was toast.

The owner of the Orange County, California, law school—Argosy University—was placed under a federal receivership and the campus lost its eligibility for federal student loans. Western State looked to be on the path to closure, joining six other law schools that had shuttered since 2017.

But nearly two years later, Western State is still operating and is celebrating a milestone: the completion of its acquisition by Westcliff University. The for-profit Westcliff, based in Irvine, threw the battered law school a lifeline in May 2019 when it agreed to purchase Western State for $1. A federal judge overseeing the receivership signed off on the deal, but the transfer still required the blessing of accreditors. The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved the school’s transfer to Westcliff University in November 2019.

Now, the future of Western State—now called Western State College of Law at Westcliff University—appears secure with the completion of that transfer. ...

The now-averted closure of Western State would have been yet another blow for Southern California’s legal education market. Whittier Law School closed in July, while both the University of LaVerne College of Law and Thomas Jefferson School of Law opted to drop their ABA accreditation and instead become California-accredited schools. That conversion means that graduates can only sit for the bar exam in California.

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Crawford & Gerzog: Tax Benefits, Higher Education, And Race

Bridget J. Crawford (Pace) & Wendy C. Gerzog (Baltimore), Tax Benefits, Higher Education and Race: A Gift Tax Proposal for Direct Tuition Payments:

A tax system should be fair. According to conventional wisdom, this fairness mandate means that similarly situated taxpayers should pay similar taxes. Notably absent from most discussions about tax fairness is any consideration of race. This makes sense, if one focuses on the tax laws’ facial neutrality, as well as the Internal Revenue Service’s failure to collect official data about the race of taxpayers. But if one is interested in the “fairness,” as the word is commonly understood, of the tax law in action, then race and other identity characteristics must inform any analysis. This Article intervenes in the discussion of tax fairness with three principal claims: one descriptive, one normative, and one utilitarian.

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Where Academic Freedom Ends

Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed:  Where Academic Freedom Ends, by Julie A. Reuben (Harvard):

In 1915, when the American Association of University Professors issued its seminal “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” it identified three areas in which faculty members should enjoy the protection of academic freedom: their scholarship, their teaching, and their actions as citizens. In the century since, almost all analyses of academic freedom have focused on the last category — what the report called “extramural utterances.” We have heard a lot about our rights and responsibilities as citizens, and almost nothing about our rights and responsibilities as experts.

That balance should be reversed. We have fought hard for our speech rights as citizens, but we have assumed, thoughtlessly, that those rights apply when we speak as professionals. We are left without an articulated ethical guide for our actions — and that leaves us vulnerable to academics exploiting their credentials under the guise of academic freedom.

The authors of the 1915 report acknowledged limitations on professors’ freedom in all three areas, which they implicitly viewed as a hierarchy, with research deserving the greatest protection and speech on public matters requiring the greatest care. Since intellectual progress requires open inquiry, they thought faculty members’ research should be unfettered by social convention and received opinion, so long as it conforms to the best methods of scholarship. Teaching should be largely free, although professors had to teach all sides of disputed issues fairly, and sometimes censor themselves in deference to students’ immaturity. Faculty members should have the freedom to engage in public affairs as citizens, but they needed to clearly disassociate their personal views from those of the university where they taught, and to speak in a manner consistent with the character of their profession. ...

Academic freedom should ensure that faculty members can conduct their research free from restrictions and influences that might limit the questions they ask and distort their findings. But this does not mean that academics are free to say anything they please in professional contexts. ...

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Wiseman: Taxing Local Energy Externalities

Hannah Jacobs Wiseman (Penn State), Taxing Local Energy Externalities, 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. 563 (2020):

There is a fundamental problem of scale in the governance of industrial development. For some of the fastest-growing U.S. industries, the negative impacts of development fall primarily at the local level, and the benefits tend to accrue more broadly to states and the federal government. These governments accordingly have inadequate incentives to address the very localized negative externalities of development. Yet states also increasingly preempt most local control over some forms of development. This creates a regulatory void, in which state and federal regulations are inadequate, and local governments lack the power to use traditional Pigouvian tools such as regulation, taxation, and liability to address local harms. Without these Pigouvian sticks, local governments are also constrained in their use of Coasean bargaining, in which they could threaten regulation or taxation to bring industry to the table and negotiate for private solutions. This gap is particularly evident in the energy space, in which oil and gas and associated pipelines, wind energy, and solar energy have strong local effects, but local control is constrained to varying degrees.

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Abramowicz & Blair-Stanek: Contractual Tax Reform

Michael Abramowicz (George Washington) & Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland), Contractual Tax Reform, 61 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1537 (2020):

One-size-fits-all taxation fails to accommodate diverse taxpayer circumstances. This Article proposes allowing taxpayers to contract into alternative tax regimes administered by private intermediaries. Participating taxpayers would make payments to the intermediaries pursuant to contract, and the intermediaries would be required to pay to the government at least as much as these taxpayers would have paid the government otherwise. That amount is determined based on the actual tax receipts of a control group, taxpayers who wish to contract with an intermediary but instead are chosen at random to continue under the status quo. These alternative tax regimes might better accommodate taxpayers’ preferences, leaving the taxpayers with greater utility, without reducing government revenue.

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Ex-Partner's Bias Suit Alleges He Was Told Black Lawyers Left Because They Can't Handle BigLaw

ABA Journal, Ex-partner's Bias Suit Alleges He Was Told Black Lawyers Left Because They Can't Handle BigLaw:

A former Black partner at K&L Gates alleges in a lawsuit that he was terminated for his complaints about discrimination and then harassed by private investigators hired by the law firm.

Willie Dennis is representing himself in the lawsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan federal court. His suit says he was “the victim of systemic racism and discriminatory barriers to equal treatment” at the law firm.

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How Law Schools Can Counteract Racial Bias Of LSAT Scores In The Admissions Process

LaTasha Hill, Less Talk, More Action: How Law Schools Can Counteract Racial Bias of LSAT Scores in the Admissions Process, 19 U. Md. L.J. Race, Religion, Gender & Class 313 (2019):

Racial bias exists within the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and can be viewed through racial and ethnic score gaps. The racial score gap was initially discovered five decades ago and continues to be true today. White test-takers consistently and overwhelmingly score higher than minority test-takers. This article is a call to action for the law school community to officially acknowledge the racial bias of the LSAT — a standardized test for law school acceptance — against minority applicants. This article encourages law school admission committees to deemphasize reliance on LSAT scores and develop new methods to justly assess the skills of every law school applicant. Consequently, by decreasing the weight of LSAT scores in the admissions process, entities such as U.S. News and World Report will need to restructure their methodology for ranking best law schools. By making procedural adjustments, law schools can bring equity to the admissions process, which would lead to a more diverse legal profession.

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Conservative Miami Law Prof Fights The Campus Cancel Culture

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Miami Herald op-ed:  As a Conservative UM Professor, I’m Fighting the Campus Cancel Culture, by Daniel B. Ravicher (Miami):

I’m a rare breed, a law professor that is an unashamed conservative. Over my 15 years of teaching, countless students of all genders, races, and religions, have confided in me as one of — if not the — only faculty member at the with whom they could speak freely about political and social issues.

This is because too many professors are intolerant of conservative ideas and students are rightfully afraid of being punished.

My conservative students feel pressure to adopt their professors’ left-wing political views by answering in class and on exams that criminal laws are racist, limits on immigration are dehumanizing and defending the unborn is violence to women. These students mock the intolerant left sermonizing from behind podiums, but also lament not being able to express their conservative views without fear of reprisal.

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Call For Tax Papers And Panels: Law & Society Annual Meeting On Crisis, Healing, Re-Imagining

Neil Buchanan (Florida) has issued his annual call for tax papers and panels for next year's annual meeting of the Law & Society Association in Chicago (May 27 - 30, 2020):

For the seventeenth year in a row, I will organize sessions for the "Law, Society, and Taxation" group (Collaborative Research Network 31).  For the fifth year in a row, I am pleased to be carried along in these organizational efforts by Professors Jennifer Bird-Pollan and Mirit Eyal-Cohen.

The conference will mostly be held online, but LSA does hope to hold some events in person in Chicago for those who are willing and able to travel.  They are also indicating that they will take account of time zone differences in their scheduling. ...

Although there is an official call for papers, please remember that you are not bound by the official theme of the conference ("Crisis, Healing, Re-Imagining").  We will give full consideration to proposals in any area of tax law, tax policy, distributive justice, interdisciplinary scholarship, and so on.

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 p.m. ET (USA) on Thursday, January 7, 2021.

Please be aware that the online submission system has been changed significantly since last year.  (For what it's worth, I think the changes are all for the better.)  Please follow these instructions carefully:

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UCLA Dean Jennifer Mnookin Donates Kidney To Her Father

One of the joys of my current role has been getting to know the amazing cohort of law school deans around the country, especially my fellow California deans and in particular the SoCal deans. Almost two weeks ago, I saw on Facebook that UCLA Law Dean Jennifer Mnookin underwent surgery in Los Angeles to remove one of her kidneys, which was flown on a red-eye to Boston for her father who had end-stage kidney disease. As it happens, Jennifer's father is also a law professor: Bob Mnookin, who teaches on the Harvard faculty.

After some cajoling, Jennifer agreed to allow me to share her incredible story. I am happy to report that both Jennifer and her father are doing well post-surgery:

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Politicians Say the Middle Class Gets A Bad Deal From The U.S. Tax System. They’re (Kind Of) Wrong.

Washington Post, Politicians Say the Middle Class Gets a Bad Deal From the U.S. Tax System. They’re (Kind Of) Wrong:

The idea of an onerous middle-class tax burden permeates the American political psyche.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigned on middle-class tax cuts. The myth of the “forgotten man” who pays all his taxes and reaps none of the benefits remains a galvanizing force in U.S. politics.

Yet, a new report shows, more than a third of the U.S. middle class get more in government benefits than they pay in taxes, and that share is rising. The middle class has clearly not been forgotten by tax policy.

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Bob Dylan’s Catalog Sale Highlights A Tax Advantage For Songwriters

Following up on my previous post, Did Bob Dylan Sell The Copyrights To His 600 Songs To Avoid A Higher Capital Gains Tax Rate In The Biden Administration?:  Wall Street Journal Tax Report, Bob Dylan’s Catalog Sale Highlights a Tax Advantage for Songwriters:

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the tax code.

The sale of Bob Dylan’s songwriting catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group, announced this week, likely means he is trading an ongoing income stream for a lump sum now. The price hasn’t been revealed but is said to be between $300 million and $400 million.

Mr. Dylan’s sale is the latest and largest of a spate of similar deals this year that come with significant tax benefits both for the songwriters selling the rights and for the companies buying them, and those incentives are encouraging transactions. ...

For musicians, a key advantage is that they can sell self-created works and owe capital-gains tax rates of 20% on the sale. That’s instead of owing ordinary tax rates of up to 37% each year on the royalty income they get from streaming, licensing and other uses of their works.

The lower capital-gains rate isn’t available to painters, filmmakers or videogame developers, who pay ordinary income-tax rates on sales as well as royalties.

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Temple Seeks To Hire A Visiting Practice Professor Of Law And Tax Clinic Director

Temple University Beasley School of Law Position Announcement: Low Income Taxpayer Clinic Director and Visiting Practice Professor of Law:

Position Summary: The Temple University Beasley School of Law was recently notified that it will receive funding from the IRS to open and operate a Low Income Taxpayer Clinic (LITC) on its Main Campus in North Philadelphia which will also serve taxpayers in northeastern Pennsylvania. It is therefore soliciting applications for the position of Visiting Practice Professor of Law and Director of the LITC, which is expected to operate on a part-time basis during 2021. The position will begin on January 15, 2021 or as soon thereafter as practicable, and will run through the end of the calendar year. The Clinic Director will be expected to establish and operate the LITC, including developing a panel of pro bono attorneys and performing community outreach, and to take a leadership role in applying to the IRS for a multi-year grant, which will likely need to be submitted in June, 2021. In addition, the Clinic Director will be expected to develop and teach a course through which students can enroll to participate in the LITC for academic credit in 2021.

It is anticipated that this part-time, visiting position will be enhanced and converted into a clinical faculty position upon receipt of a multi-year grant from the IRS. A national search for an individual to fill the clinical faculty position will be conducted if the multi-year grant is received; the individual selected to fill the part-time visiting position will be eligible for consideration for the clinical faculty position.

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Four Student Groups Demand That Harvard Discipline Law Prof Adrian Vermeule For Tweets Mocking Leftists

William A. Jacobson (Cornell), Student Cancel Mob Comes For Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule Over Tweets Mocking Leftists:

This story of cancel culture would be laughable were it not for the fact that it is so serious. It involves an attempt by four Harvard Law School student groups to interfere in the employment of, and damage the career of, Professor Adrian Vermeule. ...

It’s not easy to pigeonhole Prof. Vermeule in the current political context. I’d classify him, based on what I’ve read, as a political and intellectual iconoclast. A lot of people would probably call him a conservative, though I don’t know if that’s what he’d call himself. ... I follow Prof. Vermeule on Twitter, where his account is entertaining, irreverent, and sarcastic. ...

[F]aux outrage, inability to detect sarcasm, and ability to turn standard Twitter fare into outrage !!! has led to a much more serious attack on Prof. Vermeule in a letter sent to HLS administrators demanding punitive actions (more below), as reported by Chrissy Clark at The Washington Free Beacon:

It was authored by People’s Parity Project, a group of law students and new attorneys who aim to “unf*ck the law” by ending “how the legal profession—and the law itself—enables harassment, discrimination, and other injustices.” …

I obtained a copy of the letter. It is issued on behalf of four student groups:

The Harvard Parity Project
Alliance for Reproductive Justice
La Alianza
Progressive Jewish Alliance

The letter is three-pages single spaced, with an additional 42 pages of screenshots of tweets and excerpts from articles. It’s clear from the letter that someone or some group spent a lot of time trying to build a case against Prof. Vermeule, scouring his record to present a twisted version of reality. Prof. Vermeule was targeted, this didn’t just happen. ...

While they don’t call for Prof. Vermeule to be fired, they want him publicly shamed by the law school and humiliated by stripping him of key teaching assignments, including banning him from teaching first year law students:

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Five Jurisdictions With COVID-19-Related Diploma Privilege Are Shifting Back To Bar Exams In February

ABA Journal, Jurisdictions With COVID-19-Related Diploma Privilege Are Going Back to Bar Exam Admissions:

As of Dec. 3, the five jurisdictions with emergency diploma privilege precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic had announced plans for a remote bar exam in February 2021.

Louisiana scheduled a remote open-book bar in February, according to a Nov. 25 state supreme court order. The other four jurisdictions—Washington, D.C.; Utah; Oregon; and Washington—have announced remote Uniform Bar Exams, which are offered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

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A Year Of Lessons From The Tax Court (2020)

• Jan. 6:  Taxpayer Who Got $1.6m Assessment Reduced To $170k Not Entitled To Costs (Klopfenstein v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2019-156 (Dec. 9, 2019) (Judge Lauber) — § 7430)
• Jan. 13:  A Practical Interpretation Of The Penalty Approval Statute § 6751 (Belair Woods LLC v. Commissioner, 154 T.C. No. 1 (Jan. 6, 2020) (Judge Lauber); Tribune Media Co. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2020-2 (Jan. 6, 2020) (Judge Buch) — § 6751)
• Jan. 20:  Employee Cannot Deduct Expense That Could Have Been Reimbursed (Near v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2020-10 (Jan. 14, 2020) (Judge Kerrigan) — § 162)
• Jan. 27: §6672 Trust Fund Recovery Penalty Is Really A Penalty ... Sort Of (Chadwick v. Commissioner, 154 T.C. No 5 (Jan. 21, 2020) (Judge Lauber) — § 6672)

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WSJ: Hit By Covid-19, Colleges Do The Unthinkable And Cut Tenure

Wall Street Journal, Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure:

When Kenneth Macur became president at Medaille College in 2015, the small, private school in Buffalo, N.Y., was “surviving paycheck to paycheck,” he said. Enrollment was declining and the small endowment was flat.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. The campus shut down and revenue plummeted 15%. Dr. Macur saw what he considered an opportunity: With the approval of the board of trustees, he suspended the faculty handbook by invoking an “act of God” clause embedded in it. He laid off several professors, cut the homeland security and health information management programs, rescinded the lifelong job security of tenure and rewrote the faculty handbook, rules that had governed the school for decades.

“I believe that this is an opportunity to do more than just tinker around the edges. We need to be bold and decisive,” he wrote in a letter to faculty on April 15. “A new model is the future of higher education.”

Dr. Macur and presidents of struggling colleges around the country are reacting to the pandemic by unilaterally cutting programs, firing professors and gutting tenure, all once-unthinkable changes. Schools employed about 150,000 fewer workers in September than they did a year earlier, before the pandemic, according to the Labor Department. That is a decline of nearly 10%. Along the way, they are changing the centuries-old higher education power structure.

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AALS President Darby Dickerson: It's Time To Eliminate Legal Education's Caste System

AALS President’s Message, Abolish the Academic Caste System, by Darby Dickerson (Dean, UIC John Marshall Law School):

The theme for my presidential year is “The Power of Words.” During my January 2020 presidential address, I emphasized three words—“caste,” “candor,” and “change”—and for each word, I posed a challenge to the legal academy. This final column addresses “caste” and calls on the academy to abolish the caste system present in most law schools.

In 2002, then-Dean Kent Syverud published “The Caste System and Best Practices in Legal Education.” Syverud explained that most American law schools include seven castes, listed from highest to lowest:

• Tenured and tenure-track faculty
• Deans
• Clinical faculty
• Legal Writing Faculty
• Law librarians
• Adjunct faculty
• Staff

He observed that because some of the best practices were identified with some of the lower castes, those in higher castes were reluctant to adopt them. He also observed that those in the lower castes often suffer from lower salaries, lack of security of position, and lack of respect.

Any caste system is insidious. But most, if not all, law schools have them. In many schools, the caste system means that many individuals are not recognized appropriately or compensated fairly for their contributions. At some schools, non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty carry a disproportionate share of the teaching and service loads so that others can focus on research. ...

 We need to eliminate the caste system—a system meant to divide—from legal education. We need to recognize the similarities in and value of the work we all perform and appreciate, not denigrate, the differences. Raising some up does not diminish the work of others. Instead, it improves the whole of legal education. Because I’ve worked at three schools that have made significant progress in improving status for legal writing professionals, clinicians, academic support specialists, librarians, and staff, I know that abolishing the caste system is both a realistic call for action and one that will benefit our students and the legal profession.

Below are three concrete ideas for law schools and two pieces of advice for those in NTT positions about how we might take steps to abolish the caste system.

Brian Leiter (Chicago), It's a Good Thing the President of the AALS Doesn't Really Matter to Legal Education . . .:

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Marquette To Cut 225 Faculty And Staff As Part Of 25% Reduction In Academic Spending; $12 Million Budget Surplus To Be Used For Strategic Priorities
• Will Law Firm Partnerships Take Advantage Of State & Local Tax Work-Arounds?
• Haneman: (Re)framing Student Loan Debt As A Commons

Sunday:

• October 2020 Connecticut Bar Exam Results: Yale #1 With 100% Pass Rate For Third Year In A Row
• ROSS Intelligence To Shut Down Due To 'Spurious Lawsuit' By Thomson Reuters And Westlaw
• ‘Happy Holidays’ Is Pro-Christmas
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

October 2020 Connecticut Bar Exam Results: Yale #1 With 100% Pass Rate For Third Year In A Row

Here are the results of the October 2020 Connecticut Bar Exam for first-time test-takers by law school, along with each school's U.S. News ranking:

Bar Pass Rank (Rate)	School (Number of Takers)	US News Rank CT (Overall)
1 (100.0%)	Yale (15)	1 (1)
2 (86.5%)	Connecticut (96)	2 (50)
(75.2%)	Statewide Average	-
3 (74.0%)	Quinnipiac (100)	3 (122)

First-time pass rates for graduates in neighboring states with 5 or more test-takers:

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ROSS Intelligence To Shut Down Due To 'Spurious Lawsuit' By Thomson Reuters And Westlaw

ROSS Intelligence, Announcement By The Founders:

We have made the difficult decision to shut down operations at ROSS Intelligence. As of Monday of this week, we have no longer been accepting new customers. As of January 31, 2021, the ROSS platform will no longer be available. Between now and then, our priority is to help our current customers transition to other services.

What happened
Six years ago, we set out to make legal services more accessible by innovating legal research. We felt then, as we do today, that legal research could be more efficient, less expensive, and more accessible.

Since then, we’ve created a product that legal researchers love. We’ve worked with amazing partners to make legal research tasks more efficient and delightful. At every turn, we’ve been grateful to receive lawyers’ and other legal researchers’ feedback to shape ROSS’s development. We’ve been honored to serve legal researchers in many contexts across the U.S.: lawyers in large firms and small firms; solo practitioners; students; pro se litigants; academics; librarians; and more.

In the spring of this year, Thomson Reuters and Westlaw brought a spurious lawsuit against ROSS. When the news broke, we were grateful to receive so much community support. However, just as Westlaw devised it to be, this ongoing suit has been heavy for ROSS to bear. Litigation is expensive — no matter how speculative the claims against you nor how worthy your position. With our company ensnared by this legal battle, we have been unable to raise another round of funding to fuel our development and marketing efforts. Our bank account is running out, and we must cease operations in the New Year.

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