Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• The American Prospect, Building Back Better Through Taxing Stock Buybacks
• Bloomberg, Elon Musk’s California Exit Can Save Him $2 Billion in Taxes
• Business Insider, Democrats Are Actually Raising Taxes on the Ultrawealthy, Even Though They're Keeping a Trump Tax Cut
• Business Insider, Elon Musk Has a $2.5 Billion Reason to Move to Texas: Avoiding California Capital Gains Tax
• Business Insider, There's an Easy Way to Tax Billionaires That Would Actually Work
• CNN op-ed (Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)), This Tax Would Make Wealthy Corporations Pay Their Fair Share
• Forbes, States Are Seeing Steep Income Tax Revenue Growth. Will It Last?
• Inequality.org, What’s That ‘Surtax’ Doing in Build Back Better?
• Los Angeles Times op-ed (Jonah Goldberg), The Hypocrisy of Democrats’ ‘Build Back Better’ Bill Giving the Rich a Colossal Tax Cut
• MSNBC, America's Billionaire Tax Plan: Why Congress Still Isn't Onboard
• National Law Review, Tax Reform: What's In and What's Out (For Now)
• New York Times, Janet Yellen still supports making banks give the I.R.S. new customer data.
• PolitiFact, Does Build Back Better Give Tax Breaks to Some Millionaires?
• Salon, Republicans Who Backed Trump Tax Cuts Now Accuse Dems of Slashing Taxes for Rich
• TaxVox, Could Tax Incentives Help Recruit and Retain Teachers?
• TaxVox, Only The Rich Can Play: A Cautionary Tale Of Who Really Benefits From Tax Subsidies
• Truthout, Majority of Likely Voters Support Higher Taxes for Billionaires, Poll Finds
• Washington Post, Biden’s ‘Aggressive’ Use of a Tax Loophole He’s Trying to Shut Down

Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• Jamie R. Abrams (Louisville), Legal Education's Curricular Tipping Point Toward Inclusive Socratic Teaching
• Deborah N. Archer (NYU), Caitlin Barry (Villanova), Lisa Bliss (Georgia State), G.S. Hans (Vanderbilt), Vida Johnson (Georgetown), Wilkes Kaas (Quinnipiac), Lynnise Pantin (Columbia), Kele Stewart (Miami), Priya Baskaran (American), Jennifer Fernandez (Penn), Crystal Grant (Duke), Anjum Gupta (Rutgers), Julia Hernandez (CUNY), Alexis Karteron (Rutgers) & Shobha Mahadev (Northwestern), Clinicians Reflect on COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Looking Beyond
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Academic Freedom Alliance And Brian Leiter Weigh In On How The University Of Illinois-Chicago Has Handled Student Complaints Against A Tenured Law Professor
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine),  Koppelman On The Yale And UIC Law School Controversies

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Implementing ABA Standard 314 by Incorporating Effective Formative Assessment Techniques Across The Law School Curriculum

Diana R. Donahoe (Georgetown) & Julie Ross (Georgetown), Lighting the Fires of Learning in Law School: Implementing ABA Standard 314 by Incorporating Effective Formative Assessment Techniques Across the Curriculum, 81 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 657 (2020):

The American Bar Association now requires law schools to incorporate formative assessment into the law school curriculum by providing feedback to students relating to course-specific learning goals before the end-of-semester exam. Peer reviews and self-evaluations are two powerful formative assessment techniques that faculty can use to meet the new ABA standards to assess the students’ learning outcomes while courses are ongoing, creating more effective learning environments within the classroom.

This article argues that peer reviews and self-evaluations can be successfully used across the law school curriculum to deepen student understanding, encourage student cooperation, and develop students’ abilities to be self-regulated learners in law school.

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Colinvaux: Speeding Up Benefits to Charity

Roger Colinvaux (Catholic), Speeding Up Benefits to Charity: Donor Advised Fund and Foundation Reform, 63 B.C.L. Rev. __ (2022):

Charitable giving incentives are failing to achieve their purposes. Currently $1.26 trillion has accumulated in donor advised funds (DAFs) and private foundations, a massive accumulation of wealth under the effective control of the wealthiest in society. Gifts to these charitable intermediaries inherently frustrate the purpose of the charitable giving incentives. Until the funds are released from the intermediary, no working charity is able to benefit from the donation. Congress recognized this delay in benefit problem with respect to private foundations in landmark legislation in 1969, but has never addressed the problem for DAFs, and the rules for foundations are now too easy to avoid. Recent bi-partisan legislation introduced in Congress would address these issues. The Accelerating Charitable Efforts (ACE) Act would impose a time limit on advisory privileges for DAF contributions and close loopholes in the private foundation payout rules, among other reforms. While the ACE Act has many supporters, there is organized opposition in favor of the status quo. The article explains the case for change and addresses the various arguments made against reform, including that current payout levels are sufficient, that reform would harm charitable giving and introduce costly new burdens on charities, that the timing of grants within a DAF does not matter and so should not be regulated, and that to limit advisory privileges is to target DAFs and to attack philanthropic freedom.

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Linda Jellum Leaves Mercer For Idaho

Linda Jellum, Ellison Capers Palmer Sr. Endowed Chair in Tax Law at Mercer, has accepted a lateral position from Idaho to begin in Fall 2022:

Professor Jellum is a prolific scholar whose work has appeared in top law journals. She is also the author of multiple books. During her professional career Professor Jellum has served as the Deputy Executive Director for the Southeastern Association of Law Schools, the Deputy Director for the Association of American Law Schools, and the Chair of the American Bar Association Section’s on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.

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Menstrual Dignity And The Bar Exam

Marcy L. Karin (District of Columbia), Margaret E. Johnson (Baltimore) & Elizabeth B. Cooper (Fordham), Menstrual Dignity and the Bar Exam, 55 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1 (2021):

This Article examines the issue of menstruation and the administration of the bar exam. Although such problems are not new, over the summer and fall of 2020, test takers and commentators took to social media to critique state board of law examiners’ (“BOLE”) policies regarding menstruation. These problems persist. Menstruators worry that if they unexpectedly bleed during the exam, they may not have access to appropriately sized and constructed menstrual products or may be prohibited from accessing the bathroom. Personal products that are permitted often must be carried in a clear, plastic bag. Some express privacy concerns that the see-through bag outs test takers’ menstruation as well as their birth-assigned sex — an especially difficult problem for transgender, genderqueer/nonbinary, and intersex individuals who do not wish to share that information.

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Applying The Procedural Standing Analysis To Post-Mayo, Pre-Enforcement APA Treasury Challenges

Casey N. Epstein (J.D. 2021, Minnesota), Note, Standing Up to the Treasury: Applying the Procedural Standing Analysis to Post-Mayo, Pre-Enforcement APA Treasury Challenges, 105 Minn. L. Rev. 1947 (2021):

Administrative law and tax law have clashed for the past several decades. While recent caselaw, starting with Mayo Foundation in 2010, has indicated that administrative law, such as the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), does apply to the Treasury, many questions remain unanswered. Much attention has recently focused on the interplay between the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) and the Treasury and whether the AIA prevents taxpayers from suing the Treasury for APA violations.

With the Supreme Court poised to answer this question in CIC Services this coming Term, this Note poses the next question that the courts will need to answer: even if the AIA does not bar a taxpayer from launching a pre-enforcement administrative challenge against the Treasury, will the taxpayer have standing to secure judicial review?

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Nam: Taxing Option Luck

Jeesoo Nam (USC), Taxing Option Luck, 11 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 1067 (2021):

As economic inequality reaches new heights every decade, academics stress the importance of the tax system in matters of equity. In contemporary winner-take-all markets, much of the massive income and wealth accumulated by the rich are the result of deliberate and calculated economic gambles that turned out in their favor. Yet theories of distributive justice such as Ronald Dworkin’s brute luck egalitarianism have committed themselves to the position that even if these market outcomes are the results of luck, the unequal outcomes are justified insofar as investors chose to take such risks.

This Article argues, in contrast to the aforementioned theories, that inequalities resulting from option luck, the luck involved in deliberate and calculated gambles, remain unjust.

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Shanske & Niemeier: Subsidizing Sprawl, Segregation, And Regressivity — Sublocal Tax Districts

Darien Shanske (UC-Davis; Google Scholar) & Deb Niemeier (Maryland), Subsidizing Sprawl, Segregation, and Regressivity: A Deep Dive into Sublocal Tax Districts, 106 Iowa L. Rev. 2427 (2021):

Much ink has already been spilled demonstrating that our current built environment was—and is—the product of numerous policy decisions. Some of these decisions are accidental (as with the mortgage interest deduction provided by the federal income tax), some can be reasonable at times, but are problematic overall (as with local power over zoning), and some are outright immoral (as with redlining). This Essay will demonstrate yet another policy tool that has contributed to the current structuralization of the built landscape: the sublocal tax district. These districts are very common, but are also, by virtue of their nature and spatial heterogeneity, very difficult to study.

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A Second Open Letter From Yale Grad Simon Lazarus: 'A Take On Where Things Stand'

Following up on my previous post on the open letter by Simon Lazarus (J.D. 1967, Yale), Where Yale Law School Has Gone Off The Rails, And What Is Needed To Get Back On Track (Nov. 13, 2021):  Brian Leiter (Chicago) shared an update today from Mr. Lazarus, Trap House Enters Its Fourth Month: A Take on Where Things Stand:

In his recent address to the Federalist Society, Sterling professor Akhil Amar condemned the Yale Law School’s “duplicitous, disingenuous, and downright deplorable” actions in the Trap House Affair. As I elaborated in an earlier memo, I agree with his depiction.

I write this update to assess several significant new developments. Of these, the most noted but not necessarily the most significant is Dean Heather Gerken’s Statement of November 17, her third formal pronouncement on the affair. While she broke new ground in publicly admitting serious errors that did not adequately “conform to our values,” she did not resolve the most critical issue, namely, whether she will remove the two Law School administrators who committed the egregious violations of due process and academic freedom acknowledged in the statement. Only with that further step will Dean Gerken’s mea culpas lead to meaningful change in the life of the Law School. ...

[On] November 15, a still bigger shoe dropped.

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Academic Freedom Alliance And Brian Leiter Weigh In On How The University Of Illinois-Chicago Has Handled Student Complaints Against A Tenured Law Professor

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Academic Freedom Alliance, Letter to the University of Illinois Regarding Jason Kilborn:

The AFA sent a letter to the University of Illinois on Monday regarding the ongoing complaints concerning Professor Jason Kilborn. In December 2020, Professor Kilborn included on his final exam in a civil procedure class a hypothetical involving redacted slurs. He was suspended without adequate process or justification, and a university investigation found most of the allegations to be meritless. The law school reached an agreement with Professor Kilborn allowing him to resume his professional activities, but students have continued to call for sanctions against him and the law school has failed to adhere to its own agreement. He has been denied the annual raise provided to all of his colleagues despite his positive job evaluation, and the law school has imposed new demands that he complete sensitivity training before fully resuming his duties.

Brian Leiter (Chicago), Academic Freedom Alliance Weighs in on Case of Professor Kilborn at Illinois/Chicago John Marshall Law School:

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The Coming Spike In Law School Applications

Following up on my recent posts:

• One-Third Of The Way Through The Fall 2022 Law School Admissions Cycle: Applicants Are Down 4.4% And In All LSAT Bands (Especially 170-180 (-13.6%)), Except 150-159 (+0.3%) (Nov. 29, 2021)
• Law School Applicants Are Down, Breaking Five-Year Streak (Nov. 30, 2021)

Law.com, With Release of LSAT Scores Today, Law School Applications Expected to Spike:

November’s Law School Admissions Test scores were released as scheduled at 9 a.m. ET this morning. And while analysis of the scores likely won’t be available for a few days, according to a Law School Admission Council (LSAC) spokesperson, the expectation is that the already sky-high number of law school applicants and applications in the U.S. will rise even further.

“We’ll likely see law school applications go back up at least initially,” the LSAC spokesperson told Law.com on Wednesday. “If someone got a really good score, then they are going to apply.”

As of Nov. 29, U.S. law school applicant and application data showed declines for the 2021-22 enrollment year, but those numbers are somewhat misleading.

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Ed Kleinbard Memorial Conference At USC

Following up on my previous post on the Ed Kleinbard Memorial Conference At USC:  the conference recordings and downloads are here:

Welcome:  Andrew Guzman (Dean, USC):

Panel 1 - High Noon in the Tax Policy Corral: Ed Kleinbard’s Race Against Time

• Joseph Bankman (Stanford)
• Daniel Shaviro (NYU) (slides)

Panel 2 - Financial Products

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Lipman: Tax Audits, Economics, And Racism

Francine J. Lipman (UNLV; Google Scholar), Tax Audits, Economics, and Racism, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance (2022):

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the federal agency charged with tax revenue collection. In fiscal year 2020, the IRS collected $3.5 trillion in taxes, which represented about 96 percent of aggregate annual federal funding (IRS, 2020). In its mission statement the IRS states that its primary role is to enforce tax laws. The IRS’ website announces that it is responsible “to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share,” among similar duties. Nevertheless, the IRS’ most recent official estimate of the “tax gap” or the amount of net taxes owed by taxpayers who did not “pay their fair share” even after IRS enforcement efforts was $1.143 trillion for the three-year period 2011-2013 or $381 billion average annually. This amount is more than all the income taxes paid by 90 percent of all taxpayers (Rossotti & Forman, 2020). Assuming constant compliance rates, the Treasury has estimated that the tax gap in 2019 was $584 billion, $7 billion over the decade, or 15 percent of annual tax liabilities (IRS, 2019). Economists have estimated that the tax gap was at least $630 billion in 2020 (Sarin & Summers, 2019).

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Johnson: The Wonderful Mark-to-Market Tax

Calvin H. Johnson (Texas), The Wonderful Mark-to-Market Tax, 173 Tax Notes Fed. 1227 (Nov. 29, 2021):

Whatever its role in the current U.S. budget decisions, the proposal for mark-to-market taxation is a wonderful idea, so good to be inevitable — at some point. Mark-to-market taxation would tax shareholders on the annual gain from publicly traded stock even when those gains have not been reduced to cash. ...

Both accounting and economics define income to include mark-to-market gains. The 16th Amendment specifically authorizes a tax on income. That alone is sufficient.

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Fleischer Presents Tax Policy — Legislative Updates Today At UC-Irvine

Victor Fleischer (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) presents Tax Policy - Legislative Updates at UC-Irvine today:

Professor Fleischer will provide an overview of the tax legislation currently under consideration on Capitol Hill, including important changes to individual tax, capital gains, carried interest, corporate tax, and international tax provisions. He will also discuss developments at the OECD and the interaction between the OECD process and U.S. domestic legislation.

Layser: A Spatial Analysis Of Place-Based Tax Incentives

Michelle D. Layser (Illinois; Google Scholar), Subsidizing Gentrification: A Spatial Analysis of Place-Based Tax Incentives, 12 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 163 (2021):

Place-based tax incentives, such as the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) and Opportunity Zones incentives, are often used to promote investment in low-income neighborhoods. However, not all low-income neighborhoods have an equal need for investment subsidies. Subsidies for investment in already gentrifying neighborhoods, for example, may reflect inefficient inframarginal investment, and they may lead to inequitable outcomes. Critics fear that when gentrifying neighborhoods are eligible for tax incentives, they will draw investment away from the neighborhoods that need it most. However, few studies have provided empirical analysis to assess whether these concerns have merit. Through a novel geospatial analysis of the location patterns of tax-subsidized projects, this Article provides new evidence that critics’ concerns are justified.

This Article analyzes fifteen years of NMTC data to explore the location patterns of tax-subsidized projects in twenty U.S. cities.

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If You Build It, They Will Come: What Students Say About Experiential Learning

David I. C. Thomson (Denver; Google Scholar) & Stephen Daniels (American Bar Foundation; Google Scholar), If You Build It, They Will Come: What Students Say About Experiential Learning, 13 Fla. A & M U. L. Rev. 203 (2018): 

Our purpose here is to explore one of the “natural experiments” cited by the Task Force: the Experiential Advantage (EA) program at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law (Denver Law). EA was developed as a part of a greater general focus on experiential learning and is built upon the three “Carnegie Apprenticeships” – “the intellectual or cognitive,” “the forms of expert practice,” and “identity and purpose.” It was implemented at Denver Law starting with students entering in August 2013. To explore this natural experiment, we took a particular route and did so for what we see as good reason. It is often the case with such curricular experiments that the views of students are missing. But of course, it makes little sense to neglect them because such changes are supposedly made for the students’ benefit. So, it seems more than appropriate to ask them – from their perspective – if a change worked, or improved matters, as it was designed to do. This article is a first report on the findings of an extensive case study — a three-year, survey-based, study of Denver Law students concerning the EA Program “natural experiment.” The findings should be of considerable interest to the legal community, given that there is general support for experiential learning across most law schools, but a study of this kind — one exploring student views on curricular innovation — has never been conducted before.

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Clinicians Reflect On COVID-19: Lessons Learned And Looking Beyond

Deborah N. Archer (NYU), Caitlin Barry (Villanova), Lisa Bliss (Georgia State), G.S. Hans (Vanderbilt), Vida Johnson (Georgetown), Wilkes Kaas (Quinnipiac), Lynnise Pantin (Columbia), Kele Stewart (Miami), Priya Baskaran (American), Jennifer Fernandez (Penn), Crystal Grant (Duke), Anjum Gupta (Rutgers), Julia Hernandez (CUNY), Alexis Karteron (Rutgers) & Shobha Mahadev (Northwestern), Clinicians Reflect on COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Looking Beyond, 28 Clinical L. Rev. 15 (2021):

As a result of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, clinical faculty had to abruptly adapt their clinical teaching and case supervision practices to adjust to the myriad restrictions brought on by the pandemic. This brought specialized challenges for clinicians who uniquely serve as both legal practitioners and law teachers in the law school setting. With little support and guidance, clinicians tackled never before seen difficulties in the uncharted waters of running a clinical law practice during a pandemic.

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ABA Permits Law Schools To Accept GRE Scores In Lieu Of The LSAT

Summary of Actions of the Section’s Council at its Public Meeting Nov. 19, 2021:

In closed session, the Council also voted to permit law schools to accept GRE test scores from applicants in lieu of an LSAT score under Standard 503. The Council reminds schools that the use of test scores to make admissions decisions is subject to Standard 501(a)’s requirement that a school adhere to “sound admission policies and practices,” and that a law school may not admit applicants who do not “appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar.” The Council also reminds schools that although Standard 503 does not prescribe the weight that law schools must give to an applicant's test score, it does require law schools to use admissions tests in a manner consistent with the test developer's current guidelines regarding the proper use of the results.

• ABA Journal, Starting Now, the GRE Can Replace the LSAT in Law School Admissions
• Above the Law, The LSAT’s Monopoly On Law School Admissions Is Officially Over
• Inside Higher Ed, ABA Gives Law Schools Go-Ahead to Use GRE. One-Third of Law Schools Already Accept It. Will the Rest Now Follow Suit?
• Law.com, ABA Council Votes to Let Law Schools Accept GRE Scores in Lieu of LSATs
• Law360, ABA Permits Law Schools To Accept GRE Test In Admissions
• Reuters, After ABA's blessing, Will Law Schools Rush to Use the GRE in Admissions?

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Economists Don’t Always Agree. On This Hot-Button Issue (Child Tax Credit), They Do.

Stanford Law, Economists Don’t Always Agree. On This Hot-Button Issue, They Do.:

Jacob Goldin recently helped pull off an unlikely feat: As federal lawmakers battled over President Biden’s economic agenda, he worked to recruit more than 460 American economists in urging that a large, but temporary, cash benefit for children as part of an earlier $1.9 trillion stimulus package be made permanent.

In September, the economists, led by Hilary Hoynes and Diane Schanzenbach, sent a letter to Congress that proved propitious. Soon after, the cash benefit they were advocating for — the Child Tax Credit (CTC) — took center stage in negotiations over the future of Biden’s bid to expand the country’s social safety net. Not only are the potential costs of the CTC a point of contention, so, too, is the rekindled argument by opponents that motivated welfare reform a quarter century ago — the notion that giving a handout to the lowest-income families creates disincentives to work.

Goldin’s leading role in corralling support for the expanded CTC makes sense. An associate professor at Stanford Law School and faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), he is an expert on the taxation of low-income households and how human behavior shapes economic decision-making. He understands the CTC’s historical limitations as a poverty-reducing tool. He is also the co-author of a new working paper that gets to the heart of the current debate: What will broadening the credit ultimately cost the federal government, and are the benefits worth the price? [Whose Child is this? Improving Child-Claiming Rules in Safety Net Programs, 131 Yale L. J. ___ (2022) (with Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-L.A.)]

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Nuts And Bolts Of the 2021 Advanced, Enhanced Child Tax Credit

Francine J. Lipman (UNLV; Google Scholar) & James E. Williamson (San Diego State), Nuts and Bolts of the 2021 Advanced, Enhanced Child Tax Credit, 173 Tax Notes 319 (Oct. 18, 2021):

The enhancements in the child tax credit (CTC) in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) signed by President Biden on March 11 are a targeted child-centered, economic stimulus. Economists estimate that the 2021 CTC enhancements will increase consumer spending by $27 billion to $37 billion, generate $1.9 billion in state and local sales taxes, and create 511,000 new jobs at the median wage. Similar to the economic stimulus in rural areas from Social Security benefits, the enhanced CTC doubles its pre-ARPA spending power of $14 billion for households in rural America.

Less than four months after enactment starting on July 15, Treasury, through the IRS, is delivering almost 40 million monthly installments of estimated advanced, enhanced child tax credits (AECTC) to households, including 60 million children and their families. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that 92 percent of families with children will receive an average annual CTC of $4,380 in 2021. The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that ARPA CTC enhancements cost $110 billion, while Columbia University based Center on Poverty and Social Policy determined that the benefits should be about eight times the cost at $800 billion. CTC benefits include increases to children’s future earnings, retirement benefits, and tax payments, and decreases in child protection and criminal justice services as well as healthcare costs for children and their families because of better health and longevity.

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The Application Of International Tax Treaties To Digital Services Taxes

Katherine E. Karnosh (J.D. 2021, Chicago), Comment, The Application of International Tax Treaties to Digital Services Taxes, 21 Chi. J. Int'l L. 513 (2021):

As digital services and electronic commerce have become more prevalent aspects of the global economy, there have been concerns over how tax systems will adapt to this change. International tax treaties in particular seem to be outdated and unprepared for the digital economy. Many international tax treaties provide that businesses are to be taxed on their income only in jurisdictions where they have a sufficient physical presence. By establishing their European headquarters and digital servers in countries with low corporate income tax rates (such as Ireland) and then using those headquarters to provide digital services to the rest of Europe, large, sophisticated, multinational digital businesses have been able to generate much revenue from most European countries without paying significant taxes in those countries.

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Auerbach Presents Tax Policy Design With Low Interest Rates Today At NYU

Alan Auerbach (UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar) presents Tax Policy Design with Low Interest Rates at NYU today as part of its Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium hosted by Daniel Shaviro:

Interest rates on government debt have fallen in many countries over the last several decades, with markets indicating that rates may stay low well into the future. It is by now well understood that sustained low interest rates can change the nature of long-run fiscal policy choices. In this paper, we examine a related issue: the implications of sustained low interest rates for the structure of tax policy. We show that low interest rates (a) reduce the differences between consumption and income taxes; (b) make wealth taxes less efficient relative to capital income taxes, at given rates of tax; (c) reduce the value of firm-level investment incentives, and (d) substantially raise the valuation of benefits of carbon abatement policies relative to their costs.

Conclusion
It is by now generally recognized that the presence of low interest rates – sustained over time and across countries – has important implications for the fiscal stance of the federal government. In this paper, we argue that if low interest rates are expected to persist, there are important implications for the design of tax policy as well.

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Dean & Brakman Reiser Present For-Profit Philanthropy Today At Georgetown

Steven Dean (Brooklyn) & Dana Brakman Reiser (Brooklyn; Google Scholar) present For-Profit Philanthropy: Constraining Elite Power in Limited Liability Companies, Donor-Advised Funds and Strategic Corporate Giving (Oxford University Press 2022) at Georgetown today as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop hosted by Brian Galle:

Conclusion
In response to revelations that more than 100 extremely wealthy taxpayers paid no income tax at all (without breaking a single rule) the Tax Reform Act of 1969 created the alternative minimum tax. More than half a century later, the country seems genuinely surprised to find that while they may have traded yachts for spacecraft, the wealthiest Americans still often pay not even one dollar of tax. As was true decades ago, they need not break—or even bend—any laws to do so.

Perhaps doubting its wherewithal to directly turn private wealth into public resources through taxation, the 1969 tax reform also attempted to tame elite power with a strategic Grand Bargain. And for a time, it seemed to have succeeded. Its private foundation regime demanded accountability and a golden age of philanthropy unfolded. Extraordinary public benefits flowed from a partnership between the wealthiest Americans and the most vulnerable.

While other legislative bulwarks of the 1960s have been sunk by devastating broadsides, the Grand Bargain’s slow death has been one of a thousand small cuts. The Supreme Court eviscerated the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s protections against discrimination, dismissing its worries about the disenfranchisement of voters as “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” The unsettling consequences of the Supreme Court’s failure to anticipate a new wave of voting limits have come to dominate our nation’s political discourse.

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Steven Dean Named Co-Director Of Block Center For International Studies At Brooklyn Law School

Professor Steven Dean Named Co-Director of Block Center for International Studies:

Professor Steven Dean, an expert in international tax policy, has been named co-director of the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law, joining co-directors Professors Julian Arato and Robin Effron to lead one of the most active international law institutions in New York. Professor Roberta Karmel, who founded the center with Professor of Law Emeritus Arthur Pinto in 1987, has stepped down from a leadership role.

Dean has previously served as Vice Dean at Brooklyn Law School and, while a Visiting Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, as Faculty Director of its Graduate Tax Program. He is also host of the Tax Maven Podcast.

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Former Temple Dean Convicted In U.S. News Rankings Scandal Fraud; AUSA Hopes Case Send A Message To Administrators At Other Schools

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Philadelphia Inquirer, Former Temple Business School Dean Guilty in Rankings Scandal Fraud Case:

The rankings scandal cost Porat his job as dean and the university hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements.

The former dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business was convicted Monday of orchestrating a complex fraud scheme to propel his college to the top of national rankings and defraud its students and donors based on that unearned reputation.

Moshe Porat — who led the school for more than two decades until he was fired for the misrepresentations in 2018 — shook his head quietly as the jury announced it had found him guilty of federal conspiracy and wire fraud charges now likely to send him to prison.

It took the panel of eight women and four men less than an hour to conclude that he, along with two of his subordinates, had for years knowingly embellished the data they were sending on Fox’s students to the magazine U.S. News & World Report, allowing its online MBA program to achieve its No. 1 ranking for four straight years.

The distinction helped Fox more than double its enrollment for the program between 2014 and 2017, raking in millions in tuition payments from students and donor dollars.

“The hope is that this case sends a message to other college and university administrators that there are real consequences to making representations that students and applicants rely on,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark B. Dubnoff said. “So many people turn to these rankings … to help them make informed decisions of where to go to college, graduate school, and it’s important that people are honest and fully truthful with the representations they make.”

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Law School Applicants Are Down, Breaking Five-Year Streak

Following up on yesterday's post, One-Third Of The Way Through The Fall 2022 Law School Admissions Cycle: Applicants Are Down 4.4% And In All LSAT Bands (Especially 170-180 (-13.6%)), Except 150-159 (+0.3%):

Reuters, Law School Applicants Are Down, Breaking Five-Year Streak:

Is legal education’s pandemic boom beginning to fade?

The number of applicants to law schools nationwide has declined year-over-year for the first time since 2018, according to data from the Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit that administers the Law School Admission Test. As of Nov. 28, 22,662 people had applied to start law school in fall 2022, nearly 5% fewer than this time last year, the council reported.

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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 November 1, 2021) 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)	203,642	1	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	8,180
2	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	123,837	2	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	4,706
3	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	123,137	3	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	4,658
4	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	122,232	4	David Kamin (NYU)	4,211
5	David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.)	120,170	5	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	4,184
6	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	113,104	6	Kim Clausing (UCLA)	3,944
7	David Kamin (NYU)	110,865	7	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	3,346
8	Cliff Fleming (BYU)	106,579	8	Ruth Mason (Virginia)	3,129
9	Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings)	103,426	9	Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.)	2,682
10	Rebecca Kysar (Fordham)	102,517	10	David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.)	2,632
11	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	101,869	11	Zachary Liscow (Yale)	2,524
12	Michael Simkovic (USC)	46,038	12	Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indy)	2,390
13	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	45,841	13	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	2,288
14	Paul Caron (Pepperdine)	38,834	14	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	2,264
15	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	35,870	15	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	2,179
16	Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.)	33,587	16	Yariv Brauner (Florida)	2,152
17	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	29,420	17	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2,005
18	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	28,191	18	Hugh Ault (Boston College)	1,848
19	Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine)	27,859	19	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	1,772
20	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	27,335	20	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1,759
21	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	27,066	21	Gregg Polsky (Georgia)	1,522
22	Jim Hines (Michigan)	26,180	22	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	1,481
23	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	25,257	22	Shu-Yi Oei (Boston College)	1,457
24	Ruth Mason (Virginia)	24,954	24	Michael Simkovic (USC)	1,416
25	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	24,841	25	Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine)	1,398

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ABA Finds Cleveland-Marshall Law School In Compliance With Accreditation Standards

Following up on my previous post, ABA Finds Cleveland-Marshall Law School Out Of Compliance With Financial Resources Accreditation Standard:  Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Notice of Law School Demonstrating Compliance With Standards 202(a), (c), and (d): Cleveland State University Cleveland-Marshall College of Law (Nov. 2021):

Following consideration of the record in the matter and the Law School’s response to the Council’s August 2021 Decision Letter, the Council concluded that the information provided by the Law School is sufficient to demonstrate compliance with Standards 202(a), (c), and (d). Accordingly, the Rule 13(a)(2) hearing is cancelled in accordance with Rule 20(d). Cleveland State University Cleveland-Marshall College of Law remains an approved law school.

ABA Journal, Ohio Law School Back in Compliance With Program Standard, ABA Legal Ed Section's Council Finds:

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Avi-Yonah: A Different Way to Tax Stock Buybacks

Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), A Different Way to Tax Stock Buybacks, 173 Tax Notes Fed. 1107 (Nov. 22, 2021):

In this article, Avi-Yonah reviews the Build Back Better Act, which would impose a 1 percent excise tax on corporate stock buybacks. He argues that while the measure is an effective way to raise revenue from high-income taxpayers, it will not address the main tax problem with buybacks: the tax exemption for foreign shareholders, which Congress should reconsider.

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Salib: The Pigouvian Constitution

Peter N. Salib (Houston; Google Scholar), The Pigouvian Constitution, 88 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1081 (2021): 

How can lawmakers reduce the skyrocketing rate of gun deaths in the United States? How can they stymie the spread of viral fake news stories designed to undermine our elections? Certain constitutionally protected activities—like owning a gun or speaking online—can generate social harms. Yet when lawmakers enact regulations to reduce those harms, they are regularly struck down as unconstitutional. Indeed, the very laws designed to most aggressively reduce social harms—like total criminal bans—are the least likely to be upheld. As a result, regulators appear stuck with an unpleasant choice—regulate constitutionally or effectively, but not both.

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Mitchell: State Income Tax Rankings

Dan Mitchell, Ranking State Income Taxes:

Motivated in part by an excellent graphic that I shared in 2016, I put together a five-column ranking of state personal income tax systems in 2018.

Given some changes that have since occurred, it’s time for a new version. The first two columns are self explanatory and columns 3 and 5 are based on whether the top tax rate on households is less than 5 percent (“Low Rate”) or more than 8 percent (“Class Warfare”).

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Jason Oh Named Lowell Milken Chair In Law At UCLA

Oh Receives Faculty Chair Appointment:

UCLA School of Law Professor Jason Oh has received a faculty chair appointment in recognition of his substantial contributions to the study of tax law. ...

Faculty chairs acknowledge the distinction of the law school’s outstanding professors and are made possible by the incredible generosity of UCLA Law’s alumni and friends. UCLA Law has 69 full-time faculty members and 35 endowed chairs. ...

Oh has been appointed to the Lowell Milken Chair in Law. A member of the UCLA Law faculty since 2012 and the faculty co-director of UCLA Law’s Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, he is an authority in tax policy and public finance. His record of scholarship and policymaking features multiple publications, appearances in the media, and testimonies before Congress. Oh also serves on the board of directors of the National Tax Association. The Lowell Milken Chair in Law was endowed in 2020 with a $1 million gift to support the career development of an emerging leader in the tax or business law areas. ...

Before joining UCLA Law, Oh was a tax attorney at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and an acting assistant professor of tax law at NYU School of Law. He earned his B.A. from Harvard University and J.D. from Harvard Law School.

ETS Establishes Legal Education Advisory Council To Expand And Create New Pathways In Legal Education

ETS Establishes Legal Education Advisory Council to Expand and Create New Pathways in Legal Education:

As ETS continues to pursue its vision of expanding and creating new pathways to and through legal education that prioritize fairness and equity, the organization has announced today the establishment of the Legal Education Advisory Council (LEAC) to help deliver on this vision.

As the pathway from considering law school attendance to obtaining legal employment continues to encounter demands for innovation, legal education — and thus ETS — bears a heavy responsibility to reevaluate how law school aspirants, students and graduates are recruited, prepared, assessed and licensed. The GRE test has brought an innovative approach to law school admissions that has enriched law school communities and has the potential to improve diversity access for years to come. The members of LEAC will play a critical role in helping shape the future of legal education.

“Meaningful innovation in legal education requires the active engagement of all relevant stakeholders, including those centrally involved in the recruitment and admissions pipeline, student services and career strategy professionals, faculty and senior administrators, and employers,” said Alberto Acereda, Associate Vice President of Global Higher Education at ETS. “I am thrilled to have these 10 esteemed members of the legal community join us as we form this new council to further innovation and access in the law school space.”

The Council is being established with 10 initial members but will continue to expand. Those who have joined LEAC include:

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One-Third Of The Way Through The Fall 2022 Law School Admissions Cycle: Applicants Are Down 4.4% And In All LSAT Bands (Especially 170-180 (-13.6%)), Except 150-159 (+0.3%)

We are now 33% of the way through Fall 2022 law school admissions season. The number of law school applicants reported by LSAC is down 4.4% compared to last year at this time.

122 of the 199 law schools are experiencing an increase in applications. Applications are up 50% or more at 7 law schools, and 30% or more at 25 law schools:

Applicants are up in only one region: South Central; and are down the most in Midwest (-13.4%), Northeast (-10.7%), and Far West (-9.6%) :

Applicants' LSAT scores are down -13.6% in the 170-180 band, -5.9% in the 160-169 band, and -10.8% in the 120-149 band; and up +0.3% in the 150-159 band:

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Lesson From The Tax Court: Who Is An IRS Employee's Immediate Supervisor For §6751 Penalty Approval?

Today’s lesson involves yet more litigation over IRS compliance with the penalty approval process required by the formerly toothless §6751(b)(1).  In Sand Investment Co., LLC, et al. v. Commissioner, 157 T.C. No. 11 (Nov. 23, 2021) (Judge Lauber), the Tax Court continues teaching us the scope and operation §6751(b), a series of lessons it started back in 2017 when its decision in Graev v. Commissioner, 149 T.C. 485 (2017), gave the statute sharp teeth.  Among other requirements, the statute says approval must come from an IRS employee's “immediate supervisor.”  In today’s case, the IRS employee who proposed a bunch of penalties had two supervisors but only one definitely signed timely.  Judge Lauber finds that function trumps form in identifying which of the two supervisors was the right one to approve the proposed penalties.  This is a short lesson, and also one that will may be rendered moot.  Legislation passed by the House and now before the Senate de-fangs §6751(b).  Details below the fold.

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Koppelman On The Yale And UIC Law School Controversies

Following up on my previous posts:

• Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed:  This Is A Witch-Hunt Against A Tenured Law Professor, by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern)
• Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed: Yale Law School’s Bullying, Coercive Diversity Leaders: How Not To Do Equity Work, by Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern)

Chronicle of Higher Education, The Review: 'Many Administrators Are Cowards':

Faculty susceptibility to administrative sanction is at the center of the highly politicized culture wars playing out across universities in the last five years or so. Law schools are no exception. In the last year, Northwestern Law’s Andrew Koppelman has emerged as a sort of monitor of what he sees as flagrant instances of administrative overreach. “Many administrators,” he told me, “are cowards who are pre-disposed to grovel before student demands. The way to make cowards behave appropriately is to give them fears in the other direction.” I spoke with Koppelman about recent events at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Law and at Yale Law School. Here’s some of that conversation.

You’ve written two pieces for the Review in relatively short order, the first about the Trent Colbert affair at Yale Law, and the second about Jason Kilborn at UIC. Both cases involve members of the law school, students or faculty, getting in trouble for putatively racist speech — speech which elicited great distress among other students. I’m reminded of a somewhat different but not unrelated dilemma, what Jeannie Suk Gersen at The New Yorker has described as new challenges around teaching rape law because of student sensitivity. What’s happening?

There are two different sets of sensitivities. There are the sensitivities of students, and there are the sensitivities of administrators. It’s important to keep them apart. There are always going to be some students who take offense at things. A teacher always needs to keep that in mind. Part of a teacher’s job is not to lose the room. So teaching is an exercise in rhetoric; rhetoric has a moral dimension. It forces you to learn about your audience, to get outside your own head and into the heads of other people. This is the morally attractive aspect of rhetoric. ...

What I thought happened at Yale was that the administrators were so rigidly attached to a particular narrative that they misunderstood the situation and they made horrible mistakes. The impression I get is of quite possibly well-intentioned people who made really bad judgments.

What you are are seeing at UIC is much worse. It’s positively malevolent — there’s just no excuse for it. ...

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TaxProf Blog Holiday Weekend Roundup

Thanksgiving:

• WKRP In Cincinnati Thanksgiving Turkey Drop
• WSJ Refuses To Cancel Its Annual Thanksgiving Editorials
• Happy Thanksgiving, Pepperdine
• Avi-Yonah Posts Three New International Tax Papers On SSRN

Friday:

• Next Week’s Tax Workshops
• Weekly Legal Education Roundup
• Tax Policy In The Biden Administration
• NY Times Op-Ed: Thanksgiving, Gratitude, And The Shocking Privilege Of Life

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Columbia Settles Class Action COVID-19 Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million
• Cravath Kicks Off Associate Bonus Season With Payouts Up To $115,000
• Break Into Tax: Capital Gains & Losses — An Introduction

Sunday:

• WSJ: Fans Pour Funding—And Faith—Into 'The Chosen': A Hit Drama About Jesus
• Dave Chappelle, Reinhold Niebuhr, And The Gospel
• Morse Tan Named Dean Of Liberty University School of Law
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

WSJ: Fans Pour Funding—And Faith—Into 'The Chosen': A Hit Drama About Jesus

In July, I blogged The Chosen: Christian America’s Must-See TV Show and shared that I love the show so much that my wife and I were going to host weekly watch parties of Season 1 with lunch on Fridays in the fall semester at Pepperdine Caruso Law School. I am thrilled to report that it was such a success that we will be showing Season 2 in the spring semester. The weekend Wall Street Journal has a fascinating report on the show: Fans Pour Funding—and Faith—Into a Hit Drama About Jesus:

Crowdfunding has raised millions for ‘The Chosen,’ an ambitious series exploring characters from the New Testament. Fans have already chipped in enough for three seasons—and are driving ticket sales for a Christmas special coming to movie theaters.

Dallas Jenkins, the filmmaker who created “The Chosen,” says the show’s style is modeled more on “Friday Night Lights” than other Christian TV shows and movies. Mary Magdalene relapses into vice. The apostle Matthew is on the autism spectrum. Jesus’ miracles get back stories.

By fleshing out biblical characters across multiple seasons, the show has inspired fan discussion, debate and squabbling on a level more typical of the Marvel or Star Wars series. Except that for “Chosen” fans, the dynamic is fueled by religious faith. ...

The success of the series is a powerful reminder to Hollywood that faith-focused projects can sometimes become breakthrough hits. But what makes “The Chosen” even more of an outlier is the way it is supercharging the crowdfunding model to sustain production through multiple seasons. Though “The Chosen” is free to watch, viewers have poured $40 million and counting into its production budget, enough to pay for three out of a planned seven seasons. The costs of building the new production facilities, on a 1,200-acre camp owned by the Salvation Army, are being covered by a smaller group of the show’s fans.

Producers say viewership was sluggish when the first season premiered for a fee in 2019. But the audience spiked when they made the series free on a “Chosen” app, now the show’s main distribution hub, and viewers continued to multiply during the pandemic’s lockdown months. The show has been translated into 50 languages, and is licensed to video services from Amazon to Peacock. Producers estimate that its 16 episodes have been viewed 312 million times. Now the “Chosen” audience is set to converge in person in movie theaters.

Starting Dec. 1, about 1,700 theaters will feature screenings of a “Chosen” Christmas special, including musical performances and a new episode in which Mother Mary (a series character played by Vanessa Benavente) flashes back to her son’s birth. Distributor Fathom Events, known for one- or two- day releases of classic movies, live opera and other specialty fare, expanded the “Chosen” event to 10 days. Ticket sales are approaching $6 million so far, putting “Christmas with ‘The Chosen’” on track to be Fathom’s bestseller ever, according to chief executive Ray Nutt.

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Dave Chappelle, Reinhold Niebuhr, And The Gospel

Following up on my previous post, Norm Macdonald’s Comedy Was Quite Christian:  Russell Moore (Christianity Today), What Stand-Up Comedians Can Teach the Church:

Good comedy is strange and surprising. So is the gospel.

Apparently, comedian Dave Chappelle isn’t welcome at his own high school. According to news reports, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts delayed a ceremony to celebrate the renaming of its theater after the famous alum because students threatened to walk out.

Netflix fielded similar threats from its employees after Chappelle’s controversial standup comedy special aired on the streaming service. Many felt it was insulting toward transgender people and others. Chappelle’s special has since prompted a thousand debates about political correctness, cancel culture, and the nature of respect and civility in the public square.

While those debates are important, let’s set them aside for a moment and reflect instead on the question of who was laughing—and why.

As the Chappelle controversy has unfolded, I have found myself in conversations with two specific people on opposite sides of the “love him or hate him” spectrum. Both of these individuals were surprised by their mixed feelings—not about the social commentary or the rhetoric of the comedian but by their own reactions and responses.

One of them is a staunch conservative who’s been concerned about our country entering a “What are your pronouns?” era. He agreed with Chappelle’s arguments on that point but said he never laughed at them. In fact, he cringed several times at the crude language in the routine. “I was with him on the issue,” he said. “It just wasn’t my kind of humor.”

The other person is a committed progressive outraged by what he sees as Chappelle taking cheap shots at a vulnerable population—and yet he had the reverse response. “I hated what he was saying, at least at those parts,” he said, before looking down and wincing. “But I have to admit, he was funny.”

So while the conservative felt obligated to laugh, he felt left out because he didn’t. And although the progressive despised what was said, he felt guilty because he did laugh.

In September, David Sims of The Atlantic profiled another controversial and politically charged comedian, Norm Macdonald, after Macdonald’s death from cancer. As with Chappelle, part of Macdonald’s legacy was that he could prompt people to “laugh and gasp in shock in equal measure.” The key to all of this, Sims argued, was not Macdonald’s place on the political spectrum, which was to the right of most of his cohort. It wasn’t even his comedic material itself, which was often rather coarse. Instead, it was Macdonald’s view of what comedy is meant to do—or, more specifically, of how laughter works.

According to Sims, Macdonald argued that standups should “hunt for laughter, not applause.” The comedian went on to explain, “There’s a difference between a clap and a laugh. A laugh is involuntary, but the crowd is in complete control when they’re clapping. They’re saying, ‘We agree with what you’re saying; proceed!’ … But when they’re laughing, they’re genuinely surprised. And when they’re not laughing, they’re really surprised. And sometimes I think, in my little head, that that’s the best comedy of all.”

This seems to have little to do with the witness of the church. After all, we’re not trying to make people laugh. But that element of surprise—an involuntary reaction that goes beyond our sets of ideologies and expectations—is actually a key part of what we are called to do, and the lack of it partially explains why we so often fail.

In the mid-20th century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote an essay on the relationship between humor and faith that was utterly humorless but nonetheless insightful. In it, Niebuhr argued that at the core of human existence is a paradox. We see ourselves as insignificant in the broad sweep of space and time, per Psalm 8: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (v. 4). But our very ability to ponder that insignificance seems to place us at the center of the universe: “You have made them a little lower than the angels” (v. 5). ...

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Morse Tan Named Dean Of Liberty University School of Law

Former State Department Ambassador Morse Tan Selected to Head Liberty University School of Law:

Liberty University has announced that Morse Hyun-Myung Tan has been named the new dean of Liberty University School of Law. Tan will assume his duties on Jan. 1, 2022.

Most recently, Tan served as Ambassador at Large for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, where he oversaw the indictment, sanctioning, capture, and/or conviction of war criminals in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, the Balkans, and Lebanon. In his professional law career, Tan has served briefly as an attorney and counselor at law for major law firms. He has worked primarily in legal academia and has published numerous law review articles and delivered presentations on bioethics and international human rights, most notably as an expert on North Korea. Tan has served as a law professor or visiting scholar at University of Texas at Austin School of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law, Florida Coastal School of Law, Northern Illinois University College of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and Handong International Law School in Pohang, Korea, where he took part in founding the first American J.D. program in Asia. Ambassador Tan authored “North Korea, International Law and the Dual Crises” (Routledge). He has taught courses on North Korean policy, international criminal law, international human rights, bioethics, and constitutional law.

“At Liberty, we look for leaders who not only bring a wealth of experience in their field but are bold about their faith and fully support our Christian mission,” said President Jerry Prevo. “We are excited to welcome Ambassador Tan, who will help train future law professionals with the biblical principles that are so desperately needed in our nation today.”

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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 paper debuting on the list at #5:

1. [296 Downloads]  The Tax Gap's Many Shades of Gray, by Daniel Hemel (Chicago; Google Scholar), Janet Holtzblatt (Tax Policy Center) & Steve Rosenthal (Tax Policy Center)
2. [210 Downloads]  The 2021 Compromise, by Ruth Mason (Virginia; Google Scholar) (reviewed by Charlotte Crane (Northwestern; Google Scholar) here)
3. [194 Downloads]  Implementing an International Effective Minimum Tax in the EU, by Joachim Englisch (Münster) & Johannes Becker (Münster; Google Scholar)
4. [188 Downloads]  Colorblind Tax Enforcement, by Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington; Google Scholar)
5. [169 Downloads]  Slicing the Shadow: A Proposal for Updating U.S. International Taxation, by Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Chronicle of Higher Education, Law Professor Investigated Presidential Search At His University. It Said He Was Out of Line.
2. Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale Dean Finds 'Something Fishy' In B-School Rankings, Highlights Need For Greater Transparency
3. Washington Post, The Country’s Most Popular Law School Got An Unexpected Jolt
4. New York Post, Tenured Fordham Professor Challenges Termination For Masturbating During Zoom Lecture
5. WCTV, Florida State Law School Associate Dean Dies From COVID-19 At Age 48
6. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: How To Mess Up Your Checkbook IRA
7. Break Into Tax, Introduction To Deductions
8. Wall Street Journal, WSJ Refuses To Cancel Its Annual Thanksgiving Editorials
9. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), In Response To Criticism, ABA Releases Revised Proposed Diversity Accreditation Standard For Notice And Comment
10. J. Goosby Smith (Pepperdine), Happy Thanksgiving, Pepperdine

Columbia Settles COVID-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million

Law360, Columbia U. Settles COVID-19 Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5M:

Columbia University has agreed to pay $12.5 million to resolve a lawsuit seeking tuition and fee reimbursements in the wake of coronavirus-spurred campus closures, according to a settlement proposal filed in New York federal court.

Students brought a putative class action last year, alleging the Ivy League school deprived them of in-person instruction, access to campus facilities, student activities and other benefits for which they had paid tuition and fees. Certain refunds the school had already provided were insufficient, according to the complaint filed Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman trimmed the students' tuition claims, but said they were able to reclaim all the fees paid.

Under the deal announced Tuesday, the university will return more than $8.5 million in fees and pay an additional $4 million so the plaintiffs don't seek to revive the tuition claims, according to a lawyer for the students, Roy T. Willey IV.

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Cravath Kicks Off Associate Bonus Season With Payouts Up To $115,000

Cravath once again has kicked off associate bonus season:

• 1st Year Associate (Class of 2021):  $15,000 (prorated)
• 2nd Year Associate (Class of 2020):  $20,000
• 3rd Year Associate (Class of 2019:  $30,000
• 4th Year Associate (Class of 2018):  $57,500
• 5th Year Associate (Class of 2017):  $75,000
• 6th Year Associate (Class of 2016):  $90,000
• 7th Year Associate (Class of 2015):  $105,000
• 8th Year Associate (Class of 2014): $115,000

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Break Into Tax: Capital Gains & Losses — An Introduction

Learn or review the building blocks of capital gains & losses. This video covers the 3 elements needed for a gain or loss to be "capital" rather than "ordinary," including what constitutes a "capital asset." It also discusses holding period. Professor Lederman & Professor Emily Cauble co-host. Planned future videos will cover the capital gains preference and the limitation on capital losses.

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Tuesday, November 30: Steven Dean (Brooklyn) & Dana Brakman Reiser (Brooklyn; Google Scholar) will present For-Profit Philanthropy as part of the Georgetown Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Brian Galle.

Tuesday, November 30: Alan Auerbach (UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar) will present Tax Policy Design With Low Interest Rates as part of the NYU Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Daniel Shaviro. 

Wednesday, December 1: Victor Fleischer (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) will present Tax Policy - Legislative Updates on behalf of the UC-Irvine Graduate Tax Program. If you would like to attend, please contact taxpolicy@law.uci.edu. 

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