Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Layser Reviews Household Asymmetric Risk Of Foreclosure From Tax Assessment Limit By Bradley, Huang & Seegert

This week, Michelle Layser (San Diego) reviews Sebastien Bradley (Drexel; Google Scholar), Da Huang (Utah; Google Scholar), Nathan Seegert (Utah; Google Scholar), Household Asymmetric Risk of Foreclosure From Tax Assessment Limit (Jan. 21, 2023).

During the pandemic, U.S. housing prices soared. In many cities, rising home prices can trigger higher assessed values for property taxation. But in California and 16 other states with assessment limits, laws limit how much appreciation cities can take into account for property tax purposes. That is good news for homeowners here in San Diego, where housing prices in March 2022 were up a whopping 29.9% from the previous year. Since California law caps the annual increase in assessed value at 2%, homeowners were protected from property tax spikes during that period.

Then came the fall. From April to September, prices in San Diego fell 5.2%, and they have continued to drop. 

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• W. David Ball (Santa Clara) & Michelle Oberman (Santa Clara), The Case Against Commercial Casebooks
• Bloomberg Law, Law School’s Covering of Slavery Murals Probed by 2nd Cir.
• Paul Caron (Dean Pepperdine), With Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, Tulane, And Creighton, 40 Law Schools Are Boycotting The U.S. News Rankings
• David Lat (Boston Globe Op-Ed),  Big Law’s Cancel Culture
• David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), A Controversial Speaker Returned To Yale Law—You Won't Believe What Happened Next
• Law.com, Columbia Law Professor's 'F--k You' to Student Question Caught on Video
• Los Angeles Times Editorial, A Welcome Revolt Against the Flawed College Ranking System

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• The American Prospect, Reanimating the Taxman
• The Atlantic, A National Sales Tax Is a Terrible Idea
• Bloomberg, Americans Are Leaving High-Tax New York and Moving to Florida
• Bloomberg, Defend IRS Funding as a High-Return Investment in Democracy
• Bloomberg, Low Tax Florida Has More Jobs Than New York for the First Time
• Bloomberg, Wealth Taxes Have Always Been a Terrible Idea

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Tuesday, February 7: Brian Galle (Georgetown; Google Scholar) will present Solving the Valuation Challenge: The ULTRA Method for Taxing Extreme Wealth (with David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar) & Darien Shanske (UC-Davis; Google Scholar)) (reviewed by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar) here) as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact David Schizer. 

Tuesday, February 7: Allison Christians (McGill; Google Scholar) will present Global Tax Reform and Mythical International Law (with Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães (Antwerp; Google Scholar)) as part of the Georgetown Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli.

Tuesday, February 7: Sarah B. Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) will present Coding The Code: Catala And Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 S.M.U. L. Rev. 535 (2022), as part of the Duke Tax Policy Seminar. If you would like to attend, please contact Lawrence Zelenak. 

Wednesday, February 8: Jonathan Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar) will present Subjective Costs of Taxation as part of the Northwestern Advanced Topics in Taxation Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Gregg Polsky. 

Thursday, February 9: Katarzyna Anna Bilicka (Utah State; Google Scholar) will present as part of the UCLA Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance. If you would like to attend, please contact Kirk Stark and Jason Oh.

Friday, February 10: Robert Schütze (Durham) will present Limits to the Union’s ‘Internal Market’ Competence(s): Constitutional Comparisons (from The Question of Competence in the European Union, Oxford University Press 2014) as part of the Oxford-Virginia Legal Dialogs. If you would like to attend, please contact Tsilly Dagan and Ruth Mason. 

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Is U.S. News In Trouble?

Observer, U.S. News Depends On its College Rankings. What Happens When Universities Don’t Want To Be Ranked?:

In the past few months, numerous high-ranked universities have dropped out of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, spelling trouble for the future of the nearly 80-year old publication.

For decades, schools, deans and even students have called for an overhaul of the annual U.S. News & World Report university rankings, to no avail.

But in the past few months, a series of public statements from top-ranked universities has begun to finally pose a real threat to U.S. News, which has been the dominant player in the rankings industry for nearly 40 years. ...

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Gondwe Presents The Life-Saving Potential Of Direct Public Financial Assistance To Survivors Of Intimate Partner Violence Today At Indiana

Nyamagaga Gondwe (Wisconsin; Google Scholar) presents Emergency Exit: The Life-Saving Potential of Direct Public Financial Assistance to Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence at Indiana today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Leandra Lederman:

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is viewed primarily as a class of criminal behavior in federal policy. But the criminal justice system operates through a model of individual accountability, which means that solutions to IPV in American communities focus on education (proactive) and incarceration (reactive) as interventions.

However, public health studies on IPV suggest that the kinds of physical violence that result in arrest should not be seen as the central issue in addressing IPV. Instead, those studies suggest that physical violence should be thought of as a tool for one partner in a relationship to exert coercive power and control over the other partner. Put another way, physical violence is just one of multiple tools an abuser will use to control their partner. Other tools include emotional abuse, psychological abuse, and economic abuse.

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Londoño-Vélez Presents Behavioral Responses To Wealth Taxation: Evidence From Colombia Today At UCLA

Juliana Londoño-Vélez (UCLA; Google Scholar) presents Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxation: Evidence from Colombia (with Javier Avila-Mahecha (DIAN; Google Scholar)) at UCLA today as part of its Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance hosted by Kirk Stark and Jason Oh:

We study behavioral responses to personal wealth taxes in Colombia using tax microdata (1993-2016) linked with the leaked Panama Papers, which shed light on offshoring to Colombia’s most relevant tax havens. We leverage variation from four reforms that modified the wealth tax design—tax duration and rate schedule—and introduced discrete jumps in the tax liability. Using bunching and difference-in-difference techniques, we obtain four key results. First, we find salient and compelling evidence that wealth tax hikes cause taxpayers to lower their reported wealth instantly—a reporting response that slashes, at most, one-fifth of tax revenue. Second, this response can persist even after the wealth tax no longer applies—i.e., “hysteresis”—reflecting taxpayers’ strategic avoidance behavior. Third, taxpayers misreport what authorities cannot cross-verify: they inflate (interpersonal) debt and underreport non-third-party-reported business assets. Lastly, the wealthiest taxpayers respond to wealth tax hikes by hiding assets in hard-to-track entities in tax havens.

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Two Perspectives On The Growing U.S. News Rankings Boycott

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Medical Schools Bail on Academic Merit and Intellectual Rigor, by Ira Stoll (Education Next):

To see how the diversity, equity and inclusion mania is colliding with meritocracy in American higher education, pay attention to the flap over graduate schools pulling out of the U.S. News rankings. Readers who aren’t applying to medical school may have missed the controversy. But anyone who plans on seeing a doctor or benefiting from research or treatment at an academic medical center has an interest in the outcome.

So far, U.S. News has resisted demands from the graduate schools to base the rankings on equity rather than on the grades and test scores of incoming students. U.S. News has been transparent about the method it uses for its rankings, including factors such as a reputation survey, MCAT scores and grade point averages of incoming students.

The medical schools have been similarly clear about why they disagree with the U.S. News method and will stop participating. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a Jan. 24 statement, said the U.S. News rankings undermine the school’s “commitment to anti-racism” and “outreach to diverse communities.” ...

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Bargain Basement Progressivity? Constitutional Flat Taxes, Demogrants, And Progressive Income Taxation

Samuel D. Brunson (Loyola-Chicago; Google Scholar), Bargain Basement Progressivity? Constitutional Flat Taxes, Demogrants, and Progressive Income Taxation, 53 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 683 (2022):

State and local governments raise revenue in three primary ways: property, sales, and income taxes. Property and sales taxes tend to impose a higher burden on low-income households. To ensure the fairness and progressivity of their overall revenue system, states need their income tax to be sufficiently progressive.

Four states face an apparently insurmountable barrier to progressive income taxation: their state constitutions mandate that any income tax must have a flat rate, applicable to all taxpayers. Without a constitutional amendment, a difficult process, they cannot adopt marginal rates that increase as income increases.

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Lat: Big Law’s Cancel Culture

The Boston Globe Op-Ed:  Big Law’s Cancel Culture, by David Lat:

Ideological uniformity in Big Law, whether on the right or the left, is not a good thing — not for lawyers, law firms, and the rule of law.

On the morning of June 23, the US Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home. You might have expected the lawyers who won the case, celebrated Supreme Court litigators Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, to receive congratulations within their firm for such a major victory.

Instead, they received walking papers. That afternoon, Clement and Murphy announced in The Wall Street Journal that they were leaving Kirkland & Ellis, the nation’s highest-grossing law firm. Why? Because Kirkland presented them with an ultimatum: withdraw from representing clients in Second Amendment cases, including existing clients in ongoing representations, or withdraw from the firm.

It’s not just representing unpopular clients; even articulating an unpopular opinion might be a fireable offense today in the world of large law firms (aka “Big Law”). Take support for the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion back to the states. At least two antiabortion women partners allege — one in The Wall Street Journal and one in Original Jurisdiction, my newsletter about the legal profession — that their support for Dobbs played a major role in their being forced out of their firms. ...

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Kaplan: The Declining Appeal Of Inherited Retirement Accounts

Richard L. Kaplan (Illinois; Google Scholar), The Declining Appeal of Inherited Retirement Accounts, 42 Va. Tax Rev. __ (2023): 

As retirement accounts proliferate and grow in value, American retirees are increasingly leaving substantial balances in these accounts to their adult children, siblings, and other relatives. Until recently, these new owners were able to withdraw funds from these tax-favored accounts over their lifetimes as their personal circumstances dictated. 

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WaPo: Want To Be Happy? Don’t Be A Lawyer.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Want to be Happy? Then Don’t Be a Lawyer., by Kathleen Parker:

It might surprise few that lawyers are the unhappiest people on the planet, at least when it comes to their jobs. This is according to lawyers themselves and is the conclusion of a recent analysis by The Post of data on America’s happiest and unhappiest workers [The Happiest, Least Stressful, Most Meaningful Jobs in America].

Chalk up lawyers’ malaise to high levels of stress and a lack of “meaningfulness” in their work. This doesn’t mean all lawyers dislike their jobs, but data doesn’t lie (even if some lawyers sometimes do). I should mention that a significant number of my family members have been and are attorneys. ...

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Clausing Presents Capital Taxation And Market Power Today At Toronto

Kimberly Clausing (UCLA; Google Scholar) presents Capital Taxation and Market Power at Toronto today as part of its James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series hosted by Benjamin Alarie:

In recent decades, market power has increased substantially, as shown by measures that include industry concentration, mark-ups, and business profitability. While market power can generate benefits, it also raises vexing policy concerns, including the potential for adverse effects on labor markets, income inequality, and the dynamism of market competition. The concept of market power also has implications for how we conceptualize capital income, making it important to distinguish between normal and above-normal returns to capital. The tax system taxes both types of returns to capital, but often imperfectly and incompletely. 

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Drexel Seeks To Hire An Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof

Drexel Law Faculty Posting:

The Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law invites applications from entry-level and pre-tenure lateral candidates for a full-time, tenure-track position teaching and researching in the area of tax law. Candidates must have a demonstrated record of significant scholarly achievement and a demonstrated commitment to excellent teaching. Because the law school is part of an R1 research university, tenure stream faculty are expected to engage in significant research and demonstrate educational, methodological, or practice backgrounds that add vitality to their work.

Applications are particularly encouraged from people of color, individuals with disabilities, people of all sexual and gender identities, and anyone whose background, experience or viewpoint will contribute to the diversity of the faculty.

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Morse Presents APA Challenges To Old Tax Guidance And The Six-Year Default Limitations Period Today At Northwestern

Susie Morse (Texas; Google Scholar) presents Out of Time: APA Challenges to Old Tax Guidance and the Six-Year Default Limitations Period at Northwestern today as part of its Advanced Topics in Taxation Colloquium hosted by Gregg Polsky:

Old regs should not be subject indefinitely to administrative procedure challenge. Instead, we should leave them alone. The consensus case law view that applies the six-year limitations period under 28 U.S.C. § 2401(a) with accrual at the time of promulgation, strikes the right balance between accuracy and repose. It correctly reflects that all of the elements of the administrative procedure claim are in place at the time of the alleged error, when the regulation was promulgated. When -- as in tax -- claims can be delayed through no fault of any plaintiff, the solution is to make appropriate administrative and equitable adjustments.

Conclusion
The puzzle presented by administrative procedure challenges to old regs amounts to a classic tension in law: the tradeoff between accuracy and repose. The puzzle is solved by the default six-year limitations period of 28 U.S.C. § 2401(a), which, under a case law consensus, begins to run when the final agency rulemaking action is taken for administrative procedure claims. Tax provides a good text case for this argument because it is a somewhat more difficulty case, due to the fact that most opportunities to raise administrative procedure claims arise not as facial challenges, bur rather in enforcement cases – whether deficiency or refund -- where the pre-litigation tax procedure can be lengthy. 

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2nd Circuit To Decide Whether Vermont Law School Can Cover Underground Railroad Murals Against Artist's Wishes

Following up on my previous posts (links below), Bloomberg Law, Law School’s Covering of Slavery Murals Probed by 2nd Cir.:

Vermont Law School found a somewhat receptive Second Circuit as it defended a ruling allowing it to permanently cover murals depicting the Underground Railroad without violating an artists’ rights law.

Artist Samuel Kerson argued that the school hiding his two 1994 murals behind bolted-in acoustic panels violated the Visual Artists Rights Act, or VARA, during Friday’s oral argument at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But the school says it complied with the law when it hid murals that students complained about for decades as “cartoonish” depictions of slaves and promotion of the “white savior complex.”

The dispute raises questions regarding how far VARA limits the property rights of the owners of their physical art, and the reach of exceptions written into the law. The US District Court for the District of Vermont’s ruling said that “no court has ruled that VARA protects the artist’s interest in keeping his art visible or on display.”

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NY Times: Black Americans Are Much More Likely To Face Tax Audits, Study Finds

New York Times, Black Americans Are Much More Likely to Face Tax Audits, Study Finds:

A new report documents systemic discrimination in how the I.R.S. selects taxpayers to be audited, with implications for a debate on the agency’s funding.

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.

Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit, according to the study by economists from Stanford University [Hadi Elzayn, Daniel Ho], the University of Michigan [Evelyn Smith], the University of Chicago [Jacob Goldin, Arun Ramesh] and the Treasury Department [Robin Fisher, Thomas Hertz] [Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits]:

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Ryznar: Exams In The Time Of ChatGPT

Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-McKinney), Exams in the Time of ChatGPT, 80 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online __ (2023):

This article offers various methods to administer assessments while maintaining their integrity—after asking artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT for its views on the matter. The sophisticated response of the chatbot, which students can use in their written work, only raises the stakes of figuring out how to administer exams fairly.

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Doran Presents Executive Compensation And Corporate Governance Today At Columbia

Michael Doran (Virginia; Google Scholar) presents Executive Compensation And Corporate Governance (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) here) at Columbia today as part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by David Schizer, Michael Love, Wojciech Kopczuk, and Alex Raskolnikov. 

Over the past four decades, Congress has repeatedly used tax policy to address executive-compensation practices, most notably through golden-parachute penalty taxes (enacted in 1984), a $1 million cap on compensation deductions (enacted in 1993 and expanded in 2017), and penalty taxes on nonqualified deferred compensation (enacted in 2004). The critical assumptions underlying these efforts are, first, that certain features of executive pay represent a failure of corporate governance and, second, that tax policy can correct that failure. The first assumption may or may not be correct; the theoretical and empirical arguments about it remain unresolved. But the second assumption is increasingly untenable. Penalty taxes have been largely ineffective in changing executive-compensation practices in the ways that legislators intend; in many instances, they actually exacerbate the features of executive pay that concern Congress in the first place. 

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Princeton Review's Best 168 Law Schools (2023 Edition)

The Princeton Review has published the 2023 edition of The Best 168 Law Schools (press release) (FAQs) (methodology):

The company reports its annual law school rankings in 14 categories: each one lists the top 10 ranking schools. ...

The Princeton Review’s law school rankings are uniquely based on data the company gathers from surveys of administrators at the law schools as well as surveys of students attending the schools who rate and report on their experiences at them. The rankings for 2023 are based on surveys of administrators at 168 law schools in 2021-22 and surveys of 17,000 students enrolled in the schools [an average of 101 per school] over the past three academic years.

More than 60 data points are factored into the company’s ranking list tallies. Of the 14 categories of ranking lists, six lists are based on student- and administrator-reported data. Five are based solely on student data, and three are based solely on administrator data.

Best Quality of Life: Based on student answers to survey questions on: whether there is a strong sense of community at the school whether differing opinions are tolerated in the classroom, the location of the school, the quality of social life at the school, the school's research resources (library, computer and database resources). 

1. Virginia
2. Florida State
3. Vanderbilt
4. UCLA
5. Penn

Best Professors:  Based on student answers to survey questions concerning how good their professors are as teachers and how accessible they are outside the classroom.

1. Chicago
2. Duke
3. Stanford
4. Virginia
5. Vanderbilt

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Goldin Presents Measurement And Mitigation Of Racial Disparities In Tax Audits Today At Georgetown

Jacob Goldin (Chicago; Google Scholar) presents Measurement and Mitigation of Racial Disparities in Tax Audits at Georgetown today as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop hosted by Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli. 

Government agencies around the world use data-driven algorithms to allocate enforcement resources. Even when such algorithms are formally neutral with respect to protected characteristics like race, there is widespread concern that they can disproportionately burden vulnerable groups. We study differences in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit rates between Black and non-Black taxpayers. Because neither we nor the IRS observe taxpayer race, we propose and employ a novel partial identification strategy to estimate these differences. Despite race-blind audit selection, we find that Black taxpayers are audited at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. The main source of the disparity is differing audit rates by race among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Using counterfactual audit selection models for EITC claimants, we find that maximizing the detection of underreported taxes would not lead to Black taxpayers being audited at higher rates. In contrast, in these models, certain policies tend to increase the audit rate of Black taxpayers: (1) designing audit selection algorithms to minimize the “no-change rate”; (2) targeting erroneously claimed refundable credits rather than total under-reporting; and (3) limiting the share of more complex EITC returns that can be selected for audit. 

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Lat: A Controversial Speaker Returned To Yale Law—You Won't Believe What Happened Next

Following up on my previous post, Yale Law School Restricts Access To FedSoc Free Speech Panel Today To Avoid Repeat Of Last Year's Controversy:  David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), A Controversial Speaker Returned To Yale Law—You Won't Believe What Happened Next:

Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom spoke at YLS on Tuesday; how was she received?

This past Tuesday, January 24, Kristen Waggoner returned to Yale Law, this time to discuss 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which she argued before the Supreme Court in December. Waggoner’s client in 303 Creative is a Colorado website designer who doesn’t want to design websites for same-sex weddings, and the case presents the following question: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

303 Creative is one of the most interesting, important, and high-profile cases of the current Term, so it’s obvious why a law student group might want to host an event with one of the lawyers who argued it. In other words, I don’t consider the invitation to Waggoner to be “trolling” by the Yale Federalist Society, i.e., something done for the sole purpose of antagonizing the left.

In addition, Yale FedSoc arranged for Waggoner to be joined by two other speakers: Professor Nadine Strossen of New York Law School, who served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008, and Professor Robert Post of Yale Law School, which he led as Dean from 2009 to 2017. Professors Post and Strossen are two of the nation’s leading scholars of the First Amendment, so an event featuring them plus Kristen Waggoner is impressive. ...

So how did Tuesday’s YLS event with Kristen Waggoner go?

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WSJ: Whose Name Goes First On Your Joint Tax Return? Probably Not The Woman's.

Wall Street Journal, Who Goes First on Your Joint Tax Return? Probably Not the Woman.:

The IRS doesn’t care, so why do most people put the man first on the 1040? Even Kamala Harris goes second to the second gentleman.

When calculating federal income taxes, it makes absolutely no difference which spouse is listed first on a joint tax return. An opposite-sex couple can put the man’s name first, start with the woman’s name, list them in order of income, go alphabetically or begin with the spouse who woke up earlier last Tuesday. It literally doesn’t matter one cent.

But there are two lines for names on Form 1040. Somebody has to go first, and somebody has to go second. ... According to a first-of-its-kind assessment from researchers from the U.S. Treasury Department and the University of Michigan, men’s names were listed first on 88% of joint returns filed by opposite-sex married couples in 2020. That figure has trickled down a little since 1996, when nearly all returns—97%—listed the man’s name first.

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The Case Against Commercial Casebooks

W. David Ball (Santa Clara; Google Scholar) & Michelle Oberman (Santa Clara; Google Scholar), The Case Against Commercial Casebooks, 71 J. Legal Educ. __ (2023):

Open-source, online casebooks are a free alternative to the for-profit commercial casebooks that dominate the legal academy. They offer a host of benefits for students and professors alike. Online casebooks are surprisingly easy to create: literally the click of a button allows you to “clone” existing open-source casebooks, many of which closely track the cases and flow of the most popular commercial casebooks. Once “cloned,” it is simple to incorporate your own or others’ material, enabling professors to center their personal pedagogical goals and values as they train the next generation of lawyers.

Open-source casebooks are also free, permitting professors to meaningfully offset some of the educational costs incurred by our students. As law schools reflect on how they might build institutions that are more diverse, equitable and inclusive, open-source casebooks stand out as an obvious, attainable way to make meaningful progress towards those goals.

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Clausing Delivers Pugh Lecture Today At San Diego On The Future of International Tax Cooperation

Kimberly Clausing (UCLA; Google Scholar) delivers the annual Richard Crawford Pugh Lecture on Tax Law & Policy at San Diego today on The Future of International Tax Cooperation:

Kimberly Clausing holds the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy.

During the first part of the Biden Administration, Clausing was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis in the US Department of the Treasury, serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy. Prior to coming to UCLA, Clausing was the Thormund A. Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at Reed College.

Her research studies the taxation of multinational firms, examining how government decisions and corporate behavior interplay in the global economy. She has published numerous articles in this area, and she is the author of Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (Harvard University Press, 2019).

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• ABA Journal, Can A Chatbot Earn A JD? This One Averaged C-Plus On Law School Exams
• ABA Journal, Developing An Identity: Zachariah Demeola Created A Holistic Way For Law Students To Find Where They Fit Into The Profession
• ABA Journal, Law Prof Eastman’s False Statements About Election Helped Provoke Capitol Rioters, Ethics Charges Say
• American Lawyer, After Pandemic Hiatus, Lawyer Exchange Offers Talent Development, Retention, Referral Opportunities
• Columbia Law, In Memoriam: University Professor Emeritus Kent Greenawalt ’63
• Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn Carey Law’s Withdrawal From U.S. News Changes Little
• The Den, Mercer Law School Launches New Bankruptcy Program

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WSJ Op-Ed: The Ninth Circuit Upholds A Wealth Tax

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  The Ninth Circuit Upholds a Wealth Tax, by Christopher Cox (Former Rep. (1989-2005) & SEC Chair (2005-2009)) & Hank Adler (Chapman):

The 16th Amendment authorizes the federal government only to tax income, but some members of Congress would love to tax wealth as well. That is widely understood to be unconstitutional, but a recent ruling from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a form of wealth tax could upend that conventional wisdom if it is allowed to stand.

The case, Moore v. U.S., involves a unique provision of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which imposed a one-time retroactive tax applicable to individual U.S. shareholders of foreign corporations. Under previous law, U.S. taxpayers had to pay taxes on overseas corporate income when that income was repatriated to the U.S. in the form of dividends. The 2017 act abolished the tax on overseas income, bringing the U.S. tax system into line with those of most other developed countries. But it also created a “mandatory repatriation tax” on the corporation’s undistributed income since 1986, payable not by the corporation but its shareholders.

The result was that without selling their stock or receiving a dividend, U.S. investors were deemed to have received “income” and suddenly became liable for the new tax. ...

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WSJ: Rebellion Over U.S. News Rankings Seems Likely To Fail

Wall Street Journal, Rebellion Over College Rankings Seems Likely to Fail:

In the past two weeks, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia universities, the University of Pennsylvania and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said they would stop cooperating with U.S. News & World Report’s medical-school rankings.

That followed the decision last year by universities including Yale, Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and California, Berkeley to quit cooperating on the publication’s law-school rankings.

Critics are cheering the exodus from a process they say leads students to focus on external prestige rather than education quality and encourages schools to game rankings at the expense of students. The schools that are withdrawing say the rankings are elitist, and penalize institutions that admit strong candidates without high test scores.

“In the 40 years of rankings, this is the biggest shock to the system—that gives me hope,” said Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College, which has long abstained from the U.S. News ranking. Mr. Diver is the author of “Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do About It.”

But hopes that this marks the death knell for college rankings are likely to be in vain. The reality is that what the schools themselves contribute to the rankings is relatively small: The data includes test scores, alumni giving, financial information and so on. But most of the data used to determine the rankings can be derived from publicly available information, or surveys conducted by U.S. News itself. Indeed, U.S. News has revised the survey over the years in response to criticism. There is a case to be made that the less the schools contribute, the more objective the rankings might become, in some respects. ...

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Lesson From The Tax Court: Corporations In The Bardo

Lincoln in The Bardo is not a book for everyone.  It’s main characters (none of whom are Lincoln) are caught in the bardo, an indeterminate space between death and final after-life, whatever one conceives that to be.  But they are slow to realize it, clinging to a belief in their continued existence as they were.  Filled with unreliable narrators and casually vacillating in time and space, the novel is not an easy read.  But it is well worth the effort, being a lovely meditation on the meaning of life and the meaning of death.

XC Foundation v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2023-2 (Jan. 5, 2023) (Judge Lauber), is an easy read about a corporation in the bardo.  It teaches a practical lesson: always ensure that your corporate client is fully alive and well under state law before you try to file a petition.  There, a corporation attempted to file a petition to contest an IRS decision to revoke its 501(c)(3) status.  Well, actually, the corporation did not file the petition.  It couldn’t.  It was caught in a kind of bardo, an indeterminate space between corporate life and permanent corporate death.  California, the state that had given it life, had suspended its charter, killing its capacity to sue and be sued.  But like the characters in the novel, it ignored its own death and tried to convince the Tax Court to do so as well.  It turns out that taxpayers in the bardo cannot file petitions that the Tax Court can hear, just as Lincoln could not hear the pleas of the novel's characters.  They are the pleas of ghosts.  Details below the fold.

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Columbia Law Professor's 'F--k You' To Student Question Caught On Video

Law.com, Columbia Law Professor's 'F--k You' to Student Question Caught on Video:

"I am ashamed of my conduct," Professor Daniel Capra said in an email to Law.com on Friday. "I apologized to the student and to my class. I have devoted my career to serving and helping students and I am mortified that I acted here the way I did,” he said.

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• With Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, Tulane, And Creighton, 40 Law Schools Are Boycotting The U.S. News Rankings
• Jan Brueckner And Blaine Saito Present Tax Papers At UCLA
• Justice Kavanaugh Says U.S. News Law School Rankings Are 'Very Problematic'; Peer Reputation Is 'Kind Of A Joke'

Sunday:

• David French: Faith, Not Politics, Can Heal Lonely Hearts And A Nation
• NY Times Op-Ed: The Americanization Of Religion
• WaPo Op-Ed: Think America Is A ‘Christian Nation’? George Washington Didn’t.
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

David French: Faith, Not Politics, Can Heal Lonely Hearts And A Nation

David French, Can More Church Heal What Ails the Lonely Heart?:

[I want to talk about] the decline in church attendance, deaths of despair, and the necessity of community for hope and purpose.

Last week, my little corner of the online world lit up with people sharing a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tying America’s ongoing decline in religious practice to the increase in “deaths of despair”—ones involving suicide, alcohol abuse, and drug overdose [Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion].

The study, by Tyler Giles [Wellesley College], Daniel M. Hungerman [Notre Dame], and Tamar Oostrom [Ohio State], found that a “large decline in religious practice was driven by the group experiencing subsequent increases in mortality: white middle-aged Americans without a college degree.” And that’s not all:

We also show that there is a strong negative relationship across states between religiosity and mortality due to deaths of despair. We further find that states that experienced larger declines in religious participation in the last 15 years of the century saw larger increases in deaths of despair. Both the decline in religiosity and the rise in deaths of despair were driven by the same group of individuals in the same places.

To demonstrate the connection between declining religiosity and rising deaths, the authors examined the link between the repeal of blue laws (laws which regulate commerce on Sabbath days, traditionally Sunday), subsequent decreases in church attendance, and the rise in suicides, overdoses, and alcohol deaths. ...

It’s hard to think of an institution that can better provide hope and purpose than a well-functioning church. There is a reason John 3:16 is one of the most remembered verses in scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

There is a reason Jeremiah 29:11 is framed in countless American homes: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

These verses provide a combination of eternal and temporal assurance of God’s loving nature. That doesn’t mean Christianity can’t be incredibly demanding (Jesus urged his disciples to take up their cross to follow him), but a demanding life is a purposeful life. ...

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NY Times Op-Ed: The Americanization Of Religion

New York Times Op-Ed:  The Americanization of Religion, by Ross Douthat:

In September the Pew Research Center modeled four potential futures for American religion, depending on different rates of conversion to and disaffiliation from the nation’s faiths. In three of the four projections, the Christian percentage of the U.S. population, which hovered around 90 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, drops below 50 percent within the next half-century. In two scenarios, the Christian share drops below 50 percent much sooner, sometime around 2040, and then keeps on falling.

This is a potentially epochal transition, but a transition of what kind? Toward a truly secular America, with John Lennon’s “Imagine” as its national anthem? Or toward a society awash in new or remixed forms of spirituality, all competing for the souls of lapsed Catholics, erstwhile United Methodists, the unhappily unchurched?

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WaPo Op-Ed: Think America Is A ‘Christian Nation’? George Washington Didn’t.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Think America Is a ‘Christian Nation’? George Washington Didn’t., by Jennifer Rubin:

The Jewish community in the United States is as old as its democracy. In August 1790, George Washington sent a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I., thanking them for their well wishes.

He wrote: “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” He added, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

To a people long denied citizenship in the Old World, kept as a people apart from Christian neighbors, Washington was explaining something quite revolutionary: The United States does not simply forbear Jews; Jews are part of the United States. As the Touro Synagogue in Newport explains on its website: “The letter reassured those who had fled religious tyranny that life in the new nation would be different, that religious ‘toleration’ would give way to religious liberty, and that the government would not interfere with individuals in matters of conscience and belief.” ...

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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 #1:

1. [520 Downloads]  Pillar 2, Fiat, and the EU Unanimity Rule on Tax Matters, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds)
2. [337 Downloads]  State Strategic Responses to the GloBE Rules, by Heydon Wardell-Burrus (Oxford) (reviewed by David Elkins (Netanya; (Google Scholar) here)
3. [190 Downloads]  Textualism, The Role And Authoritativeness Of Tax Legislative History, And Stanley Surrey, by George Yin (Virginia) (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) here)
4. [102 Downloads]  Multistate Business Entities, by Andrew Appleby (Stetson; Google Scholar) & Tomer Stein (Stetson)
5. [91 Downloads]  The (Uncertain) Future of Corporate Tax Shelters, by Joshua Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Ari Glogower (Northwestern; Google Scholar) (reviewed by Michelle Layser (San Diego; Google Scholar) here)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Daily Pennsylvanian, Facing Major Sanctions, Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger
2. NY Times Op-Ed, What If Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?
3. Jonathan Choi, Kristin Hickman, Amy Monahan & Daniel Schwarcz, ChatGPT Gets C+ Grade On Four Minnesota Law School Exams
4. Christian Terwiesch, ChatGPT Gets B|B- Grade On Wharton MBA Exam
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The 50 Most Downloaded U.S. Law Professors Of 2022
6. Law.com, Seattle Law School Responds To 'Incendiary Allegations' Of Discrimination Against Visiting Professor
7. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Updated U.S. News Law School Rankings Boycott Scorecard
8. Bryce Clayton Newell (Oregon), 2022 Meta-Ranking Of Flagship U.S. Law Reviews
9. Washington Free Beacon, Yale Law School Restricts Access To FedSoc Free Speech Panel Today To Avoid Repeat Of Last Year's Controversy
10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Summary Of Changes To The Forthcoming U.S. News Law School Rankings

Tax:

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Meaning Of 'Business Premises' In §119
2. Benjamin Alarie (Toronto), The Rise Of The Robotic Tax Analyst
3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The 50 Most Downloaded U.S. Tax Law Professors Of 2022
4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Unforeseen Circumstances Rule For §121 Home Sale Exclusions
5. Wall Street Journal, The Myth Of American Income Inequality
6. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy in the Biden Administration
7. Lily Batchelder (Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy) & Greg Leiserson (Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis), Disparities In The Benefits Of Tax Expenditures By Race And Ethnicity
8. Christine Kim (Cardozo), Review Of Brian Galle (Georgetown), David Gamage (Indian) & Darien Shanske (UC Davis), Solving The Valuation Challenge: The ULTRA Method For Taxing Extreme Wealth
9. Wall Street Journal, Why So Many Accountants Are Quitting
10. David Weisbach, Three New Tax Papers On SSRN

Faith: 

1. David French (The Dispatch), How A Great American Victory Altered American Faith

With Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, Tulane, And Creighton, 40 Law Schools Are Boycotting The U.S. News Rankings

	U.S. News Rank
Boycott (40)
Yale	1
Stanford	2
Columbia	4
Harvard	4
Penn	6
NYU	7
Virginia	8
UC-Berkeley	9
Michigan	10
Duke	11
Northwestern	13
Georgetown	14
UCLA	15
Vanderbilt	17
Fordham	37
UC-Davis	37
UC-Irvine	37
Wisconsin	43
Maryland	47
University of Washington	49
UC-San Francisco	51
Tulane	55
Penn State-Dickinson	58
Penn State-Univ. Park	64
St. John's	84
Rutgers	86
New Hampshire	105
Gonzaga	116
Seattle	116
Creighton	139
Idaho	142
Cal-Western	147-192
Campbell	147-192
John Marshall (GA)	147-192
Quinnipiac	147-192
Roger Williams	147-192
San Francisco	147-192
South Texas	147-192
Southwestern	147-192
Western Michigan	147-192
No Boycott (53)
Chicago	3
Cornell	12
Washington Univ.	16
Florida	21
Georgia	29
George Mason	30
Arizona	45
Colorado	49
SMU	58
San Diego	64
Kentucky	67
Seton Hall	73
Case Western	78
South Carolina	84
Cincinnati	88
Louisville	94
Indiana (McKinney)	98
Louisiana State*	105
Texas Tech	105
Washburn	105
Drake	111
Mississippi	111
Stetson	111
Missouri-Kansas City*	114
Chapman	118
Hofstra	118
West Virginia	118
Baltimore	122
Mercer	122
Suffolk	122
Cleveland-Marshall	127
Willamette	129
Wyoming	129
Pacific	133
South Dakota	133
Regent	142
Akron	147-192
Arkansas-Little Rock	147-192
Ave Maria	147-192
Elon	147-192
Faulkner	147-192
John Marshall (IL)	147-192
Liberty	147-192
Lincoln Memorial	147-192
Mississippi College	147-192
North Dakota	147-192
Nova	147-192
Ohio Northern*	147-192
Oklahoma City	147-192
Southern Illinois	147-192
St. Mary's	147-192
Toledo	147-192
Western New England	147-192

*Will answer some but not all questions

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Jan Brueckner And Blaine Saito Present Tax Papers At UCLA

Jan Brueckner (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) presented Taxes and Telework: The Impacts of State Income Taxes in a Work-from-Home Economy (with David R. Agrawal (Kentucky; Google Scholar)) at UCLA this week as part of its Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance hosted by Kirk Stark and Jason Oh:

This paper studies the interstate effects of decentralized taxation and spending when individuals can work from home (WFH). Because WFH decouples population and employment, the analysis of tax impacts on state populations, employment levels, wages and housing prices is radically different than in the standard model where individuals live and work in the same state. Which state can tax teleworkers—leading to either source or residence taxation—matters for tax impacts under WFH. Our main findings, which pertain to the employment and wage effects of WFH, show that a shift from a non-WFH economy to WFH reduces employment and raises the wage in high-tax states, with larger effects under source taxation. Once WHF is established, an increase in a state’s tax rate either reduces employment further while raising the wage (source taxation) or leaves the labor market unaffected (residence taxation). We show that only the residence-taxation equilibrium is efficient.

Blaine Saito (Northeastern; Google Scholar) presented Public Tax Actors at UCLA last week:

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Justice Kavanaugh Says U.S. News Law School Rankings Are 'Very Problematic'; Peer Reputation Is 'Kind Of A Joke'

Reuters, Justice Kavanaugh Rips U.S. News Rankings As 'Highly Problematic' At Law School Talk

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has joined the growing chorus of U.S. News & World Report law school rankings critics, saying during a talk this week at the University of Notre Dame Law School that the annual list fails to accurately gauge which schools are providing the best legal education.

“I think they’re based on things, from what I understand, that are very amorphous, very subjective, very word of mouth factors that don’t correlate well with the education that you’re actually receiving, and I find them highly problematic,” Kavanaugh said during a Monday panel with law dean Marcus Cole, a video of which the school released on Thursday. ...

U.S. News has said it will continue to rank law schools despite the boycott and that is modifying its methodology to rely only on publicly available data supplied annually by the American Bar Association, which accredits law schools. It will no longer include expenditures-per-student, a metric that has been criticized as rewarding schools for driving up tuition, among other changes.

But the revamped rankings will still assign each school a “reputation score” derived from surveys of legal academics, judges and practicing lawyers. Kavanaugh called the reputation scores “kind of a joke,” adding that most people don’t have enough knowledge about different law schools to effectively rank them. He added that he does not consider law school rank when hiring clerks.

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Roberts Reviews Trade, Leakage, And The Design Of A Carbon Tax By Weisbach et al.

This week, Tracey Roberts (Cumberland; Google Scholar) reviews a new work by David A. Weisbach (Chicago; Google Scholar), Samuel S. Kortum (Yale; Google Scholar), Yujia Yao (IMF) and Michael Wang (Northwestern), Trade, Leakage, and the Design of a Carbon Tax (Jan. 20, 2023):

Communities throughout the world are facing extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts, wildfires, severe storms events, tornados, hurricanes/ tropical cyclones, storm surges and floods. Important and unique ecosystems are suffering irreparable harm, including polar and high mountain areas, tropical systems, and coral reefs. The risks of large-scale climate shifts, such as deglaciation, ice sheet loss, rapid sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and changes in thermohaline circulation system are rising. We are currently witnessing secondary effects of these processes including biodiversity loss, fishery collapse, deforestation, conflicts over natural resources, global migration, and threats to economic, social and political stability. All countries have a stake in these outcomes. Ideally, all countries would coordinate their efforts to address climate change.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal, US News Extends Rankings Survey Deadline; Which Law Schools Will File?
• Benjamin Alarie (Toronto; CEO, Blue J Legal), The Rise of the Robotic Tax Analyst
• Lolita Buckner Inniss (Dean, Colorado), Should I Stay or Should I Go?
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The 50 Most Downloaded U.S. Law Professors Of 2022
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), With Gonzaga, Quinnipiac, Rutgers, And Seattle, 36 Law Schools Are Boycotting The U.S. News Rankings
• Daily Pennsylvanian, Facing Major Sanctions, Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger
• David Grenardo (St. Thomas-Minnesota), How A Person of Faith Can Address Imposter Syndrome in Law School

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• Bloomberg, GOP Attack on IRS Budget Undercuts Clean-Energy Credits, Treasury Says
• Bloomberg, A New Fed Working Paper Argues That Higher Interest Rates Are Actually Increasing the Wealth Gap
• Bloomberg, SALT Cap Tweaks Back on the Table With New Republicans in Mix
• Bloomberg, Tax Justice Activists Should Manage Precedents Like Avoiders Do
• Bloomberg, You Can’t Stand Still for Higher Taxes

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Monday, January 30: Kimberly Clausing (UCLA; Google Scholar) will present The Future of International Tax Cooperation as part of the annual Richard Crawford Pugh Lecture on Tax Law & Policy at San Diego. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here.

Tuesday, January 31: Jacob Goldin (Chicago; Google Scholar) will present Measurement and Mitigation of Racial Disparities in Tax Audits as part of the Georgetown Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli.

Tuesday, January 31: Michael Doran (Virginia; Google Scholar) will present Executive Compensation And Corporate Governance (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) here) as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact David Schizer. 

Wednesday, February 1: Susan Morse (Texas; Google Scholar) will present Out of Time: APA Challenges to Old Tax Guidance and the Six-Year Default Limitations Period as part of the Northwestern Advanced Topics in Taxation Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Gregg Polsky. 

Wednesday, February 1: Kimberly Clausing (UCLA; Google Scholar) will present Capital Taxation and Market Power as part of the Toronto James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Benjamin Alarie. 

Thursday, February 2: Juliana Londoño-Vélez (UCLA; Google Scholar) will present Behavioral Responses to Wealth Taxation: Evidence from Colombia (with Javier Avila-Mahecha (DIAN; Google Scholar)) as part of the UCLA Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance. If you would like to attend, please contact Kirk Stark and Jason Oh.

Friday, February 3: Nyamagaga Gondwe (Wisconsin; Google Scholar) will present Emergency Exit: The Life-Saving Potential of Direct Public Financial Assistance to Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence as part of the Indiana Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Leandra Lederman.

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Facing Major Sanctions, Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Penn Law Dean Ted Ruger

• Prof. Amy L. Wax's Grievance Dean Ruger
• Respondent's Memorandum in Reply to Charging Party's Opposition and in Further Support of the Relief Sought in her August 31, 2022 Memorandum

• Daily Pennsylvanian, Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Penn Carey Law Dean in Opposition to Disciplinary Proceedings
• Daily Pennsylvanian, Meet the Eight Faculty Members Deciding Amy Wax's Future at Penn
• Daily Pennsylvanian, Sanctions, Grievances, and Hearings: Why Amy Wax Cannot Be Fired Easily
• Daily Pennsylvanian, Tenureship Is Indulging the Amy Waxes of the World
• Law.com, Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Penn Carey Law Dean Over Push for Sanctions
• Legal Insurrection, Tables Turned: Prof. Amy Wax, Charged With Wrongthink, Files Counter-Grievance Against U Penn Law Dean
• Reuters, Facing Sanctions, Penn Law Prof Amy Wax Files Grievance Against Dean

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Alarie: The Rise Of The Robotic Tax Analyst

Benjamin Alarie (Toronto; Google Scholar; CEO, Blue J Legal), The Rise of the Robotic Tax Analyst, 178 Tax Notes Fed. 57 (Jan. 2, 2023):

As a bold taxwriting experiment, this installment of Blue J Predicts has been generated with the help of an AI assistant, OpenAI’s “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3” (GPT-3). GPT-3 is a large language model developed by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft. It is an inexhaustible generator of text and can write with accuracy in English about almost any topic. It has performed its duty, with my human companionship, indefatigably.

This isn’t the first time that a legal academic has invoked a robotic coauthor, and I expect that these kinds of tools will become increasingly commonplace. I expect that eventually they will be about as remarkable as using a spelling or grammar checker. At this moment, however, before the rise of the robotic tax analyst, using GPT-3 to help write this article is likely to raise some eyebrows.

In October 2021 I produced a peer-reviewed law review article with my academic colleague, the late (and great) tax law professor Arthur Cockfield of Queen’s University. The article was notable for being the first peer-reviewed law review article to extensively leverage GPT-3 in its production. In that article — after a short introduction penned by us, Benjamin Alarie and Cockfield — we gave GPT-3 control of the metaphorical keyboard and allowed it to produce its textual analysis uninterrupted and unedited.

The results were mixed and intriguing, and certainly pointed in the direction of future possibility. In our view, GPT-3 had potential. In the article, we speculated on the future of AI in legal scholarship and asked provocatively in the title, “Will Machines Replace Us?” Cockfield and I concluded that “although GPT-3 is not up to the task of replacing law review authors currently, we are far less confident that GPT-5 or GPT-100 might not be up to the task in future.”

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Mason Presents Bibb Balancing Today At The OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks

Ruth Mason (Virginia; Google Scholar) presents Bibb Balancing, 91 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. __ (2023) (with Michael S. Knoll (Penn)) today as part of the OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks Series (OMG = Oxford-Michigan-MIT-Munich-Georgetown):

Courts and commentators have long understood dormant Commerce Clause doctrine to contain two types of cases: discrimination and undue burdens. This Article argues for a more nuanced understanding that divides undue burdens into single-state burdens—which arise from the application of a single state’s law alone—and mismatch burdens, which arise from legal diversity. Although the Supreme Court purports to apply Pike balancing in all undue-burden cases, we show that the Court’s approach in mismatch cases differs substantially. Specifically, unlike in single-state cases, balancing in mismatch cases involves an implicit and potentially problematic comparison by the Court between the challenged state’s regulation and those of other states. We label analysis in mismatch cases “Bibb balancing,” after the famous mudflaps case, and we show that mismatch cases present the Court with a more challenging set of issues than do other types of dormant Commerce Clause cases.

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Seattle Law School Responds To 'Incendiary Allegations' Of Discrimination Against Visiting Professor

Law.com, Seattle U Law Responds to 'Incendiary Allegations' of Discrimination Against Visiting Professor:

Seattle University School of Law Dean Anthony Varona wrote in an email to students and faculty Monday that the school is conducting an internal probe into allegations of racism against a visiting professor that were made public by the university’s student newspaper.

In a Jan. 18 article, The Seattle Spectator, Seattle University’s undergraduate student newspaper, reported that students had alleged “racially discriminatory treatment” by a visiting professor at the law school.

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Brauner Presents Taxation Of Information And The Data Revolution Today At Florida

Yariv Brauner (Florida; Google Scholar) presents Taxation of Information and the Data Revolution at Florida today as part of a celebration of his academic contribution and appointment to the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar Chair in Taxation hosted by Charlene Luke:

The digital revolution has put enormous demands on the law due to the huge, quick-moving social changes it has created. The reason tax law hasn't advanced as much as other legal fields in responding to these demands is likely because it combines the problem of taxing information with the more general issue of taxing intangibles. This essay makes the case that information is distinct and necessitates a distinctive policy and analysis. It initially argues that information cannot be taxed under the current international tax rules. Therefore, reform is required, and the paper demonstrates why it is vital right now. Finally, the article makes the case that reform is also feasible by outlining three potential reform routes and contrasting their benefits and drawbacks.

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