Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• Jonathan Bremen (Loyola-L.A.), Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light for Legal Education?
• Donald Campbell (Mississippi College), Get Your Head in the Game: Gamifying the Bar Examination
• Chronicle of Higher Education, These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing
• Michael Conklin (Texas A&M), Effects of Covid-Induced Remote Learning on LSAT Performance
• Downs v. Golden Gate University, Judge Rejects Attempt By Students And Alumni To Reopen Golden Gate Law School
• Inside Higher Ed, Female Law Faculty, Students Across the Country Are Getting Unsettling Texts
• Inside Higher Ed, One Year After Massive Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators
• Judicial Council for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, 11th Circuit Joins 5th Circuit In Dismissing Complaint Against Judges For Refusing To Hire Columbia Law Clerks 

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• Bloomberg, Biggest US Firms Largely Unscathed by Global Minimum Tax, So Far
• Bloomberg, Treasury Lays Out Tax Credit Rules on EV Charging Stations
• Bloomberg, Trump Pledges to Eliminate Taxes on Overtime
• Bloomberg, Trump Pledges to Restore SALT Write-Off, Tax Break He Curbed
• Cato Institute, Trump, Harris, and All the Wrong Ways to Do Tax Reform

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Tuesday, September 24: John Deshong (Bechtel) will present The Tax Legislative Process: Optics and Constraints as part of the UC-Irvine Current Issues in Tax Law & Policy Colloquium Speaker Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Natascha Ryan Fastabend. 

Tuesday, September 24: Emily Satterthwaite (Georgetown; Google Scholar) will present Taxing Nannies (with Ariel Jurow Kleiman (USC; Google Scholar) & Shayak Sarkar (UC-Davis; Google Scholar)) as part of the UC-San Francisco 2024 Tax Speaker Series. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. 

Tuesday, September 24: Andrew T. Hayashi (Virginia; Google Scholar) will present The Federal Architecture of Income Inequality as part of the NYU Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Daniel Shaviro. 

Wednesday, September 25: Adam Rosenzweig (Washington University) will present Stateless Public Goods as part of the San Diego Tax Law Speaker Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Michelle Layser. 

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Harris Presents Law And The Rise Of Multinational Companies In The First Era Of Globalization Today At The Oxford-Virginia Legal Dialogs

Ron Harris (Tel Aviv; Google Scholar) presents a chapter from Empire Ltd.: Law and the Rise of Multinational Companies in the First Era of Globalization (1844-1914) at the Oxford-Virginia Legal Dialogs today hosted by Tsilly Dagan and Ruth Mason:

The First Era of Globalization (1870-1914) involved not only more intensive international trade but also territorial expansion and the annexation of new colonies, mainly in Asia and Africa, to the British Empire, mass migration from Britain to the settler colonies and beyond the Empire, and a massive, unprecedented outflow of capital and spread of stock exchanges. Globalization opened up the arena to transnational companies. These faced legal challenges and opportunities in more than one location. Given these momentous historical developments, company law could no longer be viewed as domestic law and had to adjust to the new international dimensions.

At the same time as private international law shifted from preoccupation with federations to dealing with imperialism and globalization, the field of company law shifted from being a subfield of constitutional law to being a subfield of private law and from dealing mainly with domestic companies to dealing at its cutting edge with multinationals. The intersection gave rise to the new field of private international company law.

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In Appeal Of Dismissal Of Law Prof's Retaliation Claim Over Use Of Redacted Slur On Exam, 7th Circuit Asks: Should Law School Be A Safe Space?

Law360, 7th Circ. Asks If Law School Should Be 'Safe Space':

Seventh Circuit judges considering a retaliation suit from a University of Illinois Chicago law professor who used the N-word in an exam hypothetical asked Thursday if law schools should really be a "safe space" shielding students from the kind of "horrific facts" courts deal with regularly.

A three-judge appeals panel heard arguments Thursday morning over whether a district court properly tossed constitutional and retaliation claims brought by professor Jason Kilborn, who drew anger on campus after he included the abbreviations "n___" and "b___" on an exam question about a hypothetical employment discrimination matter.

Kilborn claims that university officials retaliated against his protected speech under the First Amendment and compelled his speech during an eight-week diversity course he was required to take before returning to work, following a two-semester suspension. He also alleges that his due process rights were violated when he was declared ineligible for an across-the-board raise in response to the school's finding that he violated a college nondiscrimination policy he deems unconstitutionally vague.

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Call for Nominations: AALS Section on Taxation 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award

Call for Nominations, AALS Section on Taxation 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award:

The AALS Section on Taxation Executive Committee is pleased to open nominations for its 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.  This award, first given in 2024 to Professors Patricia Cain and Cliff Fleming, honors an individual who has had a distinguished career of teaching, service, and scholarship.  Nominees should be those who have impacted the field of taxation, the legal community, and the academy through mentoring, writing, speaking, activism, and by providing opportunities to others. 

Only AALS Section on Taxation members may make a nomination, and only individuals – not institutions, organizations, or law schools – are eligible for the award. The nomination should identify the nominee’s qualifications for the award, with special attention paid to why a lifetime achievement award is appropriate at this point in the nominee’s career.

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Judge Rejects Attempt By Students And Alumni To Reopen Golden Gate Law School

Downs v. Golden Gate University, No. CGC-24-612353 (CA Super. Ct. Sept. 16, 2024):

On May 31, 2023, Golden Gate University (GGU) declared a state of "financial exigency" in its law school. On November 30, 2023, GGU announced its juris doctor program would end with the 2023-24 school year. In a "teach-out" plan, GGU offered students the ability to continue studies at two other law schools — University of San Francisco and Hamline — for the same tuition. On February 14, 2024, plaintiffs sued GGU, which filed a demurrer that was sustained with leave to amend. Plaintiffs filed a first amended complaint (FAC) on August 7, 2024 and now seek an extraordinary pretrial order "to prevent" GGU "from shutting down its law school." ...

The FAC purports to plead six causes of action, but plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail on any
of them. ... IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Plaintiffs' Motion for Injunctive Release and/or Specific Performance is DENIED.

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Drumbl: Tax Enforcement At The Intersection Of Social Welfare And Vulnerable Populations

Michelle Lyon Drumbl (Washington & Lee), Tax Enforcement at the Intersection of Social Welfare and Vulnerable Populations, 2024 Wis. L. Rev. 587: 

This Essay engages with Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s theory of stategraft [A Theory of Stategraft, 98 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1 (2023)] in the context of tax administration and the role that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plays in implementing certain social welfare benefits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Specifically, it considers whether the IRS’s denials of the EITC to those who might otherwise be eligible and entitled to it constitutes a wrongful taking by the state or a violation of basic human rights. While this Essay concludes that denials of the EITC generally do not fit within Atuahene’s definition of stategraft, it highlights two particularly problematic concerns with modern EITC enforcement and frames those within the context of Professor Atuahene’s broader concerns about how state actions affect vulnerable populations.

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These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing

Chronicle of Higher Education, These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing: 

"I’m a retired scholar. I’m not retired from scholarship."

The historian Jean H. Baker is working on an article about the suffragist Edith Houghton Hooker and thinking about her next one, on the disenfranchisement of Black men in Maryland at the turn of the 20th century. She’s 91. Samuel Jay Keyser’s Play It Again, Sam, a book about repetition in the arts, is in production at MIT Press. At 89, he is still the editor of Linguistic Inquiry, which he founded 54 years ago. Lucy Freeman Sandler’s latest book, Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, was published when she was 91. Now 94, Sandler is studying images of the destruction of books in a 13th-century pictorial Bible made for French royalty.

Aging has been much on Americans’ minds lately: In addition to the high-profile debate over whether Joe Biden, at 81, was too old to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and the continuing questions about Donald Trump’s age at 78, there have been controversies within academe about the number of elderly professors. Whatever the discourse, these three exceptional scholars prove that high-level scholarly work can be done well past the age of retirement.

So what keeps them studying and writing into their 10th decade?

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Kim & Avi-Yonah: The International Tax Revolution

Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar) & Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), Introduction, in The International Tax Revolution (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025):

The past decade has witnessed the creation of a new international tax regime (ITR). Since the advent of globalization in the 1980s and digitalization in the 1990s, the original ITR ceased to function as intended. The main problems were the increased mobility of capital related to intangibles, a relaxation of capital controls, and increased tax competition. The outcome was a significant fall in tax revenues that threatened the social safety net of the modern welfare state. The financial crisis of 2008 and harsh austerity measures led the public to pay attention to rich individuals and large corporations paying little tax on cross-border income. A new ITR has been created to resolve those problems. 

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A Guide To Becoming A Law Professor

Tiffany C. Li (San Francisco; Google Scholar), So You Want to Be a Law Professor: An Unofficial and Incomplete Guide to Pursuing a Law Teaching Career:

You’ve reached this guide because you are interested in becoming a law professor. Included are some resources I’ve collected over the years with tips and information.

All career paths are unique, and nothing on this page should be considered the definitive guide on how to become a law professor. I am a law professor at a U.S. law school, and I have gone through various phases of the U.S. legal academic job market, from practitioner writing on the side, to research fellow, to VAP, to entry-level candidate, to lateral candidate. I graduated with a U.S. J.D. and practiced for a few years before starting the academic track. All of the above are factors that shaped my candidacy on the job market/s, and my advice is solely based on what I know, from my personal experiences and those of friends I know in the field.

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Satterthwaite Reviews Penalizing Precarity By Maynard & Wallace

Emily Satterthwaite (Georgetown; Google Scholar), Hardship Withdrawals from 401(k)s: A Trap for the Unwary (JOTWELL) (reviewing Goldburn P. Maynard, Jr. (Indiana-Kelley; Google Scholar) & Clinton Wallace (South Carolina; Google Scholar), Penalizing Precarity, 123 Mich. L. Rev __ (2024))::

Those who are committed to strengthening safety nets for economically precarious workers at modest revenue cost should look no further than Goldburn Maynard and Clint Wallace’s paper on hardship-related early withdrawals by employees from their 401(k)/403(b) qualified retirement plans. Employees who need to make an early withdrawal due to hardship are, by definition, encountering difficulties and have lower ability to pay. Nonetheless, as Maynard and Wallace describe, a subset of hardship distributees may be surprised by a mismatch in the law that can heap further hardship upon them in the form of penalties.

The mismatch occurs between two sets of rules: first, the “hardship distribution” rules addressed to qualified plans under Code subsection 401(k), which allow a plan administrator to permit withdrawals before the employee reaches retirement age and, second, the rules addressed to taxpayers under Code subsection 72(t), which apply a 10 percent “early withdrawal” penalty.

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Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light For Legal Education?

Jonathan Bremen (Loyola-L.A.), Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light for Legal Education?:

This paper examines the evolving role of cold-calling in legal education, particularly through the lens of a controversial tricolor name card system introduced at Yale Law School. Drawing on historical and contemporary debates, the article explores the advantages and disadvantages of cold-calling, a pedagogical technique long associated with the Socratic method. While cold-calling can increase student participation, improve communication skills, and foster a more equitable classroom, it also has significant drawbacks, including heightened anxiety, particularly for neurodivergent students, and potential reinforcement of harmful power dynamics.

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Florida State Seeks To Hire A Tax VAP

Florida State University College of Law, Visiting Assistant Professor:

Florida State University College of Law seeks at least one Visiting Assistant Professor, to begin in the 2025-2026 academic year. ...

The College is seeking scholar-teachers interested in future appointment as tenure-track members of a law faculty. This VAP is an opportunity for individuals coming from clerkships, fellowships, or legal practice to enhance their CV with close faculty mentorship in preparation for entering the academic market.

Subject areas of particular interest include, law & technology, business law (especially tax law), family law, criminal law, environmental law, gender & the law, and race & the law, but individuals with any area of scholarly and teaching interest will be considered.

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Female Law Deans, Faculty, And Students Across The Country Are Getting Unsettling Texts

Inside Higher Ed, Female Law Faculty, Students Across the Country Are Getting Unsettling Texts:

Since the start of the year, women law professors, deans and students have received messages on their personal cellphones saying things like, “Law school isn’t fair for us men.” The FBI is reportedly investigating.

It’s not fair, you women are taking over the world now.”

That was one of the texts Shanta Trivedi, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore, told Inside Higher Ed she received from an unknown number on Jan. 30. More texts arrived the same day, she said, including, “Law school isn’t fair for us men anymore. The women always outperform us now.”

She didn’t respond. “I was terrified, because it sounded like a student who was upset,” Trivedi said. “I also was teaching at night and my class happened to be all female, and I just felt very unnerved by the whole thing.” ...

In late February, Victoria J. Haneman, the Frank J. Kellegher Professor of Trusts and Estates at Nebraska’s Creighton University, posted a warning message on X: “Attn law professors I received these texts from an unknown number this morning.” She followed her message with screenshots. Multiple women interviewed by Inside Higher Ed said they became aware of the breadth of the issue through Haneman’s posts.

The screenshots suggested the sender knew whom he was texting. “Professor Haneman?” he asked. “Yes,” Haneman replied. “Law school isn’t fair for us men anymore, women always outperform us nowadays,” the unknown sender responded. Haneman asked him to identify himself or be blocked. He responded with “I admit you women have clearly won the battle of the sexes, us men are the losers” and “It’s not fair.”

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Harvard: Lessons From The Biggest Business Tax Cut In U.S. History

Harvard Gazette, Raise Corporate Tax Rates! No, Cut Them! Maybe Take a Look First?:

Congress is spoiling for a tax battle in 2025.

Key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire. Most urgent to many voters are sunsetting provisions aimed at households, including the more generous Child Tax Credit. But renewing the law’s deep cuts to corporate taxes are also up for debate. Republicans and Democrats have seized on the issues in campaign speeches, with Kamala Harris endorsing a higher top corporate rate to pay for other initiatives and Donald Trump arguing that lowering rates further will foster growth.

In a new analysis of the TCJA, published last month in the Journal of Economic Perspectives [Lessons from the Biggest Business Tax Cut in US History], Harvard macroeconomist Gabriel Chodorow-Reich charts the real-world impacts of the 2017 law’s various corporate tax cuts. His paper, co-written with Princeton’s Owen M. Zidar and the University of Chicago’s Eric Zwick, M.A. ’12, Ph.D. ’14, describes modest increases in wages and business investments, with some expired and expiring provisions proving most cost-effective. But these gains were hardly large enough to offset the big hit to tax revenue.

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11th Circuit Joins 5th Circuit In Dismissing Complaint Against Judges For Refusing To Hire Columbia Law Clerks

Following up on my previous post:  Fifth Circuit Judicial Council Upholds Dismissal Of Prisoner's Complaint Against 8 Trump-Appointed Federal Judges Who Vowed Not To Hire Columbia Graduates As Law Clerks:

Judicial Council for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, Nos. 11-24-90106 & 11-24-90107 (Aug. 12, 2024):

[T]his Judicial Council Re­view Panel has considered ... petitioner's complaint, the order of Chief United States Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr., and the petition for review filed by petitioner. No judge on this panel has requested that this matter be placed on the agenda of a meeting of the Judicial Council.

The Judicial Council Review Panel hereby AFFIRMS the dis­position of this matter by Chief Judge Pryor. The petition for re­view is DENIED. 

Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr., U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, Nos. 11-24-90106 & 11-24-90107 (June 18, 2024):

Complainant states that the Subject Judges “represent a threat to the Constitution and must be removed from judicial office. Their conduct has made it apparent that they are politicians and possibly foreign agents masquerading as federal judges. The judges’ resort to collective punishment is an affront to this nation’s core principles of individuality and individual rights.” He asserts the Subject Judges are “anti-American,” that their “unprecedented an explicit declaration of partiality has eroded the public’s trust in the independence of the judiciary,” and that their conduct “violated fundamental standards for judicial conduct and requires their removal from office.” ...

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Raskolnikov Presents A New View Of Formal Equality Today At Columbia

Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia) presents A New View of Formal Equality at Columbia today as part of its Faculty Workshop Series: 

When it comes to equality under the law, the contemporary focus is decidedly on substance rather than form. This is especially so when economic inequality is concerned. Formal equality of law—understood as the absence of formal legal distinctions based on the material resources of individuals—has few defenders. At least since Rawls, formal equality has been viewed as a cause of material inequality, a foundation of laissez-faire capitalism, a fig leaf of sorts designed to give a veneer of justice to the unjust exploitation of the weak in a market economy. Whatever equality under the law means in contemporary view, formal equality is not it.

This Essay argues that the contemporary view is mistaken. Legal reforms consistent with formal equality of law may, indeed, lead to more inequality, but they may also lead to less. In fact, a commitment to formally equal law offers a counterweight to the key neoliberal maxim that regulation of a market economy should aim only at maximizing economic efficiency.

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Effects Of Covid-Induced Remote Learning On LSAT And Bar Exam Performance

Michael Conklin (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Effects of Covid-Induced Remote Learning on LSAT Performance: 

Existing research demonstrates that covid restrictions result in diminished academic performance. This first-of-its-kind study is designed to measure if this same effect is present with LSAT exam results. Additionally, the consistent result that racial minorities experience disproportionately bad educational outcomes from covid restrictions is also tested. The counterintuitive results from this study—that the same correlations between restrictions and race are not present when analyzing LSAT performance—illuminate numerous aspects of the LSAT exam and the people who choose to take it. Furthermore, the findings of this study will hopefully serve as a powerful catalyst to spark debate into issues regarding legal education in general and the unique nature of the LSAT exam more specifically.

Michael Conklin (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Zoom to the Bar: How Remote Instruction Affected Bar Exam Performance: 

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WSJ: Rich Americans Prep Fail-Safe Estate Plans Ahead Of Election

Wall Street Journal, Rich Americans Prep Fail-Safe Estate Plans Ahead of Election:

With the presidential race in a dead heat, rich Americans are calling estate lawyers.

The wealthy want to know if they should take steps to protect their fortunes from higher estate taxes. Should a change under the 2017 tax cuts expire as scheduled after 2025—considered more likely with Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House and Democrats gaining the majority in Congress—the minimum wealth subject to the estate tax would be halved to roughly $7 million per person.

At that level, nearly 9,000 estates would owe estate tax in 2026, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. That is compared with roughly 4,000 estates estimated to owe the tax in 2025.

Whether it pays to draft a fail-safe estate plan for tax policies that haven’t been decided is up for debate. 

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One Year After Massive Budget Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators

Following up on my previous post, Over 40% Of Full-Time Faculty Depart West Virginia Law School:  Inside Higher Ed, One Year After Massive Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators:

It’s been almost a year since the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs, including all foreign language and math graduate degrees, from its flagship Morgantown campus. About 8 percent of WVU’s majors disappeared in that vote.

Dozens of tenured professors were among the employees forced out. And as the fall semester gave way to spring, and concerns about future enrollment and finances continued, it became clear that those wouldn’t be the only losses. More professors announced they were departing of their own accord, and more still are on their way out. ...

The university hasn’t released figures for how many faculty members have voluntarily left the university atop its forced Academic Transformation cuts. Some faculty members crowdsourced a spreadsheet that lists 38 unnamed faculty members who got new jobs after Academic Transformation and who only started looking elsewhere because of it.

Five law faculty positions were cut as part of Academic Transformation, but an additional seven faculty decided to leave, the Daily Athenaeum student newspaper reported in April. And more departures are coming.

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Does The End Of Chevron Deference Mean A Weaker IRS?

Mitchell M. Gans (Hofstra), Does the End of Chevron Deference Mean a Weaker IRS?, 184 Tax Notes Fed. 1503 (Aug. 19, 2024):

The IRS was a powerful adversary when agencies enjoyed deference. Armed with Chevron deference, the IRS could resolve ambiguity in a code section by regulation. The courts deferred to that regulation — giving it “force of law” effect — if found to be reasonable, even if it was not the best interpretation. And even when there was prior inconsistent agency guidance or the regulation was adopted long after enactment of the underlying statute, Chevron nonetheless required deference.

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Weil Gotshal & Manges Tax Associate's Funny Departure Memo Includes A Clever ‘Rickroll’

Above the Law, Biglaw Farewell Memo Is A Classic Of The Genre:

Subject: Veni, Vidi, Arrivederci

Dearest Weil Fam,

I’m emailing to notify you that henceforward, any inappropriate communications from me will be reportable to the local authorities, not HR, because today is my last day at the firm.

My two and a half years here have far surpassed the professional experience I’d dreamt of. That’s partly because I don’t have an active social life, and I’m rarely let out in public. But that’s also thanks to the incredible people that I’ve met and worked with along the way. Thank you for all your support, guidance, friendship, and tolerance of my eccentricities (however successful you may have been at hiding your annoyance). There are so many people that I want to single out for their positive impact on my Weil career that I had to list them all in a separate document attached hereto.

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Gómez Presents Taxation’s Limits Today At Boston College

Luís C. Calderón Gómez (Cardozo; Google Scholar) presents Taxation’s Limits, 119 Nw. U. L. Rev. __ (2024), at Boston College today as part of its Tax Policy Collaborative hosted by Diane Ring:

Countless pages have been devoted to the question of why should everyone pay tax, yet its obverse has gone largely unnoticed: why should some people and organizations not pay tax? Our tax system exempts from ordinary income taxation a wide and diverse array of people and organizations engaged in significant economic activity—from parents providing childcare services for their family, to consular activities and charities operating animal shelters—seemingly without a convincing explanation. Perhaps as a result of the dizzying diversity of activities that have been exempted from tax, scholars and policymakers have eluded comprehensively or coherently justifying our exemption regimes.

This Article develops a novel normative theory that rationalizes and justifies our current tax exemption regime. Rather than conceiving exemptions as subsidies or individual deviations from a normative base explainable by ordinary politics, the Article argues that exemptions are best understood as mapping the “limits” of tax. These limits are neither arbitrary nor merely a collection of individual subsidies to favored activities; rather, they are best seen as being reflective of deeper collective socio-political judgments about the scope of the State and the public sphere.

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• ABA Journal, Nevada Green-Lights Three-Pronged Plan To Licensure
• ABA Journal, Stressed And Depressed, Only 34% Of Young Lawyers With Highest Student Debt Say JD Was Worth Cost, New ABA Survey Says
• amNY, New York Law School Changes Center’s Name in Educational Business Shift
• Georgia Law News, UGA Law Announces Initiatives Addressing Legal Needs for Rural Georgians and Expanding Access to a Legal Education
• Harvard Law News, 40th Anniversary of the Human Rights Program
• Law360, Georgia Law School Unveils Programs To Fill Rural Justice Jobs
• Legal Intelligencer, Leonard Packel, Villanova Law Professor, Dies at 89

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Denver Seeks To Hire An Entry Level Or Lateral Tax Prof

University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Faculty Posting: 

The University of Denver Sturm College of Law seeks applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or full Professor of Law. Although we welcome candidates across all subject matter areas and methodological perspectives, we are particularly interested in candidates capable of teaching Torts, Civil Procedure, or Tax. We seek candidates with J.D. degrees (or their equivalents), outstanding academic records, relevant professional experience, a commitment to inclusive pedagogy, and the capacity to make future outstanding contributions in the realms of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement. The University of Denver and the Sturm College of Law are committed to building a diverse and inclusive educational environment and seek candidates whose research, teaching, service, and professional experiences can contribute to advancing these important institutional commitments. ... 

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Fordham Symposium: The Legal And Ethical Implications Of ChatGPT And Other Emerging Technologies

Symposium, The New AI: The Legal and Ethical Implications of ChayGPT and Other Emerging Technologies, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1785-2012 (2024): 

• Deborah W. Denno (Fordham; Google Scholar) &  Erica Valencia-Graham (Fordham), Foreword, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1785 (2024)
• Abdi Aidid (Toronto), Toward an Ethical Human–Computer Division of Labor in Law Practice, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1797 (2024)
• Katherine B. Forrest (Paul Weiss), Of Another Mind: AI and the Attachment of Human Ethical Obligations, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1815 (2024)
• Margaret Hu (William & Mary; Google Scholar), Eliott Behar & Davi Ottenheimer (Inrupt), National Security and Federalizing Data Privacy Infrastructure for AI Governance, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1829 (2024)
• Heather Hughes (American; Google Scholar), Educating Deal Lawyers for the Digital Age, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1855 (2024)
• Jake Karr (NYU) & Jason Schultz (NYU; Google Scholar), The Legal Imitation Game: Generative AI's Incompatibility with Clinical Legal Education, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1867 (2024)
• Matthew Sag (Emory; Google Scholar), Fairness and Fair Use in Generative AI, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1887 (2024)
• Daniel J. Solove (George Washington; Google Scholar) & Hideyuki Matsumi (Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Google Scholar), AI, Algorithms, and Awful Humans, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1923 (2024)

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For-Profit Philanthropy Wins ARNOVA Outstanding Book Award

The Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) selected For-Profit Philanthropy: Elite Power and the Threat of Limited Liability Companies, Donor-Advised Funds, and Strategic Corporate Giving, by Dana Brakman Reiser (Brooklyn; Google Scholar) & Steven A. Dean (Boston University), for the Outstanding Book Award in Nonprofit & Voluntary Action Research: 

This book exposes a migration of business practices, players, and norms into philanthropy that strains the regulatory regime sustaining public trust in elite generosity through accountability and transparency and proposes legal reforms and private solutions to restore it.

Practices, players, and norms native to the business sector have migrated into philanthropy, shattering longstanding barriers between commerce and charity. Philanthropies organized as limited liability companies, donor-advised funds sponsored by investment company giants, and strategic corporate philanthropy programs aligning charitable giving by multinationals with their business objectives paint a startling new picture of elite giving.

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Nick Saban, ‘The Process’ And The Bar Exam

Donald E. Campbell (Mississippi College), Get Your Head in the Game: Gamifying the Bar Examination, 40 Miss. C. L. Rev. 223 (2022): 

During a recent administration of the bar examination, I observed the following: a student who had a child ten days before the exam passed; a student on law review failed; a student whose predictors indicated he should fail the bar exam passed; two students who were in the library every day studying failed. Even though these folks were all taking the same exam, their outcomes varied dramatically, and there did not seem to be a common variable that predicted whether they would pass or fail. My first inclination was to throw up my hands in frustration and chalk it up to the fact that every student’s situation is unique.

I was satisfied to shrug and mutter, “what can you do?,” until I came across a podcast on Coach Nick Saban. Saban is a successful college football coach at the University of Alabama. As I listened to the podcast, I realized that the bar exam experience is very similar to a football team’s preparation for a championship game. The stakes are high, the preparation is intense and condensed, each individual bar taker will either win (pass) or lose (fail), and there are points assigned based on how well the performer does.

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• The Biden Administration’s Unconstitutional Student Loan Cancellation Plans & Congress’s Responsibility To Address The Root Cause Of The Student Loan Crisis
• Why Professors Can’t Teach
• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Sunday:

• The Top Five New Tax Papers
• NY Times Op-Ed: Elite Schools Are Thinking About Black Student Admissions The Wrong Way
• What Is The Difference Between A Church And A Religious Organization?
• Evangelicals In A Diverse Democracy: Is It Time To Let Jesus Take The Wheel?
• What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First

What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First

Fox News Op-Ed: What a Rollicking Band of Billboard Charting Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About a Life of Faith, by by Mike Kerrigan (Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):

In August, my eyes welled with tears ... as I heard The Hillbilly Thomists perform live in concert for the first time. This sensational bluegrass band, which took its name from Southern Gothic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor’s delightful description of her own creative worldview, is comprised entirely of friars from the Order of Preachers.

For 50 weeks of the year, the clerics humbly live out their priestly vocations as, for instance, university chaplains, a parochial vicar and a bestselling author on theology. For the remaining two blessedly harmonious weeks, they tour. ...

Their folksy music is at once complex and lovely with lyrics rich in poetry and Scripture, but it’s their live performances that are joy incarnate. The Hillbilly Thomists’ love of God, of one other, and of music is unmistakable, an apt metaphor for the real presence that they so reverently adore. Turning Americana into sacred sound, they play with human hearts, light with — to borrow G.K. Chesterton’s definition of gratitude — happiness doubled by wonder. They are, in a very good word, winsome.

But why is this so? It’s too cute to chalk their staggering success up to Providence, which after all is not on stage with the band and keeping them in time when they perform. What about their music exudes this attractive happiness doubled by wonder? I think it is something maddeningly simple, a critical choice they’ve made in their lives, but equally maddeningly rare in the world, since so few people so unreservedly make the same choice.

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Evangelicals In A Diverse Democracy: Is It Time To Let Jesus Take The Wheel?

Christianity Today:  How to Find Common Ground When You Disagree About the Common Good, by John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar):

How do Christians live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control?

In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book titled Uncommon Ground. Our project convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect—as the subtitle said—on how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference. Since then, however, I’ve rephrased the question for my own work. We should be faithful, yes, but also neighborly. And our world is not just host to real difference of belief; it’s also a world we don’t control.

I owe this subtle but important reframing to my friendship and work with Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America. The most important interfaith organization in the country, Interfaith America does not advance a soupy multiculturalism that pretends that all roads lead to heaven or that our differences don’t matter. It takes religious particularity seriously, identifies conflicts and tensions created by that particularity, and works to find common ground across religious differences. ...

My question of how Christians can live faithfully and as good neighbors in a world we don’t control is the interfaith question. It asks how we can be fellow citizens, coworkers, and friends with people who do not share our belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This question has become increasingly important in a cultural context where Christians are too often seen as self-interested and unconcerned for our neighbors of other faiths and no faith, in our politics and in our personal lives. ...

One of my initiatives with Eboo, which this essay serves to announce, is called Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy. For the past two years, we’ve cultivated friendship and trust among a group of people whose voices collectively offer a counternarrative to the assumptions of the Christian and post-Christian right and an increasingly dechurched and unchurched left. We believe Christians can be friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens with those who don’t share our faith—and that we can do so within the fullness of our Christian identity. 

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What Is The Difference Between A Church And A Religious Organization?

Darryll K. Jones (Florida A&M), What is the Difference Between a Church and a Religious Organization? Amici line up in Support of Catholic Charities:

Friends of the Court are lining up in support of Catholic Charities Bureau's Petition for Certiorari.  Here is a brief recap:

Wisconsin denied a religious exemption from employment taxes to the Wisconsin Catholic Charities Bureau and its charitable sub-agents (independent organizations operating under the CCB umbrella) because they were not operated "primarily for religious purposes." CCB sought exemption from Wisconsin's unemployment tax but the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Catholic Charities Bureau is not churchy enough.  This, even though the Wisconsin Diocese controls and operates the CCB, and all separate organizations under CCB's general supervision are required to comply with CCB guidelines.  Those guidelines don't require adherence to or preaching of Catholic doctrine but merely that sub-agents practice good altruism, such as serving all comers without discrimination.  None of the guidelines require the separate CCB-approved and loosely controlled agents to proselytize.

The lower courts ruled that neither the CCB nor the subagents were operated for "primarily for religious purposes" within the statute's intended meaning because they didn't preach, teach or otherwise proselytize.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court, affirmed explaining that operating "primarily for religious purposes" means organizations federal law considers churches.  Plain old "religious organizations" don't get "church" status for purposes of Wisconsin's unemployment tax exemption.  At best, CCB and the organizations might just be considered "religious organizations" under federal law.  Religious organizations don't get extra special dispensation under federal tax law that churches get.

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NY Times Op-Ed: Elite Schools Are Thinking About Black Student Admissions The Wrong Way

New York Times Op-Ed:  Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way, by  John McWhorter (Columbia; Google Scholar):

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

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

1. [366 Downloads]  Non-(Fully) Harmonised Excise Taxes and Irrebuttable Presumptions, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds; Google Scholar) 
2. [328 Downloads]  Tax Regulations After Loper Bright, by Andy Grewal (Iowa; Google Scholar)
3. [284 Downloads]  International Tax Scholarship and International Tax Activism, by Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck) (reviewed by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar) here)
4. [269 Downloads]  Reforming the Taxation of Life Insurance, by Ari Glogower (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Andrew Granato (Yale; Google Scholar)
5. [262 Downloads]  Flow-Through Entities and the OECD Pillar Two, by Leopoldo Parada (Kings College; Google Scholar)

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education: 

1. Jennifer Kindred Mitchell (Baltimore) & Charlie Amiot, Rethinking Legal Education: Demystifying Neurodiversity And Building An Inclusive Future
2. Harvard Gazette, If You Want To Be Dean, You Probably Won’t Be Good At It
3. AccessLex, Predicting Bar Success — The Mediating Effects Of 1L Law School GPA On Undergraduate GPA And LSAT
4. Steven Calabresi (Northwestern), Academic Tuition And Student Loan Relief
5. Sara Berman (USC) & Chance Meyer (New England), Major Reform Of Legal Education With Minor Risk
6. Chronicle of Higher Education, Conservatives Are Rare In Academe. Does It Matter?
7. Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, Compounding Inequities In Law School Are Not Insurmountable
8. Reuters, Minority Enrollment Holds Steady At Top U.S. Law Schools
9. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman), Should You Have Kids In Law School?
10. ABA Legal Rebels Podcast, Tests Into And Out Of Law Schools

Tax:

1. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Biden Administration
3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Updated 2024 Tax Prof Rankings: Google Scholar H-Index All 
4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Updated 2024 Tax Prof Rankings: Google Scholar H-Index Since 2019
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Prof Moves, 2023-25
6. Tax Prof Jobs
   • American 
   • Arkansas
   • Boston College
   • Florida
   • Massachusetts
   • Vermont
7. Lily Batchelder (NYU), Ari Glogower (Northwestern), Chye-Ching Huang (NYU), David Kamin (NYU), Rebecca Kysar (Fordham), Kelsey Merrick (NYU), Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) & Thalia Spinrad (NYU), The Moores Lost Their Claim And Moore
8. Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina), Wellness And The Tax Law
9. Rob Natelson (Montana), Direct Taxes And The Founders’ Originalism
10. ABA Tax Section, 24th Annual Law Student Tax Challenge Problem

Faith:

1. New York Times Op-Ed (Matthew Schmitz), Catholic Converts Like JD Vance Are Reshaping Republican Politics
2. Washington Post Op-Ed (Anne Lamott), Living For The Unremarkable Moments
3. Christianity Today Op-Ed (Anna Broadway), It Is Not Best For Man To Eat Alone
4. Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & Hannah Anderson, The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children
5. Surf Report, Fall 2024 Pepperdine Law & Religion Workshop Series

Why Professors Can’t Teach

Jonathan Zimmerman (Penn), Why Professors Can’t Teach, Washington Monthly, Sept./Oct. 2024: 

In 1949, the graduate dean at the University of Minnesota imagined that he had fallen asleep and woken up in 1984. The first thing he saw was a newspaper. It mentioned none of the “Orwellian horrors” that George Orwell had predicted in his novel. Instead, a banner headline blared “AMERICAN COLLEGE TEACHING REACHES A NEW HIGH,” with all-caps subheads that read “IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE TEACHING NOW RECOGNIZED BY ALL” and “SKILL OF NEWLY TRAINED COLLEGE TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM AMAZES COMMUNITY.”

These phrases capture the perpetual dream of college-teaching reformers for the past century or more: to make undergraduate instruction into a truly professional enterprise, on par with research. But their reach has always exceeded their grasp. In the 1920s and ’30s, they introduced student evaluations; in the 1950s, seminars and televised lectures; in the 1960s and ’70s, ungraded classes and self-paced modules. Yet teaching remained a lowly endeavor, in status as well as quality: Hired mainly for their publications, many professors were woeful instructors. The problem was already apparent in 1903, when William James—who taught at Harvard for many years, despite never earning a PhD—wrote the most-quoted critique of college teaching: “Will anyone pretend for a moment that a doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be a successful teacher?” By mid-century, when the Minnesota dean wrote his missive about 1984, calls to reform undergraduate instruction had already assumed a predictable rhythm. Committees would be formed, statements would be issued, and most professors would continue to teach in the same dull, uninspired manner. In 1957, another university dean wrote that the pattern reminded him of a snow globe he had owned as a child: You shook it up and the flakes scattered, but they soon settled down exactly as before.

So it’s easy to be skeptical about the “Great College Teaching Movement,” the latest effort to improve instruction in higher education. For the past decade, several state university systems have established broad-scale initiatives to recognize—and upgrade—teaching. The leading force in this campaign is the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), cofounded by a former New York City educational official, Jonathan Gyurko, in 2014. Gyurko holds a PhD—from Columbia University Teachers College—but he’s not a standard-issue academic; instead, he is trying to alter the standards that academics use to judge each other.

Prior efforts to reform college teaching relied almost entirely on moral suasion: If you prick people’s conscience, the theory went, they will change. But nothing will really change, Gyurko says, until faculty have a clear incentive to get better. So ACUE has designed an online training course, which has been completed by 26,000 professors on 450 campuses. Some of them have received stipends; others are awarded new titles, like “distinguished teaching scholar.” Most importantly, perhaps, research has already demonstrated that students who take courses from an ACUE-accredited professor are more likely to complete them. So universities also have a clear financial reason to invest in teaching, which wasn’t as apparent in prior eras. Gyurko acknowledges the long history of failed reforms in this realm, of course. But “this time,” he insists, “it’s different.”

I hope he’s right. Yet it’s hard to imagine a real revolution in college teaching unless the big players get behind it, from the outlets that rank colleges to the governments that fund them. ... [T]he college classroom remains a black box, which almost nobody in power wants to open. Maybe they’re afraid of what they might find inside. ...

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The Biden Administration’s Unconstitutional Student Loan Cancellation Plans & Congress’s Responsibility To Address The Root Cause Of The Student Loan Crisis

James M. Truett (J.D. 2024, Louisiana State), Comment, Congress, Tear Down This Educational Wall: The Biden Administration's Unconstitutional Student Loan Cancellation Plans & Congress's Responsibility to Address the Root Cause of the Student Loan Crisis, 84 La. L. Rev. 625 (2024): 

The goal of student loan programs is to offer students financial assistance and to give the students an opportunity to receive an education. However, as an entire country, the United States has lost sight of this once revolutionary and effective goal. Student loans cause more harm than benefit by imposing enormous amounts of debts on to teenagers who just want a chance to receive an education. The harms certainly outweigh the benefits for recent graduates who will not take their dream job because it will not pay enough to finance their student loan repayments. While the burden of repaying student loans should remain with the students, universities must be held accountable for their predatory financial practices.

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Kern Reviews Deferring Income With Tiered And Circular Partnerships By Sanchirico & Shuldiner

This week, Adam Kern (San Diego; Google Scholar) reviews an article by Chris William Sanchirico (Penn; Google Scholar) and Reed Shuldiner (Penn), Deferring Income with Tiered and Circular Partnerships.

Taxes can be deferred when partnerships have different taxable years from their partners. A partnership might take account of its income in, say, January, while a partner might only take account of its income in December. In that case, the partner would defer taxes on its distributive share of partnership income for 11 months.

The academic literature has assumed that this opportunity for deferral is limited. In “Deferring Income with Tiered and Circular Partnerships,” Chris Sanchirico and Reed Shuldiner show that it is not. Taxpayers can achieve a large—indeed, unbounded—extent of deferral with tiered and circular partnerships. Moreover, while the partnership structures described by Sanchirico & Shuldiner are ingenious, they are not so large or complex as to be obviously infeasible. This is a genuine opportunity that taxpayers might well seize.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA & AccessLex, Student Debt Impacts Well-Being And Life Decisions Of Young Lawyers
• AccessLex, Predicting Bar Success: The Mediating Effects of Law School GPA
• Steven Calabresi (Northwestern), Academic Tuition and Student Loan Relief
• Chronicle of Higher Education, The Professoriate's Political Problem
• Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman), Should You Have Kids In Law School?
• Fordham Conference, Forming Lawyer-Stewards: The Special Role Of Religious Law Schools
• Harvard Gazette, You Want to be Boss. You Probably Won’t Be Good At It
• Jennifer Kindred Mitchell (Baltimore) & Charlie Amiot, Rethinking Legal Education: Demystifying Neurodiversity and Building an Inclusive Future

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• The American Prospect, Kamala’s Capital Capitulation
• Americans for Tax Fairness & Color of Change, How Tax Fairness Can Promote Racial Equity
• Bloomberg, Trump Pledges No Taxes on Overtime in Pitch to Blue-Collar Vote
• Tyler Cohen (George Mason), If Harris Taxes Americans’ Wealth, Foreigners Will Benefit
• Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, The Kamala Harris Plan for Taxing Capital Income

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Monday, September 16: Luís C. Calderón Gómez (Cardozo; Google Scholar) will present Taxation’s Limits, 119 Nw. U. L. Rev. __ (2024), as part of the Boston College Tax Policy Collaborative. If you would like to attend, please contact Diane Ring. 

Tuesday, September 17: Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia) will present A New View of Formal Equality as part of the Columbia Faculty Workshop Series. 

Friday, September 20: Ron Harris (Tel Aviv; Google Scholar) will present a chapter from Empire Ltd.: Law and the Rise of Multinational Companies in the First Era of Globalization (1844-1914) as part of the Oxford-Virginia Legal Dialogs. If you would like to attend, please register here. 

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Student Debt Impacts Well-Being And Life Decisions Of Young Lawyers

ABA & AccessLex, Student Debt, COVID-19 Relief, and Loan Forgiveness: Perspectives from Today’s Young Lawyers — Selected Findings from the 2024 American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division Student Loan Survey:

Executive Summary
Over the last few years, the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division (ABA YLD) has used data from its members to sound the alarm on student loan debt trends and the impact of student loan debt on early career attorneys who are under the age of 36 or were first admitted to practice within the last 10 years. The 2020 and 2021 Student Debt Surveys elucidated the ways in which education debt tangibly burdens relatively new J.D. recipients —most of whom are in the process of building their careers and lives. Both surveys’ results indicated that those with the highest debt balances are more often to report delaying or forgoing significant life events (e.g., marriage, homebuying, and having children). Further, the 2021 Report demonstrated that the impacts of debt are not felt equally among all young lawyers; lawyers of color are disproportionately likely to have borrowed for their education, carry high debt balances, and see their debt balances grow after graduation.

The 2024 survey results reaffirm the above findings while offering new insights regarding young lawyers’ experiences with the COVID-19 student loan repayment pause, their plans in the event of loan forgiveness, their satisfaction with loan servicers, and their mindsets regarding work-life balance. The survey results also illustrate notable differences in borrowing and debt effects by respondent characteristics, including first-generation college status. In summary, the findings indicate:

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California Bar Wants To Offer Exam Score Boosts, Payments To Sample Test Guinea Pigs

The Recorder, California Bar Wants to Offer Exam Score Boosts, Payments to Sample Test Guinea Pigs:

Select California bar exam applicants who complete a sample test written by Kaplan could receive financial incentives and see their actual 2025 exam scores boosted under a plan the state bar submitted to the California Supreme Court this week.

In two filings with the high court on Monday, state bar leaders said they need to test drive sample multiple-choice questions drafted by testing giant Kaplan, which the bar recently retained to provide a 200-question exam starting with the February 2025 sitting. The bar’s testing expert would evaluate the exam and results for the bar.

As an incentive for field testing 49 sample multiple-choice questions in November, up to 4,300 participants could receive an as-yet-undetermined payment if the state bar secures grant funding, the bar’s filing with the court stated. The bar would also offer to raise the scores of certain sample-test participants who then take the actual multiple-choice exam in February or July 2025. ...

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Osofsky: Wellness And The Tax Law

Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Wellness and The Tax Law, 59 Ga. L. Rev. __ (2025):

The tax law has long provided extensive subsidies for "medical care." These subsidies cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The definition of medical care, which is at the heart of these subsidies, originated many decades ago, at a time when there was little to no conception of wellness. 

Times have changed in the medical world. Medical science now emphasizes that wellness practices, like exercise, meditation, and social connection, have an important impact on physical as well as mental health, including by playing a significant role in preventing and treating disease. Under the tax statute, medical care includes "treatment. .. or prevention of disease." The tax law nonetheless disallows subsidies for wellness expenditures under the theory that they are "merely beneficial to general health." This tension between medical science and tax law demands that we reappraise tax law's medical care subsidy. 

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AccessLex: Predicting Bar Success — The Mediating Effects Of 1L Law School GPA On Undergraduate GPA And LSAT

AccessLex, Predicting Bar Success: The Mediating Effects of Law School GPA:

Most American law schools evaluate candidates for admission based on final undergraduate GPA (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores, due in part to accreditation requirements and institutional bar passage goals. However, several studies have demonstrated racial and ethnic score disparities associated with the LSAT, and prior literature suggests that admissions metrics have limited utility for predicting bar passage — especially when accounting for academic performance in law school.

This study uses data from nearly 20,000 lawyers who graduated from 39 law schools to build on previous literature. We propose statistical mediation to achieve a more accurate understanding of the relationship between, and predictive value of, law school admission factors, first-year law school GPA (1L LGPA), and first-time bar passage.

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The Impact Of Jarkesy On Civil Tax Fraud Penalties

Bryan Camp (Texas Tech; Google Scholar), The Impact of Jarkesy on Civil Tax Fraud Penalties, 27 Fla. Tax Rev. __ (2024):

On June 27, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy. It held that when the SEC sought a $300,000 civil penalty against Mr. Jarkesy for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitled him to a jury trial in an Article III court.  The week before, the Tax Court, an Article I court, issued a decision upholding the IRS’s imposition of a $6.3 million civil penalty against a taxpayer for tax fraud.  No jury was available. 

This article considers whether Jarkesy now requires adjudication of civil tax fraud penalties in an Article III court with access to a jury. That question is more nuanced than it might first appear. The answer depends on how one balances government administrative needs against individual liberty interests. Jarkesy inverts prior teachings on how courts should perform that balance. 

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Tax Prof Moves, 2023-25

Here is a list of (1) visiting assistant professor hires; (2) entry-level hires; (3) lateral moves; (4) promotions, tenures, chairs, and professorships; (5) administrative appointments: (6) visits; and (7) retirements involving tax professors in 2023-25. (Email me any omissions.) 

VAP Hires

• Fernando Loayza Jordán (JSD 2025, Yale) to Drexel (2025)
• Erika Isabella Scuderi (Space Policy Institute) to Florida (2024)
• Alex Ferrara Walker (Wachtell) to NYU (2024)

Entry Level Hires

• Conor Clarke (Department of Justice) to Washington University (2023)
• Jon Endean (VAP, NYU) to Brooklyn (2024)
• Assaf Harpaz (VAP, Drexel) to Georgia (2024)
• Adam Kern (Furman Fellow, NYU) to San Diego (2024)
• Luke Maher (Skadden) to Seattle (2023)
• Deanna Newton (Caruso Family Fellow, Pepperdine) to Pepperdine (2024) 
• Alex Zhang (Law Clerk, Hon. Guido Calabresi, 2nd Circuit) to Emory (2023) 

Lateral Moves

• Jonathan Choi (Minnesota) to USC (2023)
• Steven Dean (Brooklyn) to Boston University (2023)
• Dhammika Dharmapala (Chicago) to UC-Berkeley (2023)
• David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer) to Missouri-Columbia (2024)
• Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-L.A.) to USC (2024)
• Orli Oren-Kolbinger (Sapir Academic College) to Oregon (2024)
• Victoria Perry (IMF) to Georgetown Graduate Tax Program (2023)
• Gregg Polsky (Georgia) to NYU (2024)
• Kyle Rozema (Washington University) to Northwestern (2023)
• Blaine Saito (Northeastern) to Ohio State (2023)
• Phyllis Taite (Oklahoma City) to Oklahoma (2023)
• Del Wright (UMKC) to Louisiana State (2024)
• Richard Winchester (Seton Hall) to Brooklyn (2024)
• Patrice Wylly (Jane Street Group) to Georgetown Graduate Tax Program (2023)

Promotions, Tenures, Chairs, and Professorships

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UC-San Francisco Hosts Conference On U.S. International Tax Rules: Options For Change

UC-San Francisco hosts a conference on Complexities, Discontinuities, and Unintended Consequences of U.S. International Tax Rules: Options for Change today (registration): 

An east coast version of this conference was organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Florida and was held in June 17-18, 2024 in Washington, D.C. More information about that conference can be found here. This west coast version of the conference will focus on the international tax provisions most relevant to technology- and intangibles-based enterprises.

Welcome 

• Mindy Herzfeld (Florida) 
• Heather Field (UC-San Francisco; Google Scholar) 

Session #1: Taxing of CFC Earnings – GILTI and Subpart F

The panelists will explore design issues of Subpart F income and GILTI, their differences, and opportunities for harmonization post TCJA.

• Kara Mungovan (Davis Polk), Subpart F and GILTI Recommendations, 115 Tax Notes Int'l 729 (July 29, 2024) 
• Gretchen Sierra (Deloitte) (commentator)
• Brian Jenn (McDermott) (commentator) 

Session #2: Foreign Tax Credit

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Fordham Conference: Forming Lawyer-Stewards — The Special Role Of Religious Law Schools

Fordham hosts a conference on Forming Lawyer-Stewards: The Special Role of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools today and tomorrow (registration): 

Join us at the 2024 Religiously Affiliated Law School (RALS) biennial Conference, delving into the vital concept of stewardship — a principle deeply rooted in many of the world’s major religions. Our aim is to explore the critical role of lawyers as stewards of both our communities and the world. Employing a dialogue-based approach, the conference shall bring attendees together in small but diverse working groups where they will discuss how stewardship intersects with key areas such as the environment, criminal justice, and immigration. We look forward to welcoming students, legal scholars, law school administrators, and legal practitioners' voices as we explore the concept of lawyer-stewards.

September 12

Welcome Remarks 

• Joseph Landau (Dean, Fordham; Google Scholar) 

Keynote Address 

• Tania Tetlow (President, Fordham) 

Opening Panel: Religious Perspectives on Stewardship 

• Russell Pearce (Fordham) (moderator)
• Robert Cochran (Pepperdine; Google Scholar) 
• Mohammad Fadel (Toronto; Google Scholar) 
• Diane Kemker (Pepperdine/Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar)
• Samuel Levine (Touro)
• Amy Uelmen (Georgetown) 

Workshop #1: Stewardship and Welcoming the Stranger

• Gemma Solimene (Fordham) (moderator)
• Nermeen Arastu (CUNY)
• Saul Berman (Columbia) 
• Carolina Nuñez (BYU) 

Workshop #2: Stewardship and Loving Your Neighbor

• Jeffrey Brauch (Regent; Google Scholar) (moderator)
• Allison Carpenter (Catholic)
• Thomas More Donnelly (Loyola-Chicago)
• Cecelia Klingele (Wisconsin; Google Scholar) 
• Shlomo Pill (Texas Southern; Google Scholar)

September 13

Workshop #3: Stewardship and Caring for the Environment

• Nadia Ahmad (Barry; Google Scholar) 
• Saul Berman (Columbia) 
• Lucia Ann Silecchia (Catholic University) 

Concluding Panel 

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