Duff Presents Abusive Tax Avoidance And The General-Anti Avoidance Rule Today At Toronto

David Duff (UBC) presents Abusive Tax Avoidance and the Future of the General-Anti Avoidance Rule at Toronto today as part of its James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series hosted by Benjamin Alarie:

Canada enacted a statutory general-anti avoidance rule (GAAR) in 1988 in order to limit the scope of the traditional Duke of Westminster principle that taxpayers are entitled to rely on tax-motivated legal arrangements to avoid tax laws that might otherwise apply. After over 30 years of experience with the GAAR and more than 20 years of GAAR jurisprudence, the federal government released a Consultation Paper in August 2022, considering various amendments to “modernize” and “strengthen” the GAAR. This presentation is based on Professor Duff’s response to the GAAR Consultation, as well as a more conceptual article on the rationale for and appropriate design of general anti-avoidance rules that was published in 2020. 

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Columbia Affinity Groups Protest FedSoc Meeting With Justice Kavanaugh, Will Boycott Recruiting Of Diverse Law Students

David Bernstein (George Mason; Google Scholar), More Elite Law Student Foolishness, This Time at Columbia:

Apparently jealous of all the attention that Yale and Stanford law students have gotten for acting like imperious children, Columbia law students, represented by BALSA, LALSA, NALSA, EWOC, OutLaws, QTPOC, IfWhenHow, APALSA, and SALSA (no, I'm not familiar with all of these acronyms), have been throwing a collective hissy fit. The act that stirred such emotion? Columbia's Instagram account noted that a group of law students affiliated with the Federalist Society met with Justice Brett Kavanaugh in DC.

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Call For Papers: Tax Research Network Conference At Cambridge

Call for Papers:

The conference will be held at the University of Cambridge from 5-7 September 2023 and will run as an in-person conference with some virtual provision for those who are unable to travel to Cambridge. As usual, the first two days will be research focused, while the Tax Education Day will run on the 7th September. Further details of the conference are at TRN Conference 2023 – Cambridge. Both research and teaching focused papers are welcomed in this call for papers.

There will be concurrent sessions over the conference to accommodate the papers submitted. The virtual sessions will be conducted via Microsoft Teams with links to be provided prior to the conference.

The conference will offer a limited number of fee scholarships and travel bursaries for PhD students and Early Career Research/Teaching colleagues. We will also hope to have limited funding for supporting childcare costs. Further details will be available once registration opens.

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The Law Schools Most Impacted By The Methodology Changes In The Projected 2024 U.S. News Rankings

Following up on Monday's post, Projected 2024 U.S. News Rankings For All 191 Law Schools:  here are the schools most impacted by the methodology changes in the 2024 U.S. News Rankings, using the projected median ranks in Mike Spivey's 15 models:

Largest increases in the projected 2024 rankings:

Rank	School	2023 Rank	Projected 2024 Rank	Difference
1	St. Thomas (MN)	127	94	+33
2	Florida Int'l	98	66	+32
3	Oklahoma	88	59	+29
3	Marquette	105	76	+29
5	Duquesne	129	102	+27
6	Stetson	111	85	+26
7	Wyoming	129	108	+21
8	Kansas	67	47	+20
8	Texas Tech	105	85	+20
10	St. John's	84	65	+19
11	South Carolina	84	66	+18
11	Chapman	118	100	+18
11	Dayton	122	104	+18
14	Drake	111	94	+17
15	Belmont	133	117	+16
15	Pace	142	126	+16
15	Regent	142	126	+16
18	Mercer	122	107	+15
19	Texas A&M	46	32	+14
19	Seattle	116	102	+14
19	West Virginia	118	104	+14
19	Samford	139	125	+14
23	Wake Forest	37	24	+13
23	Villanova	56	43	+13
25	Baylor	58	46	+12
25	Temple	63	51	+12
27	SMU	58	47	+11
28	Seton Hall	73	63	+10
28	New York Law School	129	119	+10

Largest decreases in the projected 2024 rankings:

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WSJ: The IRS Makes A Strange House Call On Journalist Matt Taibbi

Wall Street Journal Editorial, The IRS Makes a Strange House Call on Matt Taibbi:

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent. We’ve seen the letter, and both the circumstances and timing of the IRS focus on this journalist raise serious questions.

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Chemerinsky: Stanford Law Students Violated Free Speech By Shouting Down A Conservative Speaker

Sacramento Bee Op-Ed:  Stanford Students Violated Free Speech by Shouting Down a Conservative Speaker, by Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UC-Berkeley):

There is no First Amendment right to use speech to shout down a speaker and keep them from being heard. This principle has again become important in connection with an incident at Stanford Law School on March 9. ...

This is not the first time in recent years that law students have behaved this way. A year ago, students at both UC Law San Francisco (previously Hastings College of Law) and at Yale Law School disrupted invited conservative speakers. In all of these instances, protesters defended their actions by claiming that they had the right to use their speech to “de-platform” a speaker and keep them from being heard. This is wrong as a matter of law and at odds with common sense. There is no reason why the protesters’ speech should be given priority over that of an invited speaker and an audience desiring to listen. Cases have consistently rejected such a right to a “heckler’s veto.” Indeed, if it were allowed, the only permissible speech would be that where no one cares enough to protest.

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Sarkar Presents Internal Revenue’s External Borders Today At Georgetown

Shayak Sarkar (UC-Davis; Google Scholar) presents Internal Revenue’s External Borders at Georgetown today as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop hosted by Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli:

The mandate of tax agencies seems clear: to secure revenue for the government and ensure taxpayer compliance. Yet for decades, tax agencies have regularly facilitated immigration enforcement. While scholars and the public have paid significant attention to the use of state and local police for immigration enforcement, this conscription of the taxman as a foot soldier has largely been overlooked.

This paper aims to correct that oversight. Building on the emerging critiques of the tax system’s role in perpetuating racial inequities, I first describe tax-agency participation in immigration raids, holding the dry mechanics of the agency procedures against stark examples of IRS complicity in mid-raid civil rights violations. I then address several reasons to be concerned about tax-agency involvement in immigration enforcement before considering existing constraints on that involvement. My review of those constraints begins with a reminder of the tax-law origins of immigration raids’ constitutional exceptionalism, before assessing the residual constraints on agency participation: taxpayer privacy, regulatory suppression, and civil rights torts.

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DePaul Law Review Symposium Call for Papers: Succession

The DePaul Law Review has issued a call for papers for its Spring 2024 symposium: 

The DePaul Law Review will devote the third issue of its 73rd volume (slated for publication in Spring 2024) to a Symposium addressing the Emmy-winning scripted drama Succession from a legal and pedagogical point of view. The aim of this special issue is to collect in one place the insights of a variety of faculty members with different legal subject-matter expertise, as a resource for all who are interested in the use of this award-winning work for the teaching, practice, and study of law. The DePaul Law Review has already secured the participation of a number of distinguished scholars.

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Does the Tax System Favor Superstar Firms?

John Gallemore (North Carolina; Google Scholar) & Edward L. Maydew (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Does the Tax System Favor Superstar Firms?:

Influential recent research finds that economic activity is increasingly concentrated in large, highly profitable "superstar firms." The causes and consequences of the rise of superstar firms are the subjects of intense debate among academics, policymakers, and others. Acting on concerns that superstar firms have tax advantages relative to other firms, policymakers are increasingly designing and enacting additional taxes that target superstar firms. We examine the validity of the underlying assumption that the tax system favors superstar firms, using both forward-looking and backward-looking measures of firms’ tax burdens.

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2023 Law School Rankings By Graduates In BigLaw Jobs

Law.com, The 2023 Top 50 Go-To Law Schools:

We have ranked the 50 law schools that sent the highest percentage of their 2022 juris doctor graduates into associate positions at the largest 100 law firms in the country.  Columbia Law School topped the list for the 10th straight year, with 65.6% of its recent graduate class now working in Big Law. Cornell Law School came in at No. 2, followed by Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law at No. 3.

1. Columbia
2. Cornell
3. Northwestern
4. Penn
5. Chicago
6. USC
7. Duke
8. NYU
9. UC-Berkeley
10. Vanderbilt
11. Virginia
12. Michigan
13. Georgetown
14. Harvard
15. UCLA
16. Boston College
17. Boston University
18. Howard
19. Texas
20. Stanford
21. Fordham
22. UC-Irvine
23. Illinois
24. Emory
25. Wash U
26. Yale

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Cauble: Taxpayers' Tax Election Regrets

Emily Cauble (Wisconsin; Google Scholar), Taxpayers' Tax Election Regrets, 77 Tax Law. ___ (2023):

In a variety of contexts, taxpayers can file tax elections that dictate their tax treatment. After filing or not filing a given tax election, a taxpayer might later feel regret. Perhaps the taxpayer lacks adequate information about the election's existence or tax effects at the time the taxpayer makes (or fails to make) the election. Later, the taxpayer acquires additional tax law information revealing that an alternative election would have produced more favorable tax results. Alternatively, the taxpayer may make an election because it will produce favorable tax consequences if the taxpayer's transactions or behavior play out the way the taxpayer predicts. When the taxpayer's predictions prove to be inaccurate, the taxpayer wishes she had made a different election. A taxpayer who learns that an earlier election was, in retrospect, ill-advised might attempt to benefit from her newly acquired knowledge by retroactively filing a new election. Tax law's limitations on the use of hindsight determine whether the taxpayer will succeed.

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Law Schools Try Texting To Monitor Students' Mental Health

Reuters, Law Schools Try Texting to Monitor Students' Mental Health:

As evidence mounts that law students suffer through outsized mental health challenges, some law schools are experimenting with a new tactic to identify struggling students and get them help.

At least five U.S. law schools have adopted a service first developed for medical schools, called Early Alert, that sends one text message a week to students asking them to rate how they feel about a specific topic.

Questions range from academics and personal relationships to sleep quality and financial stability. Students respond on a scale of one to 10, with answers in the mid-to-low range triggering a list of available resources, outreach by a law school staff member, an automatic call from a crisis counselor, or all three.

“It has had substantive impact,” said Chalak Richards, dean of students, Diversity and Belonging, at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, which began using Early Alert in the spring of 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced classes to go online. “I don’t have to wait for faculty to notice that one person in their class of 55 seems off.”

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Projected 2024 U.S. News Rankings For All 191 Law Schools

Following up on my previous posts:

• Summary Of Changes To The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time 1-Year Bar Passage
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate 2-Year Bar Passage
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
• 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings

Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting), A Look At Possible U.S. News Rankings:

[W]e thought it might be interesting to explore what different results would look like from various methodologies in the upcoming edition, to be released in a few weeks. Because of the boycott U.S. News has announced that it plans to use publicly available data, e.g. information available through the American Bar Association. They will still use the assessment scores, though they have stated they plan to reduce the weight assigned to those metrics.

• Peer Assessment (currently 25%): 12%-24%
• Lawyer|Judge Assessment (currently 15%): 7%-12%
• 10-Month Employment (currently 14%): 25%-40%
• First-Time Bar Passage (currently 3%): 2%-10%
• Ultimate 2-Year Bar Passage (currently 0%): 0%-10%
• Student|Faculty Ratio (currently 2%): 2%-10%
• Median LSAT|GRE (currently 11.25%): 8%-15%
• Median UGPA (currently 8.75%): 5%-11%
• Acceptance Rate (currently 1%): 1%-3%

Mike used this year's assessment scores in his 15 models. In contrast, Derek Muller (Iowa) reduced this year's peer assessment scores of the 42 law schools boycotting the rankings by 0.1 in his 5 models.

Mike listed the results for each law school within each of the fifteen scenarios. He then sorted all 191 law schools by their median rank. Here are the Top 50:

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Teo Presents The United Nations In Global Tax Coordination Today At British Columbia

Nikki J. Teo (University of Sydney) presents A False Start in International Tax Coordination: The Ghost of the UN’s Past today at Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia hosted by Wei Cui (email here to attend virtually over Zoom at 6:30 PM ET): 

This talk unveils the missing history of the UN’s first attempt at international tax coordination through its Fiscal Commission (1946–1954). It dispels the prevailing myths surrounding the work of that body and reveals the heated struggles by developing countries and the UN Secretariat to negotiate and formulate more equitable international tax principles for application between developed and developing countries. This vital saga sheds light on the role of politics in shaping the international tax regime and offers insights into pressing debates about inclusiveness and multilateralism in international tax norm-setting.

The United Nations in Global Tax Coordination: Hidden History and Politics (Cambridge University Press March 2023):

The United Nations in Global Tax Coordination fills the decade-long knowledge gap in international tax history concerning the UN Fiscal Commission, which functioned as the overarching fiscal authority during the early post-World War II economic order. With insights from political economy and international relations scholarship, this critical archival examination chronicles the tenacious activism by post-colonial developing countries to preserve source taxation rights, and by the UN Secretariat in championing the development of equitable tax rules. Such activism would ultimately lead developed countries to oust the UN as a forum for international tax norm setting.

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• ABA Journal, A Real Defense Of Fake Trials And A Love Letter To My Family
• ABA Journal, After ‘Disruptive Heckling,’ Stanford Law Requires Free Speech Session, Notes Associate Dean’s Leave
• ABA Journal, Exchange At Stanford Law Event With Federalist Society Wasn’t Productive, Associate Dean Says
• ABA Journal, Law Schools Employ Texting Service To Keep Tabs On Students’ Mental Health
• Law.com, Fragomens Donate $1M to Case Western Reserve University Law
• Law.com, Mitchell Hamline and Emory Law Deans Both Planning to Step Down
• Law.com, University of Hawaii Law School Receives $500K Gift for Faculty Professorships
• Law.com, US News Announces Release Date for 2023-24 Graduate School Rankings Following 42 Law School Withdrawals

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Weisbach: Constrained Income Redistribution And Inequality: Legal Rules Compared To Taxes And Transfers

David A. Weisbach (Chicago; Google Scholar), Constrained Income Redistribution and Inequality: Legal Rules Compared to Taxes and Transfers:

A widely accepted result, associated with Louis Kaplow and Steve Shavell, is that it is more costly to use legal rules to redistribute income than to use the tax and transfer system (the income-tax only result). An assumption behind this result is that if a legal rule is changed to eliminate its income-redistributive effects, the tax and transfer system can be adjusted to counteract the effects of those changes on the distribution of income. A number of commentators have questioned this assumption, suggesting that political constraints may limit the ability of the tax and transfer system to adjust to changes in legal rules. They conclude that legal rules should sometimes, or always, be designed to redistribute income.

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Lesson From The Tax Court: The Whistleblower Who Blew Too Hard

Section 7623(b)(1) says that the IRS must reward whistleblowers when the information they provide causes the IRS to start “any administrative or judicial action” to collect unreported or unpaid taxes.  In such cases, whistleblowers can get an award of up to 30% of the proceeds actually collected from such actions.  Id.  So what happens if the whistleblower's information does not lead to an administrative or judicial action against the particular taxpayer fingered by the whistleblower, but instead prompts the IRS to create a general administrative program to target taxpayers like the one fingered by the whistleblower?

That was the claim in Thomas Shands v. Commissioner, 160 T.C. No. 5 (Mar. 8, 2023) (Judge Greaves).  There, the whistleblower claimed entitlement to 30% of some $1 billion collected from the IRS’s second Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative (OVDI) in 2011.  His theory was that his blowing the whistle on one particularly influential tax evader prompted both the creation of the second OVDI and a rush by taxpayers to voluntarily disclose under the program.

The Tax Court ruled that Mr. Shands’ claim was overblown (pun totally intended).  Both the statute and implementing regulations make it clear that the relevant “administrative or judicial action” is one against particular identified taxpayers.  The creation of a general administrative program such as OVDI was not the kind of action that triggered a mandatory award.  Therefore, under the newly restricted reading of its authority to review whistleblower petitions, the Tax Court held that it lacked jurisdiction to review whether his information really did or did not contribute to OVDI.  The IRS simply had not started a requisite administrative or judicial action.  Details below the fold.

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More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 3)

David French (New York Times), Free Speech Doesn’t Mean Free Rein to Shout Down Others:

Robust protest should be welcome in the academy, and it is entirely appropriate to ask any judge difficult questions during the question and answer session after a speech. But protests that go so far as to shout down or disrupt speeches or events aren’t free speech but rather mob censorship.

This is an ancient principle of American liberty. My right to protest does not encompass a right to silence or drown out another person. ... By shouting down Judge Duncan, the Stanford protesters violated his right to speak and the attending students’ right to hear his speech.

But I’m less interested in what happened than why it did. This isn’t the first disruption incident in recent years at an elite American law school. Last March, students at Yale Law School attempted to disrupt an event featuring Kristen Waggoner, then the general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom. (Disclosure: I’m a former senior counsel for A.D.F.) Less than two weeks earlier, students at what is now the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, shouted down a former Cato Institute lawyer, Ilya Shapiro, so completely that he couldn’t deliver his prepared remarks.

The fundamental problem in top schools like Stanford and Yale isn’t so much the individual choices of the students themselves (though they’re certainly responsible for their actions) but rather that the institutions are often prisoners of a social dynamic they helped create. America’s elite law schools are overwhelmingly progressive, and ideological dominance of any kind can breed groupthink and intolerance. ...

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates $50 Million Naming Gift At Annual Dinner With President George W. Bush
• Loyola-L.A. Hosts Festschrift, Symposium, And Celebration To Honor Ellen Aprill
• Yale Hosts Symposium On The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, And Future

Sunday:

• NY Times Op-Ed: Dogs, God, And Love
• WSJ: Should We Use Gender-Neutral Pronouns For God?
• Pepperdine Receives $1.5 Million Templeton Religion Trust Grant For ‘Covenantal Pluralism Project’
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

NY Times Op-Ed: Dogs, God, And Love

New York Times Op-Ed:  On Pets, Moral Logic and Love, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):

In January, I fell in love with someone. It was the last thing I’d expect and caught me completely off guard.

He has sandy blond hair with flecks of gray and gorgeous, sad eyes. He loves to go on walks and cuddle. His name is Herbie. He is just over eight pounds and is a mutt of some terrier variety.

My affection for Herbie came as a surprise because I have never been much of a pet person. ...

But if I’m honest, there’s a little more to it than that. When I was in my early 20s, at a conference on global inequality, I saw a video that interspersed photos of people in intense poverty and famine with news clips reporting on the epidemic of overweight dogs in the United States. The video was direct and didactic. It affected me, even more so after I spent time in East Africa and saw grinding poverty up close.

I didn’t think it was wrong to have a pet, and I’m surrounded by people who are so enthusiastic about their pets that I’d never articulate this concern out loud. Yet in an unspoken place inside me, I’d created a zero-sum system where any money, time or energy I gave to a domestic animal was taking money, time or energy from other humans. ...

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WSJ: Should We Use Gender-Neutral Pronouns For God?

Wall Street Journal, Must God Have a Gender in Our Prayers?:

A bishop of the Church of England said last month that it has been studying whether to allow the use of non-gendered language for God in worship, a practice that a growing number of other churches have adopted over the last several decades. The question is part of a larger debate over how far religious traditions should adapt to the changing values of the wider culture.

“There are two religions within the Church of England vying for supremacy…two fundamentally opposed conceptions of God,” said the Rev. Lee Gatiss, director of the Church Society, a group that promotes traditional teaching. “One is the God of the Bible, as traditionally understood by believers throughout the centuries and all over the world. The other is a flexible God who changes depending on the spirit of the age.”

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Pepperdine Receives $1.5 Million Templeton Religion Trust Grant For ‘Covenantal Pluralism Project’

Pepperdine University Receives $1.5 Million Templeton Religion Trust Grant for ‘Covenantal Pluralism Project’:

Pepperdine University has received a grant of $1,531,920 from the Templeton Religion Trust (TRT) to launch the “Covenantal Pluralism Project: Promoting Covenantal Pluralism Through Heritage, Coalitions, and Advocacy.”

As a grantee of TRT, Knox Thames will join Pepperdine University as a senior fellow with the Caruso School of Law and the School of Public Policy. After 20 years of government service in various diplomatic roles, Thames will direct the Program on Global Faith and Inclusive Societies, which will develop innovative approaches to foster an appreciation for diversity, pluralism and the rights of others. 

“Pepperdine University is delighted to add a scholar and practitioner of Knox Thames’ quality and caliber to our campus community,” said President Jim Gash. “Thames’ Covenantal Pluralism Project will develop innovative pathways and bolster current efforts for covenantal pluralism by advancing religious freedom and religious literacy through faith communities, popular culture, governments and human rights organizations. His work will contribute to the mission of Pepperdine, provide our students with cutting-edge ideas and perspectives, and enrich the congenial milieu of our university.”

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

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

1. [478 Downloads]  Why Data Giants Don't Pay Enough Tax, by Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães (Antwerp; Google Scholar) & Allison Christians (McGill; Google Scholar)
2. [206 Downloads]  21st Century Churches and Federal Tax Law, by Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar) & Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame; Google Scholar)
3. [203 Downloads]  The Rise of the Robotic Tax Analyst, by Benjamin Alarie (Toronto; Google Scholar; CEO, Blue J Legal)
4. [170 Downloads]  Nonprofit Law as the Tool to Kill What Remains of Campaign Finance Law: Reluctant Lessons from Ellen Aprill, by Richard Hasen (UCLA; Google Scholar)
5. [168 Downloads]  Subjective Costs of Tax Compliance, by Jonathan Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar) & Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar)

Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates $50 Million Naming Gift At Annual Dinner With President George W. Bush

We had planned to celebrate our October 2019 $50 million naming gift (more here) at our 50th anniversary law school dinner in March 2020, but Covid forced several postponements. After waiting 1,082 days (!), over 1,000 members of our community gathered at the Beverly Hilton for a spectacular evening of celebration, faith, and humor.

3L Tyler Lisea opened the festivities and introduced Asha Madukar (JD '19), who sang a stirring rendition of How Great Thou Art, accompanied on the piano by her father Joel. 3L Ana Rodriguez, President of the Christian Legal Society, introduced Judge Consuelo Maria Callahan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who delivered a wonderful invocation. 1L Keanu Mayo led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by this video honoring Ken Starr, Dean of Pepperdine Caruso Law School from 2004-2010, who passed away on September 13, 2022:

Dinner was then served. Rick Caruso and I had the great honor of sitting next to President Bush — I am so glad the photographer captured this great photo of President Bush enjoying himself at the dinner:

Following the dinner, 1L Christian Parham introduced Pepperdine President Jim Gash (JD '93), who introduced President Bush and Rick Caruso for a fascinating 45-minute wide-ranging conversati0n replete with much laughter:

President Gash and I presented President Bush with a gift: a bomber jacket with the Pepperdine Caruso Law Seal (riffing off the iconic photo of President Bush in a bomber jacket with the Presidential Seal):

President Gash delivered his remarks, emphasizing how the gift from Rick and Tina Caruso to the law school had galvanized fundraising at the university, including the acquisition and renovation of Château d'Hauteville in Switzerland and the construction of The Mountain at Mullin Park on our Malibu campus.

I delivered my remarks, emphasizing how the Caruso gift has catapulted the law school forward in many ways, including recruiting students with the the highest entering credentials (164 median LSAT & 3.85 median UGPA), and launching them into full-credit jobs at the highest rate (92%), in our history. The gift enabled us to lower the average student debt of our graduates by $58,000 and to make 100% of the student loan payments of every graduate working in the public interest. We were able to recruit four outstanding tenure-track teachers and scholars who have already published in the nation's best law reviews — e.g., Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Pennsylvania. And our average U.S. News ranking over the past four years is #49, the highest in our history.

The Caruso gift also has galvanized fundraising at the law school, including our 50 For 50 Campaign, which raised $3.5 million for student scholarships from 55 donors contributing $50,000 or more. I was pleased to be able to thank those of our thirty-two $1 million-plus donors who were in attendance at the dinner: Jeanette and Michael (JD '74) Bidart, Tina and Rick (JD '83) Caruso, Anna and Thomas Fessler (JD '83), Michelle (JD '89) and Mark ('88) Hiepler, Janet Kerr (JD '78), Rick Stack on behalf of the Hugh & Hazel Darling Foundation, and Judge Danny Weinstein. 

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Wall Street Journal, DEI Dean Escalates Battle Against Dean; Stanford Law School's Sole Conservative Professor Weighs In
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings
3. Roundup, Dean Martinez's 10-Page Letter To The Stanford Community About The Disruption Of Judge Duncan's Speech
4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), ChatGPT Thinks I Am Way More Interesting Than I Am
5. Roundup, More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2)
6. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
7. Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School 'Mismatch' Is Worse Than We Thought
8. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
9. Wall Street Journal, The Unraveling Of The U.S. News Rankings
10. Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed, 'Academic Freedom Has To Protect The Amy Waxes So It Can Be There To Protect The Galileos'

Tax:

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Another Reason To Keep Good Records
2. U.S. Treasury Department, Greenbook On Tax Proposals In Biden's FY24 Budget
3. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Unforeseen Circumstances Rule For §121 Home Sale Exclusions
4. Wall Street Journal, The Myth Of American Income Inequality
5. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Inherent Unreliability Of Third-Party Reporting
6. ProPublica, IRS Files: Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing
7. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Corporations In The Bardo
8. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
9. Roundup, Tax Policy In The Biden Administration
10. Blaine Saito (Northeastern), Review Of Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions By James Alm (Tulane), Jay Soled (Rutgers) & Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina)

Faith: 

1. New York Times Op-Ed, Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division

Loyola-L.A. Hosts Festschrift, Symposium, And Celebration To Honor Ellen Aprill

Loyola-L.A. hosted a festschrift, live symposium, and celebration to honor Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar) yesterday:

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Nonprofits, Taxes, and Speech, 56 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. __ (2023):

Federal tax law is of two minds when it comes to speech by nonprofits. The tax benefits provided to nonprofits are justified in significant part because they provide nonprofits great discretion in choosing the specific ends and means to pursue, thereby promoting diversity and pluralism. But current law withholds some of these tax benefits if a nonprofit engages in certain types of political speech. Legislators have also repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, sought to expand these political speech restrictions in various ways. And some commentators have proposed denying tax benefits to groups engaged in other types of disfavored speech, including hate speech and fake news. These latter proposals have recently become more prominent as additional facts come to light about the role of nonprofits in supporting white supremacy and in disseminating misleading information about COVID-19 treatments.

This Article explores the existing and proposed limitations on speech by tax-exempt nonprofits given the constitutional restrictions on such limitations and the policy justifications for existing nonprofit tax benefits. It explains why the existing limits on political campaign intervention and lobbying by charities are both justified given the subsidy provided to charities and their supporters under existing federal tax law and constitutional given existing and longstanding case law. It further concludes that any expansion of these limits on charities to cover other types of speech, including hate speech and fake news, would be inconsistent with the existing broad definitions of the purposes that charities can pursue as well as, in some circumstances, constitutionally suspect. It also concludes that limits on speech by non-charitable tax-exempt nonprofits, including the existing limit on political campaign intervention for some of these nonprofits, is both unwise as a policy matter and, in some circumstances, constitutionally suspect given the lack of a subsidy for such speech by these nonprofits.

• Commentator: Eugene Volokh (UCLA; Google Scholar)

Roger Paul Colinvaux (Catholic University),  Strings Are Attached: Placing a Spotlight on the Hidden Subsidy for Gift Restrictions, 56 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. __ (2023):

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Yale Hosts Symposium On The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, And Future

Yale hosts a symposium today on The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, And Future (registration):

The Lillian Goldman Law Library, with the generous support of the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, is pleased to announce its second legal information symposium: “The Legal Treatise: Past, Present, and Future,” scheduled to take place at Yale Law School on Friday, March 24, 2023. The papers presented at this event will be published as a special symposium issue of Law Library Journal. This symposium will examine the legal treatise as a source and genre through the lenses of history, authorship, identity, and transition. 

Welcome Remarks 

• Femi Cadmus (Librarian, Yale; Google Scholar) 
• Heather Gerken (Dean, Yale) 

Keynote Address 

• John Langbein (Yale), The Rise and Fall of Legal Academic Treatise Writing in the United States

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Saito Reviews Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions By Alm, Soled & DeLaney

This week, Blaine Saito (Northeastern; Google Scholar) reviews a new work by James Alm (Tulane; Google Scholar), Jay A. Soled (Rutgers; Google Scholar) & Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions, 84 Ohio St. L.J. __ (2023).

The tax gap is an enduring problem. We should raise quite a bit more revenue than is collected by the IRS. Efforts to address the tax gap usually focus on greater audits and enforcement as well as new reporting requirements. But these measures are facing increasing political pressure. One need only look to the vilification of the increase in IRS funding, something for which tax policy experts have long advocated, to see this problem. Given these constraints, what then can we do? James Alm, Jay A. Soled, and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas in their piece, Multibillion Dollar Tax Questions, 84 Ohio St. L.J. __ (2023), say that compliance may be improved by asking the right questions in the right way.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), ChatGPT Thinks I Am Way More Interesting Than I Am
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Dean Martinez's 10-Page Letter To The Stanford Community About The Disruption Of Judge Duncan's Speech
• Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed:  When a Professor Makes Obnoxious Remarks on Race and Culture, Is It a Matter of Academic Freedom?
• The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanford Law’s Diversity Dean Is ‘on Leave’ as Controversy Boils Over a Disrupted Speech
• Stuart Kyle Duncan (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit): Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• Bloomberg, Biden Reaches Moment of Truth for Electric Vehicle Tax Credits
• Bloomberg, Logging Into Zoom at the Beach Could Land You a Tax Bill
• Bloomberg, You’re Facing a Big Tax Bill If You Hold These Mutual Funds
• Center Square, Federal Legislation Hits Bankers Dumping Pre-Failure Stock With 100% Tax on Profits
• Fortune, U.S. Banks Are Sitting on $1.7 Trillion in Unrealized Losses. That’s Not a Problem—Until It Is

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DEI Dean Escalates Battle Against Dean; Stanford Law School's Sole Conservative Professor Weighs In

Following up on yesterday's post, Dean Martinez's 10-Page Letter To The Stanford Community About The Disruption Of Judge Duncan's Speech:  Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford, by Tirien Steinbach (Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Stanford):

Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments. Judge Duncan answered in turn. Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue. ...

My participation at the event with Judge Duncan has been widely discussed. I was asked to attend the event by the Federalist Society, the organizers of the student protest and the administration. My role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate.

As soon as Judge Duncan entered the room, a verbal sparring match began to take place between the judge and the protesters. By the time Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene, tempers in the room were heated on both sides.

I stepped up to the podium to deploy the de-escalation techniques in which I have been trained, which include getting the parties to look past conflict and see each other as people. My intention wasn’t to confront Judge Duncan or the protesters but to give voice to the students so that they could stop shouting and engage in respectful dialogue. I wanted Judge Duncan to understand why some students were protesting his presence on campus and for the students to understand why it was important that the judge be not only allowed but welcomed to speak. ...

At one point during the event, I asked Judge Duncan, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” I was referring to the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech: to consider not only the benefit of our words but also the consequences. It isn’t a rhetorical question. I believe that we would be better served by leaders who ask themselves, “Is the juice (what we are doing) worth the squeeze (the intended and unintended consequences and costs)?” I will certainly continue to ask this question myself. ...

Whenever and wherever we can, we must de-escalate the divisive discourse to have thoughtful conversations and find common ground. Free speech, academic freedom and work to advance diversity, equity and inclusion must coexist in a diverse, democratic society.

Diversity, equity and inclusion plans must have clear goals that lead to greater inclusion and belonging for all community members. How we strike a balance between free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion is worthy of serious, thoughtful and civil discussion. Free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion are means to an end, and one that I think many people can actually agree on: to live in a country with liberty and justice for all its people.

Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor, A Wake-Up Call From Stanford Law School:

It is no longer possible to ignore the rise of ideological intolerance or the damage that university diversity bureaucracies can do.

Michael W. McConnell (Stanford):

The disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s talk at Stanford Law School (“My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School,” op-ed, March 18) was a terrible event—terrible for the speaker, the students who wished to hear him and the law school’s environment as a place of civil discourse. But it was also a necessary wake-up call. Not only for Stanford, I hope, but for U.S. universities in general.

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Tuesday, March 28: Thomas J. Brennan (Harvard) will present Protean Capital Income Taxes (with Robert L. McDonald (Northwestern-Kellogg; Google Scholar)) as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact David Schizer. 

Tuesday, March 28: Shayak Sarkar (UC-Davis; Google Scholar) will present Internal Revenue’s External Borders as part of the Georgetown Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli.

Wednesday March 29: David Duff (Toronto) will present a paper as part of the Toronto James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Benjamin Alarie. 

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Pistone Presents The Implications Of Pillar II (Globe) For Developing Countries Today At Boston College

Pasquale Pistone (Visiting Professor, NYU; Academic Chairman, IBFD (The Netherlands); Professor of Tax Law, University of Salerno (Italy); Jean Monnet ad Personam Chair in European Tax Law & Policy, WU Vienna (Austria); Google Scholar) presents The Implications of Pillar II (Globe) for Developing Countries at Boston College today as part of its Tax Policy Workshops hosted by Jim Repetti: 

The desirable global tax governance goal of preventing the race to the bottom should not justify the bias that the Pillar II version of GloBE might in some cases to produce in favour of domestic over foreign investment. By neutralizing tax incentives in cross-border, but not in domestic situations, the GloBE top-up tax (IIR) puts developing countries, which mostly rely on foreign capital, at a systematic disadvantage when their tax incentives reduce corporation taxes below the global corporate minimum rate. This hidden collateral effect of GloBE might undermine the right of such countries to remain the masters of their international tax policy decisions and pursue their economic development without external interferences. For such reason, it might be questioned from the perspective of fairness and legitimacy. 

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Stark Presents Retrofitting Prop 13 Through The Personal Income Tax Today At Duke

Kirk J. Stark (UCLA) presents Retrofitting Prop 13 Through the Personal Income Tax at Duke today as part of its Tax Policy Seminar hosted by Lawrence Zelenak:

Under constitutional limitations on California’s local property tax introduced via Proposition 13 in June 1978, homeowners are generally taxed not on the fair market value of their homes but rather the property’s historic cost. As home prices rise over time, this “acquisition value” feature has two predictable effects: (1) it results in significant property tax disparities, favoring longtime homeowners relative to more recent purchasers, and (2) it discourages homeowners from moving because of the increased property tax burdens associated with purchasing a new home. Less widely recognized is the offsetting effect of a longstanding feature of California’s income tax: the deduction for local property taxes. By directing a larger subsidy to those with higher property taxes, this provision favors recent homebuyers facing market-value property taxes relative to longtime owners with constitutionally limited assessed valuations. It also mitigates to some degree Prop 13’s lock-in effect by reducing the effective property tax rate for those who purchase new homes.

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Dean Martinez's 10-Page Letter To The Stanford Community About The Disruption Of Judge Duncan's Speech

Update: 

• DEI Dean Escalates Battle Against Dean; Stanford Law School's Sole Conservative Professor Weighs In (Mar. 24, 2023)

Dean Jenny Martinez sent a 10-page letter to the Stanford community yesterday:

As my message to you last week indicated, I had hoped to wait until after final exams concluded at the end of this week to offer any further comments on the disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech at a student Federalist Society event on March 9, 2023, and the school’s response to that disruption. However, continuing outside attention to these events, as well as the volume of hateful and even threatening messages directed at members of our community, have led me to conclude that a more immediate statement is necessary.

As we consider the role of respectful treatment of members of our community, I want to be clear that the hate mail and appalling invective that have been directed at some of our students and law school administrators in the wake of March 9 are of great concern to me. All actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the law permits.

In the message below, I respond below to many of the questions I continue to receive about why I apologized to Judge Duncan, why I stand by that apology, and why the protest violated the university’s policy on disruption. I articulate how I believe our commitment to diversity and inclusion means that we must protect the expression of all views. And, I outline some of the steps the school will be taking in the wake of this incident, including the adoption of clearer protocols for managing disruptions and educational programming on free speech and norms of the legal profession.

This message is unusually lengthy; because we are a law school and these issues are core to our educational mission, I explain some of my reasoning in quite a bit more detail than I would for a general audience. I also recognize that what I share below will not please everyone. While some of you may disagree with my views, I look forward to continuing the conversation about how we can create a learning environment that both respects freedom of speech and ensures that we support all of our diverse community members on their path to becoming lawyers.

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Mayer: Nonprofits, Taxes, And Speech

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Nonprofits, Taxes, and Speech, 56 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. __ (2023):

Federal tax law is of two minds when it comes to speech by nonprofits. The tax benefits provided to nonprofits are justified in significant part because they provide nonprofits great discretion in choosing the specific ends and means to pursue, thereby promoting diversity and pluralism. But current law withholds some of these tax benefits if a nonprofit engages in certain types of political speech. Legislators have also repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, sought to expand these political speech restrictions in various ways. And some commentators have proposed denying tax benefits to groups engaged in other types of disfavored speech, including hate speech and fake news. These latter proposals have recently become more prominent as additional facts come to light about the role of nonprofits in supporting white supremacy and in disseminating misleading information about COVID-19 treatments.

This Article explores the existing and proposed limitations on speech by tax-exempt nonprofits given the constitutional restrictions on such limitations and the policy justifications for existing nonprofit tax benefits.

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Law School Deans See Through The U.S. News Rankings Bluster

William M. Treanor (Dean, Georgetown), U.S. News and World Report Has a New, Aggressive Defense of Its Rankings. Law School Deans Like Me See It for What It Is.:

Since 1987, U.S. News & World Report has been ranking law schools. While the law school rankings have been criticized for decades, this year more than 40 law schools have announced they will not participate, and earlier this month, representatives of more than 100 law schools attended a conference to discuss a solution, hosted by Harvard and Yale law schools (the first schools to pull out), and featuring Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

In anticipation of the Harvard-Yale conference, U.S. News, which had been relatively quiet in the face of past criticism, responded ferociously, running a full-page ad in the Boston Globe and a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending the ranking system. In the op-ed, U.S. News’ executive chairman and CEO Eric J. Gertler suggested that law schools were withdrawing from U.S. News because, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s possible invalidation of affirmative action in admissions, they want to be able to ignore grades and standardized test scores in admitting students, without suffering a drop in their U.S. News ranking.

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Taxing Nudity: State 'Pole Taxes' Violate The First Amendment

Alexander Volokh (Emory; Google Scholar), Taxing Nudity: Discriminatory Taxes, Secondary Effects, and Tiers of Scrutiny:

In recent years, states have passed “pole taxes,” i.e., taxes targeting nude dancing at adult entertainment establishments. Such taxes generally target establishments where alcohol is consumed, and the proceeds generally fund programs that benefit victims of sex crimes (or similar). Some of these taxes are “erotic-expression taxes” that specifically target sexual dance or other expressive conduct, while others are more general “nudity taxes” that are not defined by reference to expressive conduct.

State governments have defended such taxes against First Amendment attack on the theory that (1) such taxes combat negative secondary effects and (under Renton v. Playtime Theaters) should be analyzed under intermediate scrutiny as though they were content-neutral, and (2) such taxes survive intermediate scrutiny given sufficient evidence of the linkage between the establishments and the secondary effects.

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The Top 20 Law Schools Produce Fossil Fuel Lawyers 3X The Rate Of The Average Law School

Law Students For Climate Accountability, Fueling the Climate Crisis: Measuring T-20 participation in the Fossil Fuel Lawyer Pipeline:

On November 16, 2022, the Dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken made a shocking announcement: Yale Law School would be leaving the US News & World Report law school rankings. Many law schools shared her frustrations with the rankings that Gerken called "profoundly flawed," and more than 40 law schools have followed Yale's decision to exit the rankings.

With the dominant framework for law school rankings in decline, the question arises of how we can better evaluate law schools. One important metric is the impact that graduates are having on the greatest justice issues the world faces, including, most significantly, the climate crisis.

On this metric, the law schools that have typically been ranked highest are not performing the best-in fact, they tend to perform the worst. We find that T-20 law schools-the top 20-ranked schools in the US News rankings ­have produced fossil fuel lawyers at over three times the rate of the average US law school. T-20 schools have produced nearly half of all US fossil fuel lawyers in our dataset.

Our findings emphasize that prestige in the legal field, including the view promoted by the US News rankings, is far too often accorded to actors advancing injustice. The same law schools that sit at the top of the US News rankings serve as linchpins in the production of lawyers who help climate polluters avoid accountability, write the contracts for climate-destroying fossil fuel projects, and lobby against environmental regulations.

In this respect, the current rethinking of the law school ranking system could provide an opening for law schools, as it may reduce pressures to promote careers at fossil fuel-friendly corporate law firms. We hope they will take it.

The climate crisis threatens-and has already begun-to produce immense harms, with its harshest impacts falling on the Global South and, within the US, BIPOC and low-income communities. Lawyers can play a vital role in addressing the climate crisis, but many use their legal skills to advance extraction of and dependency on the primary cause of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. As LSCA's annual Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard shows, elite law firms conduct far more work to exacerbate the climate crisis than to address it.

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Lawsky Presents Coding The Code: Catala And Computationally Accessible Tax Law Today At Toronto

Sarah B. Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) presents Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 S.M.U. L. Rev. 535 (2022), at Toronto today as part of its James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series hosted by Benjamin Alarie:

This Article describes a new programming language, Catala, created by a team of computer scientists and lawyers. Catala provides a tractable and functional approach to coding U.S. tax law that offers a more transparent formalization and could potentially hold the government more accountable than the current patchwork of forms, worksheets, and secret programs.

While this Article describes a particular programming language, key characteristics of this particular language could generalize to other programming languages that formalize the law. First, Catala is a domain-specific programming language designed specifically for formalizing tax law. In particular, Catala is structured using default logic, a nonstandard logic that represents the underlying structure of the U.S. tax code more accurately than does standard logic. This structure makes the computer code easier to read, easier to create, and easier to modify when the law changes. Second, computer code is created in Catala using a well-known approach in the field of computer science (though rarely mentioned in legal literature) called “pair programming,” which, in this implementation, takes advantage of the knowledge of both lawyers and computer coders. 

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'Academic Freedom Has To Protect The Amy Waxes So It Can Be There To Protect The Galileos'

Following up on last week's post, New York Times, UPenn Accuses A Law Professor Of Racist Statements. Should She Be Fired?:  Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed:  When a Professor Makes Obnoxious Remarks on Race and Culture, Is It a Matter of Academic Freedom?, by Mona Charen:

University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax has no patience for victimhood complaints. Asked whether she considers mid-20th century British politician Enoch Powell (whose writing she assigned and who gained fame for his “rivers of blood” anti-immigration speech) was a racist, Wax was indignant.

“Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a racist? Where are we getting with that? Define racist. I have no idea what you mean. It is a bludgeon that is a promiscuous term. You define what a racist is, and I will spend two seconds addressing that question because it is sterile.”

And yet, Wax herself is competing for victim status by upping the ante on obnoxious public remarks and almost daring the law school at which she teaches to punish her. ...

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ChatGPT Thinks I Am Way More Interesting Than I Am

Write a bio of Pepperdine Caruso Law School Dean Paul Caron

Paul Caron is an American legal scholar and academic administrator who currently serves as the Dean of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. He was born in the United States and grew up in the Chicago area.

Caron graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Accountancy. He then went on to earn a law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

After law school, Caron worked as an attorney in the tax department of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City. He later joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he taught courses in tax law and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

In 2003, Caron joined the faculty of the University of San Diego School of Law, where he held the rank of Professor of Law and served as the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development. During his time at USD, Caron became well-known for his scholarship in tax law and his popular TaxProf Blog, which he founded in 2004.

In 2017, Caron was appointed as the 7th Dean of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. In this role, he has overseen significant changes at the law school, including the construction of a new campus in downtown Los Angeles and the creation of new programs in areas such as dispute resolution and entertainment, media, and sports law.

Throughout his career, Caron has been a prolific scholar and writer, with more than 50 published articles and book chapters to his credit. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field of tax law, and has been frequently cited in the national media on issues related to tax policy and reform.

Caron has also been active in the legal community, serving on the board of directors of the American Tax Policy Institute and as a member of the executive committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association. He has received numerous awards and honors for his scholarship and teaching, including the University of Cincinnati College of Law's Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the American Bar Association's Section of Taxation Distinguished Service Award.

In addition to his academic and professional accomplishments, Caron is also an accomplished musician and photographer. He has released several albums of original music and his photographs have been featured in exhibitions and publications around the world.

Can you guess the number of factual errors?

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WSJ: The Unraveling Of The U.S. News Rankings

Wall Street Journal, The Unraveling of the U.S. News College Rankings:

Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken floated the idea past a small circle of colleagues. She had a sleepless night and queasy morning. And then, on Nov. 16, she started the revolt.

“The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed,” Ms. Gerken said in a letter that day. And with that, Yale Law pulled out.

Within three months, more than 40 law schools—about 20% of the programs that U.S. News ranks—said they would also end their cooperation and no longer share data with the publication, including 12 of the top 14. A wave of medical schools, led by No. 1 Harvard Medical School, followed. At the undergraduate level, the Rhode Island School of Design (No. 3 among regional universities in the North) and Colorado College (No. 27 in the latest measure of national liberal-arts colleges) withdrew last month.

The rebellion, which has thrown into tumult the most famous source of college rankings for generations of would-be students, was decades in the making.

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Curtis & Avi-Yonah: Microsoft’s Cost-Sharing Arrangement — Frankenstein Strikes Again

Stephen L. Curtis (Cross Border Analytics) & Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), Microsoft’s Cost-Sharing Arrangement: Frankenstein Strikes Again, 178 Tax Notes Fed. 1433 (Mar. 6, 2023):

In this report, Curtis and Avi-Yonah break down Microsoft’s cost-sharing arrangement and explain how corporate taxpayers have been able to improperly exploit the cost-sharing regulations to shift hundreds of billions or even trillions in U.S. profits offshore with little or no IRS detection or enforcement.

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How Law Schools With Bar Pass Issues Can Get Their Rates Above 75%

ABA Journal, How Can Law Schools With History of Bar Pass Issues Get Their Rates Above 75%?:

The University of Dayton School of Law has an accomplishment many see as important—both its two-year and first-time bar pass rates are now above 75%. The law school’s two-year pass rate fell below 75% once, for the class of 2018. This year, the two-year pass rate (based on the class of 2020) is 97.06%, and the first-time pass rate is 75.58%. ...

Of the 19 existing law schools that at some point since 2020 had two-year bar pass rates below 75%, Dayton is one of six that has not received public notice of noncompliance. A chart with the data can be seen below. ...

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Wallace Presents Taxing Luxury Emissions Today At UC-San Francisco

Clinton G. Wallace (South Carolina; Google Scholar) presents Taxing Luxury Emissions, 106 Cornell L. Rev. __ (2023) (with Shelley Welton (Penn)) (reviewed by Tracey Roberts (Cumberland; Google Scholar) here) at UC-San Francisco today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Manoj Viswanathan:

A host of recent economic and sociological studies have documented the rising challenge of carbon inequality — that is, extreme class disparities in carbon emissions both within the United States and globally. These studies show an alarming divide, with the top 10% of emitters producing half of all emissions and the top 1% alone producing 17% of emissions, while the bottom 50% of the world produces only 10%. These disparities are driven by “luxury emissions” produced by the carbon-intensive lifestyles of the rich, which too often include private jets, mega-SUVs, yachts, and multiple mansions.

Climate change law has been slow to react to the reality of carbon emissions inequality — even as public and media outrage has mounted. Perhaps discouraged by decades of slow progress on both wealth redistribution and carbon consumption policy, policymakers and legal scholars have yet to put forward any serious proposals for how the law might, or should, account for class-based emissions disparities.

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2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings

U.S. News & World Report has announced that the new 2024 law school rankings will be publicly released on Tuesday, April 18 (law schools will receive an embargoed copy on Tuesday, April 11). Here is my coverage of the current 2023 law school rankings:

• Pepperdine’s Place In The 2023 U.S. News Law School Rankings (Mar. 29, 2022)
• Amanda Runyon (Pennsylvania), Leslie Street (William & Mary), & Amanda Watson (Houston), U.S. News Rankings Get it Right On Law Libraries (Mar. 31, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Tax Rankings (Mar. 30, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Business/Corporate Law Rankings (Mar. 31, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Clinical Training Rankings (Apr. 1, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Constitutional Law Rankings (Apr. 2, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Contracts/Commercial Law Rankings (Apr. 4, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Criminal Law Rankings (Apr. 5, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Dispute Resolution Rankings (Apr. 6, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Environmental Law Rankings (Apr. 7, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Health Care Law Rankings (Apr. 8, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Intellectual Property Law Rankings (Apr. 9, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News International Law Rankings (Apr. 11, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Legal Writing Rankings (Apr. 12, 2021)
• 2023 U.S. News Trial Advocacy Rankings (Apr. 13, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Omnibus Specialty Rankings (Apr. 14, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Omnibus Specialty Rankings v. Overall Rankings (Apr. 15, 2022)

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Taite Presents Welfare v Wealthfare: The Illusion Of Equity In Tax Policy Today At Georgetown

Phyllis Taite (Oklahoma City) presents Welfare v Wealthfare: The Illusion of Equity in Tax Policy at Georgetown today as part of its Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop hosted by Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli: 

Tax laws and policies may be perceived as race-neutral because race data is not used to determine tax liability. Similarly, the rate structure may be perceived as progressive because tax rates increase as income increases. Nonetheless, history has demonstrated that tax laws and policies are biased against race and class and the tax system is not effectively progressive. This article explores a few ways that perceptions of tax policy do not match the reality of tax laws and policy. 

This article will discuss how transfer taxes were implemented permanently to raise revenue and combat wealth concentration. Instead, the federal transfer tax system is no longer effective for either purpose, though both are essential to effectively addressing vast economic inequalities. Through various tax acts, tax policy has subsidized the wealthy, people who need no financial assistance, rather than combat wealth concentration.

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When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment On Sander And Steinbuch's 'Mismatch And Bar Passage'

Following up on Friday's post, Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought:  Sherod Thaxton (UCLA), When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's “Mismatch and Bar Passage”:

Mismatch theory—which posits that race-conscious admissions policies harm racial minorities by admitting students into challenging schools where they cannot succeed—has figured prominently in the debate over affirmative action during the last half century. The recent challenges to Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race as a factor in admissions decisions have argued, inter alia, that universities “can eliminate this harmful mismatch and allow students to excel at schools for which they are most prepared by eliminating the use of racial preferences.” The persistence of the idea of mismatch in both policy discussions and litigation is puzzling given that the empirical evidence in favor of mismatch is not only sparse, but has been deemed unreliable by the vast majority of analysts who have rigorously investigated the matter. In an effort to preserve the legal and political relevance of mismatch in light of these mounting critiques by many of the most prominent statisticians and social scientists in academia, proponents of mismatch posit that the limitations of available data hamper the precise measurement of key variables and that better data would reveal stronger support for mismatch.

Richard Sander and Robert Steinbuch’s “Mismatch and Bar Passage: A School-Specific Analysis” presents a statistical analysis of the “law school mismatch hypothesis” in an effort to explain racial differences in the likelihood of passing the bar examination on the first attempt.

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Blue J Predicts With 90% Confidence That Taxpayer In Podlucky Would Not Win Innocent Spouse Claim

Benjamin Alarie (Osler Chair in Business Law, University of Toronto; CEO, Blue J Legal),  Susan Massey (Director, Blue J Legal) & Christopher Yan (Senior Legal Research Associate, Blue J Legal), Relief of Innocent Spouses — Not So Podlucky, 178 Tax Notes Fed. 1339 (Feb. 27, 2023):

In this article, the authors use the Blue J machine-learning algorithm to examine Podlucky, an innocent spouse relief case recently decided by the Tax Court, demonstrating how useful artificial intelligence tools can be in calibrating the strengths and weaknesses of clients’ circumstances and predicting likely outcomes in similar cases.

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