Making Law Student Evaluations More Meaningful

LawProfBlawg (Anonymous Professor, Top 100 Law School), Making Student Evaluations More Meaningful:

Four years ago, I wrote a series of pieces about how student evaluations did not yield meaningful data. Worse, the data they did yield were used to disproportionately attack women and minorities. This should have come as no shock because all the evidence suggests that student evaluations are biased against women and minorities. It’s the circle of … well, something.

The literature suggests that teaching evaluations are deeply, deeply troubled measures of professor teaching skills. They ought to be done away with. But I’m not optimistic. Universities employ experts in using surveys. Yet they continue to use flawed ones. And as universities seek to measure more “stuff” regardless of the precision of those measures, student evaluations are here to stay. So, it’s worth a moment envisioning how to make them less troubling. ...

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• What Got Katherine Magbanua Convicted Of Dan Markel’s Murder? What's Next For Charlie Adelson?
• For 1st Time Since 2011, IRS Makes Mid-Year Adjustment In Standard Mileage Rate Due To Spike In Gas Prices; 62.5 Cents/Mile Is Up 11.6% From 2021
• After Submitting False Data To U.S. News For 9 Years, USC Ordered To Certify Accuracy Of Its Data In Future Rankings

Sunday:

• NY Times Op-Ed: Uvalde Needs Our Prayers
• NY Times Op-Ed: 400 Years Ago, They Would Be Witches. Today, They Can Be Your Spiritual Coach.
• Race, Immigration Law, And Christianity: Despair Or Hope?
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

NY Times Op-Ed: Uvalde Needs Our Prayers

New York Times Op-Ed:  Uvalde Needs Our Prayers, 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)):

HIn some ways, it felt like a thousand pastors’ meetings I’d been to before. Seventeen ministers from around a dozen churches met in a church fellowship hall on a Wednesday morning around white plastic folding tables. Men and women shook hands, hugged and sat down together. We went around the tables introducing ourselves.

But this was not an ordinary clergy meet-up. We sat less than two miles from Robb Elementary School, where the day before a gunman killed 19 children and 2 adults.

Together these pastors faced an impossible question: What do you do when you are charged with the spiritual care of a town confronting an incomprehensible horror? ...

Tony Gruben, the pastor of Baptist Temple Church and leader of the meeting, found out about the mass shooting as it was happening. He was about an hour and a half from Uvalde, running errands. One of his church members, who is also his close friend, is the school counselor at Robb. She texted him: “Please pray. In lock down. Shooter on campus.” He didn’t text back, worried a text ping might alert an intruder if she was hiding.

A little while later, he got a call from Uvalde’s mayor. The phone connection was weak and broke up, but Gruben heard enough to know things were really bad and that he should hurry back to town. He spent the night alongside another pastor counseling families and, as he said, “helping the helpers,” by offering what he called the “ministry of presence and prayer” to law enforcement officers, town leaders and teachers at Robb. Like every other local pastor I spoke with, he didn’t get home until around midnight.

The Guardian recently summed up “thoughts and prayers” as “obfuscation and inaction.” After the Uvalde shooting, the National Parents Union called for policy changes and “more than thoughts and prayers.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been criticized for saying that he was “lifting up in prayer” children and families in Uvalde, while also taking large contributions from the NRA.

But as that debate raged online and in the broader culture, these pastors in Uvalde turned to prayer to help people respond to this tragedy. ...

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NY Times Op-Ed: 400 Years Ago, They Would Be Witches. Today, They Can Be Your Spiritual Coach.

New York Times Op-Ed:  400 Years Ago, They Would Be Witches. Today, They Can Be Your Coach., by Molly Worthen (North Carolina):

[A] spiritual coach [is] a relatively new occupation that is dominated by women and appears to be growing, although hard numbers are elusive (to further confuse things, some practitioners refer to themselves as business coaches, albeit ones with a generous helping of New Age ritual on the side). At a time when more and more Americans call themselves spiritual but not religious, these coaches give us a glimpse of the allure and the hazards of 21st-century D.I.Y. religion.

Spiritual coaches are a new chapter in the long history of female religious entrepreneurship in America — a tradition that runs from Boston in the 1630s, when Anne Hutchinson’s packed religious meetings outraged Puritan ministers, to today’s evangelical conference circuit, dominated by demure yet forceful female evangelists who are not ordained but whose books and podcasts constitute major media empires. By blending eclectic religious practices with the gospel of entrepreneurship, spiritual coaches pitch their clients (who, like the coaches, are mostly women) the things that religion has always promised. They offer a path to meaning in the midst of suffering and tools to recover a sense of agency in a world that flings us around by our heels. ...

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Race, Immigration Law, And Christianity: Despair Or Hope?

Jennifer Lee Koh (Pepperdine), Race, Immigration Law, and Christianity: Reflections and Tensions Raised by United States v. Wong Kim Ark:, 23 Pol. Theology ___ (2022):

In 1898, the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil. The case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, involved the son of Chinese immigrants who was born in and had spent the vast majority of his life in the U.S. Immigration officials denied his claim to citizenship when he attempted to return to the country after a trip to China. Its direct legal holding—that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right—continues to have salience for immigration law debates and discourse today.

This Essay, written for a joint symposium between the Journal of Law and Religion and Political Theology on Wong Kim Ark and James Baldwin’s 1955 essay, Equal in Paris, reflects upon several themes—and tensions—present in the case and echoed in contemporary society. The Essay first explores the influence of race in the development of immigration law, along with the simultaneous discomfort with race as a basis for legal rights and remedies. The second theme, raised by Wong Kim Ark’s holding and subsequent history, is the necessity and shortcomings of law as a source of protection, particularly in the context of bureaucratic systems with the power to incarcerate. Finally, the conclusion briefly highlights ways in which Christianity might serve as a source of both despair and hope for the future.

IV. Christianity in America as a Source of Despair and Hope
The Wong Kim Ark decision is now over one hundred years old and stands for a relatively simple legal assertion about birthright citizenship. But the decision, along with the historical context and personal experience of Wong, offers various moments of resonance with contemporary conversations around similar themes present in the case: citizenship, belonging, formal law, actual practice, and the impact of incarceration on the value of the self. What if any relevance does Christianity in the US have on these themes? I suggest here that Christianity can serve as either a source of despair or of hope, depending on one’s perspective and which aspects of American Christianity receive emphasis.

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The Top Five New Tax Papers

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

1. [459 Downloads]  Taxing Robots, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds; Google Scholar) & Maria Amparo Grau Ruiz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Google Scholar)
2. [421 Downloads]  A Matter of High Interest: How a Quiet Change to an Actuarial Assumption Turbocharges the Life Insurance Tax Shelter, by Andrew Granato (J.D.|Ph.D., Yale; Google Scholar)
3. [364 Downloads]  Taxation and the Knowledge Economy, by Alan Kirkpatrick (Bournemouth) & Anne Fairpo (Bournemouth)
4. [322 Downloads]  Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, by Steven Dean (Brooklyn)
5. [297 Downloads]  Tax Neutrality Regimes and GloBE, by Leopoldo Parada (Leeds; Google Scholar)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Joshua Doležal), The Big Quit: Even Tenure-Line Professors Are Leaving Academe. 'Why Would I Want To Improve Faculty Morale? I Want These People To Leave.'
2. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Taxpayer Held To His Word(s) Regarding Alimony
3. Jonathan Turley (George Washington) & Eugene Volokh (UCLA), More On Ilya Shapiro And Georgetown Law School
4. Tallahassee Democrat, With Katherine Magbanua's Conviction In Dan Markel's Murder, Prosecutors Set Their Sights On Charlie Adelson
5. Bloomberg, IRS Dangles Telework To Lure Workers To Beleaguered Agency
6. Letter From Ilya Shapiro to William Treanor (Dean, Georgetown), 'Dumb Tweets For Me, But Not For Thee' 
7. Wall Street Journal Editorial, The Georgetown Law School Purge
8. Tallahassee Democrat Op-Ed (Jason Solomon), The Hired Help Are All Convicted In Dan Markel's Murder. Let Retributive Justice For The Narcissist Adelson Family Begin.
9. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates The Class Of 2022
10. Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Size Matters: Why Harvard Law Is Less Woke Than Yale Law

What Got Katherine Magbanua Convicted Of Dan Markel’s Murder? What's Next For Charlie Adelson?

Tallahassee Democrat, What Got Katherine Magbanua Convicted of Dan Markel’s Murder? Here’s What Her Lawyer Said:

There was evidence against convicted murderer Katherine Magbanua that was hard to overcome as jurors weighed her role in the murder of acclaimed Florida State law professor Dan Markel, one of her attorneys said Friday.

In an exclusive interview a week after the highly-anticipated trial ended, Miami defense attorney Chris DeCoste commented on the verdict, the evidence he believes the jury keyed in on, and what’s next for his client of six years. ...

Magbanua attorney says Dolce Vita tape pivotal in verdict
On the stand, Magbanua struggled to explain to jurors how she came into more than $100,000 in extra money in the years immediately following Markel’s brutal murder. A secret FBI recording of her and a prime suspect — Markel’s ex brother-in-law Charlie Adelson — that left the impression the two were discussing the murder was a focal point for jurors. ...

Magbanua testified she was innocent, but stumbled in her explanations
Magbanua told jurors she wanted them to hear the truth from her, but instead she delivered a disjointed account of her life in the years around Markel’s murder. Her relationship with Garcia was rocky when she started dating Markel’s talkative former brother-in-law Charlie Adelson, who is accused of orchestrating and financing the hit. ...

One co-conspirator testified, one didn't
Magbanua’s attorneys consistently told jurors they couldn’t trust Luis Rivera’s testimony. ... But the one man who could definitively say whether Magbanua was involved — or not — did not take the stand. Garcia, who was convicted of Markel's murder in 2019, refused to testify on behalf of the mother of his children. ...

What does this mean for Charlie Adelson?

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For 1st Time Since 2011, IRS Makes Mid-Year Adjustment In Standard Mileage Rate Due To Spike In Gas Prices; 62.5¢/Mile Is Up 11.6% From 2021

IR-2022-124, IRS Increases Mileage Rate For Remainder of 2022:

The Internal Revenue Service today announced an increase in the optional standard mileage rate for the final 6 months of 2022. Taxpayers may use the optional standard mileage rates to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business and certain other purposes.

For the final 6 months of 2022, the standard mileage rate for business travel will be 62.5 cents per mile, up 4 cents from the rate effective at the start of the year. The new rate for deductible medical or moving expenses (available for active-duty members of the military) will be 22 cents for the remainder of 2022, up 4 cents from the rate effective at the start of 2022. These new rates become effective July 1, 2022. The IRS provided legal guidance on the new rates in Announcement 2022-13, issued today.

In recognition of recent gasoline price increases, the IRS made this special adjustment for the final months of 2022. The IRS normally updates the mileage rates once a year in the fall for the next calendar year. For travel from Jan. 1 through June 30, 2022, taxpayers should use the rates set forth in Notice 2022-03.

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After Submitting False Data To U.S. News For 9 Years, USC Ordered To Certify Accuracy Of Its Data In Future Rankings

Following up on my previous posts:

• USC Pulls Ed School Out Of U.S. News Graduate School Rankings; Jones Day Is Investigating 5 Years Of Inaccurate Data (Mar. 24, 2022)
• Jones Day Finds USC Dean Intentionally Reported False Data To U.S. News To Goose Its Ranking (Apr. 30, 2022)

Robert Morse (Chief Data Strategist, U.S. News), U.S. News Responds to University of Southern California Education School on Misreporting (June 7, 2022):

U.S. News & World Report has recently been informed by the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education that "for several years, USC Rossier had been inaccurately reporting data on research and student enrollment to USNWR."

U.S. News is reviewing the various disclosures made by the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education with respect to this misreporting, which are included in the recently published investigative report by the law firm Jones Day.

The Jones Day report said, "From at least 2013 to 2021, the School misreported data to US News about the selectivity of its doctoral programs." In addition the report said, "While this investigation focused on the School’s reporting of doctoral selectivity metrics, Jones Day confirmed during the course of the investigation the existence of irregularities in the School’s calculation and reporting of research expenditures, and identified other potential data misreporting issues, such as issues relating to the exclusion of online EdD programs, the designation of EdD students as part-time, certain faculty-related metrics, and the School’s reporting of teacher job placement and retention statistics."

In light of these findings, U.S. News will require the Rossier School of Education’s dean or top academic, the University of Southern California's president and the Chair of USC’s Board of Trustees to provide a letter certifying the accuracy of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education's data submissions to U.S. News for the next three ranking cycles in order to be included in the rankings. ...

Click here to read the letter U.S. News sent to University of Southern California.

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For First Time Since 2011, IRS Makes Mid-Year Adjustment In Standard Mileage Rate Due To Spike In Gas Prices; 62.5 Cents Per Mile Is Up 11.6% From 2021

IR-2022-124, IRS Increases Mileage Rate For Remainder of 2022:

The Internal Revenue Service today announced an increase in the optional standard mileage rate for the final 6 months of 2022. Taxpayers may use the optional standard mileage rates to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business and certain other purposes.

For the final 6 months of 2022, the standard mileage rate for business travel will be 62.5 cents per mile, up 4 cents from the rate effective at the start of the year. The new rate for deductible medical or moving expenses (available for active-duty members of the military) will be 22 cents for the remainder of 2022, up 4 cents from the rate effective at the start of 2022. These new rates become effective July 1, 2022. The IRS provided legal guidance on the new rates in Announcement 2022-13, issued today.

In recognition of recent gasoline price increases, the IRS made this special adjustment for the final months of 2022. The IRS normally updates the mileage rates once a year in the fall for the next calendar year. For travel from Jan. 1 through June 30, 2022, taxpayers should use the rates set forth in Notice 2022-03.

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Layser Reviews Appleby's State Exit Taxes

This week, Michelle Layser (Illinois; moving to San Diego; Google Scholar) reviews Andrew Appleby (Stetson; Google Scholar), No Migration Without Taxation: State Exit Taxes, 60 Harv. J. on Legis. ___ (2023).

In recent years, U.S. individuals and businesses have tended to move “from cold, high-tax northern states to warm, low-tax southern and southwestern states” (CNBC). These migration patterns have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the work environment has shifted to remote settings, and “[m]ost experts expect more people and businesses will choose to locate where they can pay lower taxes.” (CNBC). When wealthy taxpayers and large businesses leave a state, they take income with them, eroding the state’s tax base. To fight these trends, states have traditionally engaged in tax competition to attract and retain wealthy taxpayers and businesses. A large body of research, including my ownforthcoming article (Overcoming Constitutional (And Political) Barriers to State Place-Based Tax Incentive Reform, 170 U. Pa. L. Rev. ___ (2022)), focuses on how states use tax incentives to discourage out-migration and encourage in-migration. In his forthcoming article, Professor Andrew Appleby focuses on another strategy states can use to fight out-migration: exit taxes.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal, After Repeat Failures to Meet Bar Pass Standard, ABA Gives Cooley Law School Extension
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates The Class Of 2022
• Katie Eyer (Rutgers), Am I Disabled? Disability Identity and Law Faculty
• Letter From Ilya Shapiro to William Treanor (Dean, Georgetown), 'Dumb Tweets For Me, But Not For Thee' 
• Roundup, Legal Ed News Roundup
• Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Size Matters: Why Harvard Law Is Less Woke Than Yale Law
• Carole Silver (Northwestern) & Swethaa Ballakrishnen (UC-Irvine), Where Do We Go From Here? International Students, Post-Pandemic Law Schools, and the Possibilities of Universal Design
• Brian Soucek (UC-Davis), How to Protect DEI Requirements From Legal Peril

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• American Progress, The Millionaire Surcharge Would Improve the Fairness of the Tax Code
• Bloomberg, Biden’s FY 2023 Budget Would Result in $4 Trillion of Gross Revenue Increases
• Bloomberg, EBay Sellers Face 1099-K Tax Headache Under New IRS Rule
• Bloomberg, Yellen Touts Stalled IRS Funding Boost as Deficit Reduction Tool
• Common Dreams, Demand Grows for Windfall Profits Tax as Goldman Sachs Predicts More Gas Pump Pain

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More On Ilya Shapiro And Georgetown Law School

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Eugene Volokh (UCLA), What Are Georgetown Professors Forbidden to Say?:

[ W]hatever you might think about what happened to Shapiro, this incident also produced a report from the IDEAA office that deals with all of Georgetown, not just the law school. (I've received a copy, on condition that I can quote it but can't post it.) And this tells us about much more than just the Shapiro incident: It gives us a good sense about what all Georgetown professors are, at least ostensibly, forbidden from saying. I'd like to use this post to explore that. ...

It doesn't matter whether you care about Ilya Shapiro's career. The important thing here, I think, is just how much speech is now in peril, going forward, for Georgetown professors generally (especially ones who lack tenure, but even the tenured ones).

Jonathan Turley (George Washington), Shapiro Resigns From Georgetown After the Law School Reinstates Him on a “Technicality”:

Shapiro has elected to leave Georgetown to take a position with the Manhattan Institute given the lack of support for his right to speak freely at the law school. Unfortunately, most schools want to avoid litigation (and the controversy) over terminating dissenting faculty. The preference is to make life on faculties so hostile or intolerable that faculty will simply resign. ...

The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination. This includes blocking academics from speaking on campuses like a recent Classics professor due to their political views. Conservatives and libertarians understand that they have no cushion or protection in any controversy, even if it involves a single, later deleted tweet. ...

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Brown Reviews Maynard's Biden’s Gambit: Advancing Racial Equity While Relying On A Race-Neutral Tax Code

Dorothy Brown (Emory; moving to Georgetown), The Biden Administration's Racial Equity Challenges (JOTWELL) (reviewing Goldburn P. Maynard Jr. (Kelley School of Business, Indianal (Goolgle Scholar), Biden’s Gambit: Advancing Racial Equity While Relying on a Race-Neutral Tax Code, 131 Yale L.J. Forum 656 (2022)):

Professor Goldburn Maynard’s excellent Essay: Biden’s Gambit: Advancing Racial Equity While Relying on a Race-Neutral Tax Code, analyzes the Biden’s Administrations efforts to advance racial equity through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) enacted by Congress and signed into law on March 11, 2021.

Professor Maynard wryly observes that “[w]ith courts standing in the way, [racial equity] must be promoted in a neutral, indirect way that ignores systemic discrimination.” (P. 679.) Perhaps however it is the Biden Administration that should bear some responsibility for not engaging in better fact finding to prove its legislative scheme was narrowly tailored. Nevertheless, Professor Maynard’s conclusion is more than supported by constitutional precedent. Ultimately, Professor Maynard believes what is needed is “both targeted and universal programs to tackle inequality.” (P. 686.)

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WSJ: The Five Most Dreaded Words At The Office — ‘Let’s Start a Google Doc’

Wall Street Journal, The Five Most Dreaded Words at the Office: ‘Let’s Start a Google Doc’:

Shared documents are a workplace minefield of performance anxiety and awkward interactions.

More than three billion people use Google Workspace products like Docs and Sheets, according to the company. Many of them seem to dread it.

The workplace ritual tends to go something like this: You’re minding your own business, trying to write a proposal or plug numbers into Google Sheets, when the mood shifts. A small circle materializes near the top of the screen. The avatar belongs to a colleague, or worse, your boss. The discomfort can be heightened by the appearance of any number of anonymous animals, which Google auto-assigns to people who open a Doc without being signed into their account: anteater, wombat, quokka.

The cursor starts flashing. Questions abound: What are this person’s intentions? Will they scroll down far enough to see the garbled notes at the bottom that you haven’t deleted? Why on earth are they online at 1 a.m. on a Saturday? And what is a quokka? ...

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Hasen: Forget (Arguing About) Redistribution

David Hasen (Florida; Google Scholar), Forget (Arguing About) Redistribution, 29 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol'y 41 (2021):

Reformers often argue that the benefits of ameliorating inequality are worth the cost in higher tax rates and reduced economic efficiency that redistributive social policy supposedly requires. This paper suggests that these arguments are mostly misplaced. Focusing solely on the marginal benefit of government- versus private-sector spending, there is ample reason to conclude that many governmental expenditures directed to reducing inequality are independently justifiable on the basis that they increase efficiency and, over time, more than pay for themselves. Because the efficiency argument directly addresses concerns that might otherwise counsel restraint in redistributive programs, treating the reduction of inequality as a worthwhile tradeoff against efficiency or higher tax rates is mostly counterproductive from a social policy perspective. In fact, the failure to adopt or enhance many spending programs itself represents a form of upward redistribution as measured from a baseline of social wealth maximization. This redistribution is difficult or impossible to justify from either a welfarist perspective or a libertarian one

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Augmented Lawyering

John Armour (Oxford; Google Scholar), Richard Parnham (Oxford) & Mari Sako (Oxford; Google Scholar), Augmented Lawyering, 2022 U. Ill. L. Rev. 71:

How will artificial intelligence (AI) and associated digital technologies reshape the work of lawyers and structure of law firms? Legal services are traditionally provided by highly-skilled humans — that is, lawyers. Dramatic recent progress in AI has triggered speculation about the extent to which automated systems may come to replace humans in legal services. A related debate is whether the legal profession’s adherence to the partnership form inhibits capital-raising necessary to invest in new technology. This Article presents what is to our knowledge the most comprehensive empirical study yet conducted into the implementation of AI in legal services, encompassing interview-based case studies and survey data. We focus on two inter-related issues: how the nature of legal services work will change, and how the firms that co-ordinate this work will be organized. A central theme is that prior debate focusing on the “human vs technology” aspect of change overlooks the way in which technology is transforming the human dimensions of legal services.

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Con Or Constitutional: An Analysis Of The 'Net Worth' Wealth Tax

Brian Fletcher, Con or Constitutional: An Analysis of the "Net Worth" Wealth Tax, 54 Creighton L. Rev. 87 (2020):

This Article is an in-depth analysis of the wealth tax proposals presented by former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to determine if their proposals could be considered constitutional. As both plans propose a wealth tax based on “net worth,” this Article attempts to determine how a court or the tax code would most likely define this essential term for tax purposes. The proposals are then compared, in the context of United States legal history, to historically constitutional and unconstitutional federal taxes. 

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Where Do We Go From Here? International Students, Post-Pandemic Law Schools, And The Possibilities Of Universal Design

Carole Silver (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Swethaa Ballakrishnen (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Where Do We Go From Here? International Students, Post-Pandemic Law Schools, and the Possibilities of Universal Design, 8 CJCCL 313 (2022):

Following on our earlier research on the experiences of international students, this article uses the recent global pandemic as a revealing lens to revisit structural inequalities in American law schools. Over the years, law schools have simultaneously encouraged international student enrollment and functioned in ways that have marginalized these students. We suggest that this dissonance between postured inclusion and the actual experience of exclusion these students endure highlights important ways in which law schools’ commitments to equity and inclusion more generally can appear more performative than substantial. We argue that the pandemic has made stark inequalities that have always existed, and that despite its devastating consequences, this period offers new insights that could help reshape the future of legal education.

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Taxation Of Long-Term Unemployment In The Digital Economy

Limor Riza (Ono Academic College; Google Scholar), Taxation of Long-term Unemployment in the Digital Economy: Facing the Twenty-First Century Challenges, 70 Cath.U. L. Rev. 421 (2021):

The article examines the policy of taxing long-term unemployment. We claim that tax systems should not tax the unemployed regardless of whether they reenter the labor market. Unemployment is a socioeconomic problem. The fear of expanding unemployment increases due to COVID-19 that shut down large sectors of the economy for a long period and also due to the digital economy. As early as the 1930s, Keynes expressed his fear of the economic challenges his grandchildren's generation would face, coining the term "technological unemployment." Several contemporary economists substantiate this fear by showing that some occupations are bound to disappear. Unemployment insurance is part of social law aimed at granting financial security during unemployment. This article focuses on security benefits paid out of unemployment insurance programs to unemployed who become chronically so. In many countries it is common to tax unemployment benefits, but tax laws do not distinguish between short-and long-term unemployed taxpayers.

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Am I Disabled? Disability Identity And Law Faculty

Katie R. Eyer (Rutgers; Google Scholar), Am I Disabled? Disability Identity and Law Faculty, 71 J. Legal Educ. __ (2022):

This short Essay addresses the dilemmas of disability self-identification from the perspective of those who are ambiguously disabled, and calls on greater numbers of law faculty to situate themselves within, rather than outside, the disability community.

Conclusion
We have a long way to go before our law schools, and the wider legal profession, can be a truly welcoming space for people with disabilities. Currently, the best many law students with disabilities can hope for is for their accommodations to be smoothly granted, to find a few understanding professor allies, and, if they are lucky, to find community with other disabled law students. Casual bias, lower expectations, and struggles over accessibility remain a routine part of many law students’ law school experience. Out in the legal profession, those with visible disabilities are likely to face explicit bias in hiring, even as law firms purport to include disability among the categories of diversity that they value. And both within law schools and without, those with disabilities are likely to find that the structural norms of the profession celebrate exclusionary rituals of physical and mental stamina rather than value the strength and diversity of perspectives that those with nonnormative minds and bodies may bring.

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Blank: Presidential Tax Transparency

Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Presidential Tax Transparency, 40 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 1 (2021):

Whether the public should have access to the tax returns of the President of the United States, and those who seek the office, is the focus of acute attention and debate. President Donald Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns throughout his campaigns and presidency has fueled multiple legislative public disclosure proposals. In March 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation as part of the For the People Act of 2021 that would require Presidents, Vice Presidents, and nominees to publicly disclose several years of their tax returns through the Federal Election Commission. Many state legislatures have considered similar requirements for candidates who seek to appear on state primary and general election ballots. Proponents of these measures argue that public disclosure of tax returns could expose conflicts of interest, reveal the President’s and candidates’ annual tax liability and tax rates, and, most importantly, enable the public to observe whether the President or candidates have engaged in tax evasion, pursued tax shelters and other tax avoidance, and participated in audits or tax controversies with the IRS.

This Article intervenes in the disclosure debate by exploring whether, and to what extent, mandatory public disclosure of tax returns would achieve the policy objective of enabling voters to observe candidates’ and elected officials’ compliance with the tax law.

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Inoculating The Next Generation Of Lawyers: Mandating Substance Use And Mental Health Education For Law Students

Janet E. Stearns (Miami), Inoculating the Next Generation of Lawyers: Mandating Substance Use and Mental Health Education for Law Students, 61 U. Louisville L. Rev. __ (2022):

This articles reviews some of the major approaches for mandating an educational requirement for substance use and mental health education (SUMH) for law students, reviews some of the commonly used textbooks for Professional Responsibility and how they approach SUMH, and finally makes recommendations on best practices for SUMH education.

Conclusion
This article reflects my passionate commitment that law students would benefit from some fundamental and dedicated education around substance use and mental health challenges. This would alleviate and normalize some of the well-documented experiences that students have in law school, and also better prepare them for law practice following graduation. Addressing these issues are core elements of professional identity and deserve focused attention during the law school experience. In a perfect world, this would include (1) pre-orientation/orientation foundation, possibly in the form of an online module; (2) incorporating these topics into all required PR classes; (3) ensuring that all professional identity touchpoints have information on essential resources around SUMH including the LAPs in each jurisdiction; (4) some end of study certification to the bar or MPRE testing to signal the core importance of these topics.

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Estate And Gift Tax Valuation Of Cannabis Business Interests

Jonathan G. Blattmachr (Milbank), Bridget J. Crawford (Pace; Google Scholar) & Mitchell M. Gans (Hofstra), Estate and Gift Tax Valuation of Cannabis Business Interests, 161 Tr. & Est. 22 (Jan. 2022):

Approximately half of all American adults have used cannabis at some point in their lives. Whether or not any one estate planning professional falls into this particular demographic, it is crucial for all advisors understand the estate planning uncertainties and complexities facing owners of legal cannabis businesses. Eighteen states have legalized cannabis for adult recreational use; thirty-seven states have legalized the medicinal use of cannabis (often in conjunction with permitting adult recreational uses). Experts estimate that legal recreational sales in the United States were $18.9 billion in 2021 and that, by 2026, sales in the United States alone will reach $41.8 billion or more. As the legal cannabis industry expands, estate planners are more likely to have clients who own interests in legal cannabis businesses. After providing a brief introduction to the important federal banking and income tax limitations on cannabis businesses, this article turns to the more complex—and unpredictable—issue of how interests in legal cannabis businesses should be valued for estate and gift tax purposes.

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Despite 3 Years Of Noncompliance With 75% Bar Passage Accreditation Standard, ABA Grants Western Michigan 3-Year Extension Of Time To Achieve Compliance

Despite not meeting ABA Accreditation Standard 316 ("At least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates in a calendar year who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their date of graduation") in 2020 (66.0%), 2021 (62.3%), and 2022 (59.5%), the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar granted Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School's request for a three-year extension to achieve compliance.

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NY Times: The Global Minimum Tax Deal Is In Trouble

New York Times, The Global Minimum Tax Deal Is In Trouble:

What economists hailed as the most ambitious tax overhaul in a century is now mired in a toxic mix of fine print and political paralysis.

It was only last fall that more than 130 nations signed on to an agreement to eliminate the world’s tax havens and enact a global minimum tax. The agreement was designed to increase taxes substantially on many large corporations and to end an international fight over how technology companies are taxed. Its architects said it would end the global “race to the bottom” for corporate tax rates.

But legislators in both the U.S. and Europe are now struggling to pass the laws needed to make good on the promises embedded in the deal. And no tax changes are likely to pass on their own, without the more politically popular spending programs also passing.

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WSJ: The Georgetown Law School Purge

Following up on yesterday's post, Ilya Shapiro Quits Georgetown Law: 'Dumb Tweets For Me, But Not For Thee':  Wall Street Journal Editorial, The Georgetown Law School Purge:

Ilya Shapiro resigns as the woke mob sets him up for dismissal.

Optimists have opined that America has reached “peak woke” as a backlash against it grows. Think again, as the experience of Ilya Shapiro demonstrates.

Nearby Mr. Shapiro describes his treatment at the hands of Georgetown University Law School, which had hired him to be the executive director of its Constitution Center. Mr. Shapiro is a libertarian-minded legal scholar who sometimes writes for these pages. Georgetown, like most law schools, is dominated by progressives, often of the intolerant and vindictive variety.

But Mr. Shapiro was encouraged by dean William Treanor and the school’s Speech and Expression Policy, which promises to defend dissenting voices on campus. His painful education has been discovering that some speech is more protected than others. ...

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Bearer-Friend: Tax Without Cash

Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington; Google Scholar), Tax Without Cash, 106 Minn. L. Rev. 953 (2021):

This Article documents and evaluates tax obligations paid without cash, referred to as “in-kind tax paying.” Such forms of tax paying include paying federal income taxes by remitting a used flatbed truck to the IRS, paying local property taxes by working a few hours a month answering phones at city hall, and paying state excise taxes by conveying a proportion of all seashells farmed within a state to that state. These are not just hypotheticals, but forms of in-kind tax paying that occur in the United States throughout periods when many taxes are also paid in cash. Nevertheless, despite its long history and prevalence, in-kind tax paying has been underexplored as a viable, and potentially appealing, form of tax remittance.

By providing an original taxonomy of in-kind tax paying within a cash economy, this Article makes three contributions. 

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Chronicle Of Higher Education Debate: The Constitutionality Of Required Faculty Diversity Statements

Following up on last month's post, Brian Soucek (UC-Davis; Google Scholar), The Constitutionality Of Required Faculty Diversity Statements (55 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 101 (2022)): 

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  How to Protect DEI Requirements From Legal Peril, by Brian Soucek:

More and more universities ask or require faculty to describe their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion when they apply for jobs, tenure, or advancement. All 10 campuses of the University of California, where I work, now ask for diversity statements, and the University of Illinois made headlines last month when it adopted a similar rule. As the mandates multiply, critics allege that they are a bad idea or, even worse, unconstitutional.

I’ll leave it to others to decide whether diversity statements are effective at promoting a more diverse faculty or a more equitable and inclusive learning environment. But as a law professor and former chair of the University of California’s systemwide academic freedom committee, I can say this: Mandatory diversity statements are constitutional — at least if they are done the right way.

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  Diversity Statements Are Still in Legal Peril, by Brian Leiter (Chicago; Google Scholar):

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Sanchirico: Should A Global Minimum Tax Be Country-By-Country?

Chris William Sanchirico (Penn; Google Scholar), Should a Global Minimum Tax be Country-by-country?: 

The OECD has proposed implementing a global minimum tax, and the US already has in place one version of such a regime in the form of GILTI. A key design choice in the imposition of a global minimum tax is whether the minimum should be tested on a country-by-country basis or on the basis of an MNE's global average tax rate. The consensus view appears to be that a country-by-country approach is superior because, first, it raises more revenue and, second, it is more effecting at controlling harmful tax competition. This paper challenges those assertions. It presents a simple game-theoretic analysis suggesting that a global averaging approach is superior in both respects.

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Ilya Shapiro Quits Georgetown Law: 'Dumb Tweets For Me, But Not For Thee'

Following up on Friday's post, Georgetown Law School Reinstates Ilya Shapiro Following Four Month Investigation Into Justice Jackson Tweet:

Letter From Ilya Shapiro to William M. Treanor (Dean, Georgetown) (June 6, 2022):

After full consideration of the report of the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action (“IDEAA Report”), and upon consultation with counsel, family, and trusted advisers, it has become apparent that my remaining at Georgetown has become untenable. Although I celebrated my “technical victory” in the Wall Street Journal, further analysis shows that you’ve made it impossible for me to fulfill the duties of my appointed post. You cleared me on a jurisdictional technicality, but the IDEAA Report—and your own statements to the Law Center community—implicitly repealed Georgetown’s vaunted Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy.

You told me when we met last week that you want me to be successful in my new role and that you will “have my back.” But instead, you’ve painted a target on my back such that I could never do the job I was hired for, advancing the mission of the Center for the Constitution.

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Keith Fogg To Retire As Harvard's Tax Clinic Director

Law360, This Change Could Ease Filing Burden, Retiring Tax Prof. Says:

As Harvard tax clinic director, Fogg has seen or done most of what there is to see and do in tax law over his career. He's seen a lot of the U.S., too — he biked from California to Florida a couple of years ago while on sabbatical — and is looking forward to doing some international travel once he retires from the Harvard Federal Tax Clinic this summer.

As that date approaches, [T. Keith] Fogg took the time to speak with Law360 about his career, challenges facing the IRS and the outlook for the future of tax policy.

Prepopulating tax returns is one policy change that would help people save money and stay compliant, as tax filing can get complicated for folks who work several jobs or have multiple bank or brokerage accounts, Fogg said.

Taxpayers spend around $300 billion annually to file their tax returns, according to a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that more than two-fifths of returns could be accurately prepopulated and that such a system could reduce the tax gap [Lucas Goodman (Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department), Katherine Lim (Federal Reserve Bank, Minneapolis), Bruce Sacerdote (Dartmouth) & Andrew Whitten (Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Treasury Department), Automatic Tax Filing: Simulating a Pre-Populated Form 1040]. ...

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Size Matters: Why Harvard Law Is Less Woke Than Yale Law

Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Size Matters: Why Harvard Law Is Less Woke Than Yale Law:

"Engaging in good faith discussion"—that is how Harvard Law School titled a profile of Jacob Richards, the outgoing president of its Federalist Society chapter. The piece, published April 27 by the law school’s communications office, was effectively a targeted advertisement for center-right applicants, featuring gushing quotes from Richards about the open-mindedness of his class.

"I came into law school wondering if I’d get shunned for voicing conservative views," Richards said. "Instead, I’ve found that most of my peers are eager and willing to engage."

Then came the leak.

The law school featured the profile on its Instagram account on May 11, one week after news broke that the Supreme Court has circulated a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. That timing didn’t sit well with Gabrielle Crofford, the outgoing president of Harvard Law School’s student body, who urged anybody upset that the law school had kind words for a conservative to complain to the communications office.

"If it made you mad to see the President of Fed Soc celebrated on Harvard Law’s IG mere days after we found out Roe was being overturned, you should email Communications Dean Melody Jackson," Crawford wrote on Instagram. "The more students they hear from the better."

The school received multiple emails—"probably in the dozens," a student with firsthand knowledge of the situation told the Washington Free Beacon—enough for Harvard to disable comments on the Instagram post amid a tsunami of vitriol. Current and former students demanded the law school delete the post, calling it "embarrassing," "tone-deaf," and "transphobic."

Initially, the blow-up seemed to follow a familiar script: milquetoast remarks from a center-right lawyer, followed by furious demands for administrators to enforce orthodoxy. Many law schools have capitulated to those demands: from Yale Law School, which threatened to discipline a conservative student for using the term "trap house," to Georgetown Law School, which placed a professor on leave for criticizing affirmative action on the Supreme Court.

At Harvard, though, administrators refused to remove the post and told Richards they had his back.

"I am very sorry that you have received such critical comments," Jackson, the law school communications dean, wrote Richards in an email. "We were pleased to share your story."

That resolve, students say, reflects Harvard Law’s size and staffing decisions, which have inoculated it against the ideological mania of rival law schools—especially Yale. ...

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Virginia Tax Review Publishes New Issue

The Virginia Tax Review has published Vol. 40, No. 3 (Spring 2021):

Hayes R. Holderness (Richmond), Changing Lanes: Tax Relief for Commuters, 40 Va. Tax Rev. 453 (2021) (reviewed by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Utah, moving to Cardozo; Google Scholar) here):

Tax law reaches all parts of life, and societal expectations about life’s activities often affect how the law is applied. As those expectations change, application of the law should be expected to change in turn. This Essay highlights changing societal views about commuting, particularly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, to demonstrate how even long-standing positions under the tax law can be quickly uprooted. Specifically, as working from home becomes standard, taxpayers should be afforded tax relief when required to commute into the workplace, despite the fact that the tax law traditionally has rejected such relief.

Grayson M. P. McCouch (Florida), Custodianships, Trusts, and Guardianships, 40 Va. Tax Rev. 475 (2021):

 

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• Above the Law, Law Student's Cruel Response To School Massacre Highlights How Broken Law Schools Have Become
• Above the Law, Law Professor On The Future Of The First Amendment
• Above the Law, 'No Pressure': Loretta Lynch Tells Harvard Law Grads They're The Ones Who Can 'Save Us' From Gun Violence
• Above the Law, Over 100 Law School Organizations Issue Statement On Alito Leak, Calling On Lawyers To Be Ready
• Law.com, After 3 Unusual Years, New York Law Schools Fete Graduates With In-Person Ceremonies
• Law.com, Law School Applicant: I Lost My Seat at UVA Law for Missing Deposit Deadline by Half an Hour
• Law.com, 'Let No One Define You,' Judge Judy Sheindlin Addresses NYLS Graduates
• Law. com, 'Like the Ice Cream Machine at McDonald's': BARBRI Users Complain About Frequent Outages

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Liscow: Redistribution For Realists

Zachary Liscow (Yale; Google Scholar), Redistribution For Realists, 107 Iowa L. Rev. 495 (2022):

Inequality is a defining issue of our time. Nevertheless, the longstanding economic orthodoxy for addressing inequality is that we should redistribute solely through tax and transfer policies because those are the most efficient means for doing so.

While the orthodoxy holds in theory, it fails in practice because of the public’s psychology about redistribution. New evidence shows that individuals silo their policy views: many are reluctant to redistribute through taxes and transfers but are willing to do so in other policy domains, like provision of necessities such as transportation, food, and housing. The orthodoxy thus restricts redistribution efforts to a policy domain where the public resists redistribution while neglecting the many policy domains where the public embraces redistributive policies. The current orthodoxy may be more efficient, but it is also a prescription for widespread inequality.

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The Hired Help Are All Convicted In Dan Markel's Murder. Let Retributive Justice For The Narcissist Adelson Family Begin.

Tallahassee Democrat Op-Ed:  Can Traditional 'Motives' Really Explain the Dan Markel Murder?, by Jason Solomon (Stanford; Founder, Justice for Dan):

Prosecutors’ story of Magbanua’s motive was easy enough: money. But the prosecutors also had to explain the motive for those who hired her — the family of Markel’s ex-wife Wendi Adelson, specifically her brother Charlie and mother Donna, who prosecutors say led the conspiracy.

The state pointed to the Adelsons’ “desperate desire” for Wendi and her kids to relocate to South Florida, and fear of Markel’s motion to limit Donna’s unsupervised visits with her grandkids. There is lots of evidence for these motives, and the jury should hear about them again when Charlie is tried.

But do you really commit murder because you want your daughter (or sister) to live closer, or you can’t stand the idea of not being able to babysit your grandkids?

Another kind of explanation relies less on reason and more on pathology. And judging by their behavior leading up to the murder, narcissism appears to be an Adelson family trait. Experts say that when narcissists’ idealized self-image is threatened, they can get unreasonably angry. It’s called “narcissistic rage.” ...

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Lesson From The Tax Court: Taxpayer Held To His Word(s) Regarding Alimony

Congress eliminated the deduction for alimony in the December 2017 Reconciliation Act (informally called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA).  The concept is still important, however.  First, the legislation grandfathered in alimony payments made pursuant to divorce or separation instruments executed on or before December 31, 2018.  So the question of whether a payment qualifies as alimony will thus still be important for many taxpayers for years to come.  Second, the definition continues to play an important role in analyzing the support requirements for dependents.  See §152(d)(5).

Determining whether payments constitute alimony is not always easy and errors can lead to §6662 penalties for careless taxpayers and their advisors.  Jihad Y. Ibrahim v. Commissioner, T.C. Summ. Op. 2022-7 (May 16, 2022) (Judge Weiler), teaches us the importance of the words used in divorce instruments. There, Dr. Ibrahim sought to deduct $50,000 in payments to his ex-wife.  He called them as alimony on his return.  But the marital separation agreement and the divorce decree did not call them that.  The IRS disallowed the deduction as contrary to the plain language in the divorce decree.  Despite Dr. Ibrahim’s ingenious arguments, the Tax Court agreed with the IRS and held the taxpayer to his word(s).  Details below the fold.

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The Big Quit: Even Tenure-Line Professors Are Leaving Academe. 'Why Would I Want To Improve Faculty Morale? I Want These People To Leave.'

Following up on my previous posts:

• Why I Am Leaving My Tenured Faculty Position At Age 53 (Sept. 23, 2021)
• Tenured, Trapped, And Miserable (Nov. 11, 2021)

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  The Big Quit: Even Tenure-Line Professors Are Leaving Academe, by Joshua Doležal (Author, The Recovering Academic Newsletter (2022)):

When William Pannapacker landed a tenure-track job as an English professor, in 2000, it felt like a religious experience. “Suddenly,” he writes, “I was an academic ‘born-again.’” Pannapacker thought he had escaped his blue-collar roots after completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University, but even with Ivy League credentials he struggled for years to find work. The job offer renewed his conviction that he had been called to faculty life, and he embraced it fully — publishing widely, securing more than $2 million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and eventually earning an endowed chair. Yet this year he retired from that position to face an uncertain future at the age of 54.

Faculty members have been leaving higher education for decades, but Pannapacker’s story stands out: He was tenured. We have become accustomed to the exodus of graduate students, postdocs, and adjuncts, but before Covid it was still possible to see tenured and tenure-track faculty members as relatively immune from the stresses of working in higher ed. No more. A 2020 study by The Chronicle and Fidelity Investments found that more than half of all faculty members surveyed were seriously weighing options outside of higher education: either changing careers entirely or retiring early. The study showed that faculty members share a great deal with the millions of American workers whose life transitions have been described alternately as the Great Resignation or the Big Quit. Though it may be true that most faculty members have chosen to disengage from their work rather than quit outright, as Kevin R. McClure and Alisa Hicklin Fryar recently argued in these pages, the story of those who have quit during the pandemic remains largely untold. I am one of them.

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• With Katherine Magbanua's Conviction In Dan Markel's Murder, Prosecutors Set Their Sights On Charlie Adelson
• IRS Dangles Telework To Lure Workers To Beleaguered Agency
• For Law Profs, Law Students, And Everyone

Sunday:

• WSJ Book Review: What Did Thomas Jefferson Really Think About God?
• WSJ Essay: Why Most Pastors Avoid Politics
• Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates The Class Of 2022
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

WSJ Book Review: What Did Thomas Jefferson Really Think About God?

Wall Street Journal Book Review:  ‘Thomas Jefferson’ Review: The Spirit Was Partly Willing, by Barton Swaim (Editorial Page Writer, Wall Street Journal) (reviewing Thomas S. Kidd (Baylor; Google Scholar), Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (2022)):

For most of the 20th century, historians and biographers adopted a reverential tone toward the American Founders. That, as readers of these pages will not need to be told, has changed. A half-century ago the typical scholar would have expressed sincere regret that Washington, Jefferson, Madison et al. had owned slaves and failed to live up to the Declaration’s promise of equality. But that scholar would also have acknowledged their courage, intellectual rigor, sagacity and political skill. In the 2020s, by contrast, the Founders’ principal accomplishments are the depredation of native lands and the composition of a now-obsolete Constitution. And every Founder, slave-owner or not, stands more or less guilty of the one sin from which, in the post-Christian code of morality, there is no hope of redemption: white supremacy.

It’s tendentious and sanctimonious and productive of much bad writing, that’s true. But the move away from veneration may bring collateral benefits. There was a time when influential historians and high-ranking Democratic politicians revered Thomas Jefferson because he embodied their ideals of freethinking skepticism and disregard for tradition. That time has passed. Jefferson was a great and accomplished man, whatever his severest detractors might say. But the revelation in 1998 that he sired several children by an enslaved servant has made his repellent views on the subject of race impossible for his admirers to play down or excuse. The reputation of Jefferson the Enlightenment Hero has suffered in turn. It’s hard to praise a man for his courageous heterodoxy, belief in man’s unaided capacity for reason, and support for French revolutionary violence when he also compared blacks to subhumans and spurned the poetry of Phillis Wheatley solely because she was black.

What we need is a balanced reassessment of Jefferson’s thought and attitudes on God and religion. Thomas S. Kidd, a professor of history at Baylor, gives us that in his crisply written life Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh.

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WSJ Essay: Why Most Pastors Avoid Politics

Wall Street Journal Essay:  Why Most Pastors Avoid Politics, by Ryan Burge (Baptist Pastor; Author, Twenty Myths About Religion and Politics in America (2022); and Assistant Professor of Political Science, Eastern Illinois University):

Rev. [Greg] Locke and Robert Jeffress ... are often raised up by critics as examples of how American Christianity has become overtly political, sparking a movement on social media to revoke the tax-exempt status of all U.S. churches.

In fact, research shows that only a very small fraction of American pastors invoke politics from the pulpit. The reason isn’t ministers’ fear of running afoul of the IRS, but instead a strategic calculation about their own careers and the future.

In 2019, I conducted a survey of 1,010 Protestant Christians asking them if they had heard their pastor discuss a list of 10 political issues from the pulpit over the previous year. The list ranged from simple encouragement to vote on election day to hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights. The survey showed that 30% had heard none of the issues discussed in church, while another 25% said they had heard only one. The most commonly mentioned issue was religious liberty, cited by 30% of respondents. Just a quarter of churchgoers said that they had heard a sermon about gay rights or abortion, and only 16% had ever heard Donald Trump’s name invoked from the pulpit.

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Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates The Class Of 2022

3L Commissioning Service and Dinner (April 20, 2022):

3L Baccalaureate Service (May 19, 2022):

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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 joining the list at #3, #4, and #5:

1. [417 Downloads]  Taxing Robots, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds; Google Scholar) & Maria Amparo Grau Ruiz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Google Scholar)
2. [400 Downloads]  A Matter of High Interest: How a Quiet Change to an Actuarial Assumption Turbocharges the Life Insurance Tax Shelter, by Andrew Granato (J.D.|Ph.D., Yale; Google Scholar)
3. [300 Downloads]  Taxation and the Knowledge Economy, by Alan Kirkpatrick (Bournemouth) & Anne Fairpo (Bournemouth)
4. [296 Downloads]  Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, by Steven Dean (Brooklyn)
5. [221 Downloads]  The Use of New Technologies in VAT and Taxpayers’ Rights, by Marta Papis-Almansa (Copenhagen)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Sharp Corners Of The §170 Substantiation Requirements
2. William Treanor (Dean, Georgetown), Georgetown Law School Reinstates Ilya Shapiro Following Four Month Investigation Into Justice Jackson Tweet
3. Tallahassee Democrat, Jury Finds Katherine Magbanua Guilty Of First Degree Murder Of Dan Markel
4. Tallahassee Democrat, More On Friday's Conviction In Dan Markel's Murder: Katie Magbanua's Disastrous Decision To Testify; Pressure Builds On Her To Finger Charlie, Other Adelsons
5. Erik Hembre (University of Illinois-Chicago), Professional Sports Teams In High-Tax States Are At A Competitive Disadvantage
6. Jerry Organ (St. Thomas), LSAT Profiles Of Matriculants And Law Schools, 2010-2021
7. MIT News, Harvard And MIT Offer Free Open-Source Law School Casebooks
8. IRS, 2021 Data Book: Audit Rates Plummet For The Rich
9. AccessLex Institute & Gallup, Law School Pandemic Year 2: Student Perspectives On Distance Learning
10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Journey Continues ...

With Katherine Magbanua's Conviction In Dan Markel's Murder, Prosecutors Set Their Sights On Charlie Adelson

Tallahassee Democrat, With Magbanua Conviction in Markel Murder, Prosecutors Set Their Sights Toward Charlie Adelson:

Charlie Adelson joked that buying his sister a TV was cheaper than hiring a hitman to kill Florida State law professor Dan Markel as a way to solve the issues surrounding her divorce.

In April he was taken into custody on first-degree murder and related conspiracy and solicitation charges in connection with Markel's July 2014 shooting at his house in Betton Hills.

It's unclear what effect the conviction of Katherine Magbanua on May 27 could have on Adelson's case, but her two-week trial did lay out how investigators say the wealthy dentist sought out Markel's killers through her — and what role covert conversations between the two captured by undercover FBI agents could have in his prosecution. ...

Charlie Adelson's statements about hiring a hitman, detailed by Wendi Adelson as she was interviewed by Tallahassee Police detectives the day Markel was shot, immediately made him a prime suspect, despite her attempts to brush it away on the stand.

“He ... made a very bad joke ... that it was cheaper than hiring a hitman,” Adelson told jurors.

When detectives heard the same story from a boyfriend of Wendi Adelson, they zeroed in on the statement.

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IRS Dangles Telework To Lure Workers To Beleaguered Agency

Bloomberg, IRS Dangles Telework to Lure New Recruits to Beleaguered Agency:

The IRS is in the midst of a return-to-office effort that will offer many employees the option to telework some or most of the time, something agency officials and union leaders view as an asset in recruiting.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the agency to close its offices for several months in 2020. While employees tasked with processing paper tax returns and other documents have been working in-person for the last two years, many other employees have continued to work remotely.

The IRS is taking a phased approach to bringing everyone back to the office, which started in late April with members of leadership coming in at least once per pay period. As of May 8, employees without formal telework agreements were required to return to the office, and other employees could do so voluntarily.

“We’re starting to see increased foot traffic in our buildings again,” Geralda Larkins, project director of return to office at the IRS, said in an interview.

Normal operations are scheduled to begin on June 25, when employees will need to follow the specific rules of their telework agreements, including whether they need to be in-office a certain number of days each pay period or need to telework within a certain distance of their office.

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For Law Profs, Law Students, And Everyone