WSJ Essay: In Praise of Anxiety

Wall Street Journal Essay:  In Praise of Anxiety, by Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (Hunter College; Author, Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad) (2022)):

Anxiety can be used to create a deeper sense of personal fulfillment by striving toward excellence and savoring having a purpose in your life.

Nobody likes to feel anxious. Anxiety is among the most pervasive and reviled of human emotions. An entire industry has sprung up to aid us in eradicating it, from self-help books and holistic remedies to pharmaceuticals and cutting-edge cognitive behavioral therapy. Yet we are an ever more profoundly anxious society. Epidemiological studies show that over 100 million people in the U.S. will suffer from an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. Rates, especially among the young, have been rising for the past decade. Our efforts to contain anxiety aren’t working.

As a clinical psychologist and neuroscience researcher, I have devoted the past 20 years to understanding difficult emotions like anxiety, and I believe that we mental health professionals have made a terrible mistake. We’ve convinced people that anxiety is a dangerous affliction and that the solution is to eliminate it, as we do with other diseases. But feeling anxious isn’t the problem. The problem is that we don’t understand how to respond constructively to anxiety. That’s why it’s increasingly hard to know how to feel good.

This “bad” feeling isn’t a malfunction or failure of mental health. It’s a triumph of human evolution, a response that emerged along with one of our greatest attributes: the ability to think about the uncertain future and prepare for it. Anxiety places us in the “future tense” (pun intended)—a state in which we are motivated not only to survive but to thrive, by being more persistent, hopeful and innovative.

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Hamilton & Bilionis: Law Student Professional Development and Formation: Bridging Law School, Student, and Employer Goals

Neil W. Hamilton (St. Thomas; Google Scholar) & Louis D. Bilionis (Cincinnati), Law Student Professional Development and Formation: Bridging Law School, Student, and Employer Goals (Cambridge University Press 2022):

Law schools currently do an excellent job of helping students to 'think like a lawyer,' but empirical data show that clients, legal employers, and the legal system need students to develop a wider range of competencies. This book helps legal educators to understand these competencies and provides practical ways to build them into a law school curriculum. Based on recommendations from the American Bar Association, the American Association of Law Schools, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, it will equip students with the skills they need not only to think but to act and feel like a lawyer. With this proposed model, students will internalize the need for professional development toward excellence, their responsibility to others, a client-centered approach to problem solving, and strong well-being practices. These four goals constitute a lawyer's professional identity, and this book empowers legal educators to foster each student's development of a professional identity that leads to a gratifying career that serves society well. This title is Open Access.

Reviews:

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WSJ: Annual Reviews And OKRs Are A Terrible Way To Evaluate Employees

Wall Street Journal:  Annual Reviews Are a Terrible Way to Evaluate Employees, by Marcus Buckingham (Author, Love + Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life (Harvard Business Review Press 2022)):

Gallup data from the 2020 version of their continuing workplace research reveal that 86% of employees don’t think their annual review is accurate. In a 2018 Adobe Inc. study of a representative sample of 1,500 office workers, 22% reported that they’d even burst into tears during their review.

For millions, the annual performance review is akin to going to a bad dentist: Before you go, you dread it; while you’re there, it’s painful; after it’s done, nothing’s fixed. And yet the annual review remains a reality for most workers. ...

The failings of the annual performance review fall into three broad buckets:

They are too infrequent.
Goals set at the beginning of the year are irrelevant by the third week of the year. Data from ADP’s human-resources systems reveal that, after inputting their goals, fewer than 4% of people go back and check their goals even once during the year. In the real world, your actual work has precious little to do with your goals. Work happens in a continuing flow, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week. ...

They are dehumanizing. ...

They are irrelevant to real-world performance.
Each worker is unique in what they love and loathe about their work. Even those who excel at the very same job excel differently—excellence in any job is idiosyncratic. Research from the ADP Research Institute’s series of global studies of more than 50,000 workers from 27 countries reveals that workers who report they find love in what they do, and are good at it, are far more likely to be engaged, resilient, and experience less stress on the job, regardless of what their job is. They are far less likely to express an intent to leave, or even to be actively interviewing for a new job. ...

The annual review should be dead, a relic of MBO’s, KRA’s, OKR’s and all those falsely precise acronyms spawned in the Jack Welchian 80s and Andy Grovian 90s. But they aren’t. They live on—still today, OKR’s lurk inside the performance appraisals at many Silicon Valley tech giants. And they are among the reasons so many companies will wonder why they can’t keep their talent. Why one day ... sound, hardworking, well-intentioned people suddenly up and quit.

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WSJ Op-Ed: How God Works — The Science Behind The Benefits Of Religion

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Does Religion Make People More Ethical?, by David DeSteno (Northeastern; Google Scholar; Author, How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion (2021)):

[W]hen it comes to morality, the power of religion is more in the doing than in the believing. Studies of religion and health show that identifying with a religion—saying you believe in God or going to worship once a year on Easter or Yom Kippur—means very little. Epidemiological research shows that it is people who live their faith, regularly going to services and engaging in their religion’s rituals, who tend to live longer, healthier and happier lives.

In most faiths, being religious isn’t just defined by a creed but by rituals and practices that permeate daily life. When we pray and sing together, listen to readings from scripture, or give offerings and blessings of thanks to God, our minds and bodies aren’t passive. They’re subtly being nudged toward virtue.

Take giving to charity. A large-scale 2017 study by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy [Special Report on Giving to Religion] showed that in the U.S., 62% of religiously active households gave to charity, with an average donation of $1,590. By contrast, only 46% of nonreligious households give, with an average donation of $695. And increased attendance at religious services is associated with increased generosity.  ...

[W]hen people feel gratitude, elevation and compassion more frequently, they become more moral in general. While this might seem at odds with the commonly held view that qualities like honesty or generosity are stable personality traits, scientists now recognize that morality is really more of a moment-to-moment balancing act between competing motives. From about the age of 7 onward, children spend a good deal of time learning how to exert self-control so they can inhibit their less-than-noble desires.

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God, Grades, And Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact On Academic Success

New York Times Op-Ed:  I Followed the Lives of 3,290 Teenagers. This Is What I Learned About Religion and Education, by Ilana M. Horwitz (Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life, Tulane University; Author, God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press 2022) (author summary) (author interview)):

As a sociologist of education and religion, I followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016. I studied the relationship between teenagers’ religious upbringing and its influence on their education: their school grades, which colleges they attend and how much higher education they complete. My research focused on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the United States.

I found that what religion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways, religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career.

However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.

Religious boys are not any smarter, so why are they doing better in school? The answer lies in how religious belief and religious involvement can buffer working-class Americans — males in particular — from despair. ...

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Colin Diver: The Rankings Farce

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  The Rankings Farce, by Colin Diver:

‘U.S. News’ and its ilk embrace faux-precise formulas riven with statistical misconceptions. ...

On July 1, 2002, I became president of Reed College in Portland, Ore. As I began to fill the shelves in my office with mementos from my previous life as a law-school dean, I could feel the weight already lifting from my shoulders. “I’m no longer subject to the tyranny of college rankings,” I thought. “I don’t need to worry about some news magazine telling me what to do.”

Seven years before my arrival at Reed, my predecessor, Steven S. Koblik, decreed that Reed would no longer cooperate with the annual U.S. News Best Colleges rankings. ...

There is a growing cottage industry of college evaluators, many spurred by the commercial success of U.S. News. I call it the “rankocracy” — a group of self-appointed, mostly profit-seeking journalists who claim for themselves the role of arbiters of educational excellence in our society. It wasn’t just the U.S. News rankings that were incompatible with Reed’s values. Virtually the whole enterprise of listing institutions in an ordinal hierarchy of quality involves faux precision, dubious methodologies, and blaring best-college headlines. To make matters worse, the entire structure rests on mostly unaudited, self-reported information of dubious reliability. In recent months, for example, the data supporting Columbia’s second place U.S. News ranking have been questioned, the University of Southern California’s School of Education has discovered a “history of inaccuracies” in its rankings data, and Bloomberg’s business-school rankings have been examined for perceived anomalies. ...

I came by my rankings aversion honestly. In 1989, I became the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. The next year, U.S. News began to publish annual rankings of law schools. Over the next nine years of my deanship, its numerical pronouncements hovered over my head like a black cloud. During those years, for reasons that remained a complete mystery to me, Penn Law’s national position would oscillate somewhere between seventh and 12th. Each upward movement would be a cause for momentary exultation; each downward movement, a cause for distress.

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NY Times: Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed For Wealth Redistribution

New York Times, Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed for Wealth Redistribution:

In 2013, the French economist Thomas Piketty, in his best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a book eagerly received in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, put forth the notion that returns on capital historically outstrip economic growth (his famous r>g formula). The upshot? The rich get richer, while the rest of us stay stuck in the mud. Now, nearly a decade later, Piketty is set to publish A Brief History of Equality, in which he argues that we’re on a trajectory of greater, not less, equality and lays out his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities. (In short: Tax the rich.) If the line from one book to the other looks slightly askew given the state of the world, then, Piketty suggests, you’re looking from the wrong vantage point. “I am relatively optimistic,” says Piketty, who is 50, “about the fact that there is a long-run movement toward more equality, which goes beyond the little details of what happens within a specific decade.” ...

What did you think of the billionaire tax that Biden just proposed?
It would have been better before his election. If you had told the American public before the elections that he wanted a wealth tax — which again is something that is very high in opinion polls — this would have been much easier. This could have forced the Democratic Congress to take a stand. It’s more complicated now. But if it works, it’s better than nothing. ...

You know, I do find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that after 40 years of worsening inequality, you — the inequality guy, Mr. r>g — are publishing a book saying we’re on the right track historically. It’s sort of cold comfort to know we’re more equal today than we were 100 or 200 years ago. Really give me a reason to feel as optimistic as you do. 

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WSJ Book Review: The Flag And The Cross — Defining Christian Nationalism

Wall Street Journal Book Review:  D.G. Hart (Hilldale College), Defining Christian Nationalism (reviewing The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Apr. 1, 2022)):

How pervasive is Christian nationalism in the United States? Before answering, a more pressing question is: What is it? Here the people paid to define our terms are all over the place. Christian nationalism can involve a national church like the Church of Scotland. It can be a form of civil religion, as in “one nation under God.” It can also dissolve into American exceptionalism: “a city set on a hill.” Whatever the definition, attaching national or civic meaning to divine purpose is as old as recorded history.

It is also everywhere in America. When Franklin D. Roosevelt explained his administration’s reasons for entering World War II, the president did not hesitate to invoke God or quote the Bible. “The world is too small to provide adequate ‘living room’ for both Hitler and God,” he told Americans. “We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: ‘God created man in His own image.’ ”

Seventy years later when filmmaker Aaron Sorkin wrote the lines delivered by a news anchor in the first episode of HBO’s The Newsroom, the religious component of Christian nationalism may have been invisible but the appeal to moral purpose was pronounced. After lamenting America’s decline, the news anchor explained what made America great: “We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed. We cared about our neighbors.” He might well have asked: What did Jesus do?

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Good With Words: Speaking And Presenting

Patrick Barry (Michigan), Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting (2021)

Suppose you were good with words. Suppose when you decided to speak, the message you delivered—and the way you delivered it—successfully connected with your intended audience. What would that mean for your career prospects? What would that mean for your comfort level in social situations? And perhaps most importantly, what would that mean for your satisfaction with the personal relationships you value the most?

This book is designed to help you find out. Based on an award-winning course and workshop series at the University of Michigan taken by students training to enter a wide range of fields—law, business, medicine, social work, public policy, design, engineering, and many more—it removes the guesswork from figuring out how to communicate clearly and compellingly. All of us have ideas that are worth sharing. Why not learn how to convey yours in a way that people will appreciate, enjoy, and remember?

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WSJ: God And Man At Yale Law School

Wall Street Journal, God and Man at Yale Law:

Anthony Kronman grew up in an atheist household. Now he’s determined to convince American elites of the existence of ‘divinity.’

Was it divinely ordained that a boy raised by aggressively atheist parents would one day, in his eighth decade, make a passionate public case for God? This mischievous thought crosses my mind as I speak to Anthony Kronman, whose book After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity and Joy, forthcoming in March, aims to persuade America’s “relentlessly rational” elites to acknowledge the existence of “divinity.”

Those elites include his colleagues at Yale Law School, where Mr. Kronman, 76, is a professor and former dean. “In the academic circles in which I live and work,” Mr. Kronman writes, “the only respectable view of God is that he doesn’t exist.” He elaborates in an interview, saying that they regard his public professions of spirituality with “skeptical bemusement.” To the extent religion figures in their conversations at all, “it often does so as a synonym for prejudice and superstition—the attitude [Barack] Obama expressed, in an unguarded moment, when he made his regrettable comments about ‘guns and religion’ ” while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Mr. Kronman’s ambition is to repair “the schism between those for whom religion continues to matter and those who view it with amusement or contempt.” The political implications of this split are especially profound in America, which Mr. Kronman says is unlike any other country in both its “commitment to secular values” and the “seriousness with which it takes religious beliefs.” The combination of the two has frequently been a source of national strength, but in recent decades it has given rise to hostility and bitterness.

“After Disbelief” approaches the problem by giving each side its philosophical due. Mr. Kronman argues that the scientific conviction that everything in the world is “knowable and explicable” collides with the practical reality that we can never know everything—that the questions are “inexhaustible” because new ones arise from every answer. ...

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Cooper: After The Fact

National Jurist, A Legal Thriller:

Do you like legal thrillers but hate how they never feature tax attorneys? Quinnipiac School of Law professor Jeff Cooper has you covered. Cooper’s debut novel “After the Fact” was released in November 2021 and tells the tale of Jack Collins, who joins a famous law firm in New York City, leaving behind a small Connecticut practice. He thinks he’s hit the big time, but not all is what it seems.

Jeff Cooper (Quinnipiac), After the Fact (2021):

When Jack Collins leaves a small Connecticut law practice to join one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, he trades a nondescript office for an elite one in a gleaming New York City skyscraper. He basks in the pride of working with people far more glamorous than those he left behind, including a famous boss, an alluring coworker, and a well-known client, Abigail Walker, the wealthy widow of a senator.

Jack thinks he’s on the path to glory, but he’s really a victim of deceit, a pawn in a game he doesn’t even know he’s playing. His new boss harbors deep secrets, his seductive coworker is not the person he thinks she is, and his new law firm is at the very center of a blackmail plot involving the widow Walker.

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Simkovic: Did New Deal Liberalism Steer Too Far To The Right?

Michael Simkovic (USC; Google Scholar), Did New Deal Liberalism Steer Too Far to the Right?, 174 Tax Notes Fed. 681 (Jan. 31, 2022) (reviewing A Half-Century With the Internal Revenue Code: The Memoirs of Stanley S. Surrey (Ajay K. Mehrotra (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Lawrence Zelenak (Duke), eds. 2022):

Ajay K. Mehrotra, professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Lawrence Zelenak, the Pamela B. Gann Professor of Law at Duke Law School, have prepared a sparkling introduction to the recently discovered memoirs of Stanley S. Surrey, which they have also edited for publication.

Surrey was a tour de force in the legal academy and government. His career spanned the rise, peak, and fall of New Deal liberalism and the triumph of Reagan-Thatcherism that followed. Mehrotra and Zelenak deftly portray Surrey’s life against the backdrop of broader social forces and trends. Their sympathy for their subject shines through the essay, but it never veers into hagiography.

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The Power Of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward

Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay:  ‘No Regrets’ Is No Way to Live, by Daniel H. Pink (Author, The Power Of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward (2022)):

“No Regrets.” It’s an alluring motto, a handy recipe for success and satisfaction. Reject the pain of looking backward, revel in the pleasure of dreaming forward, and the good life will ensue.

Little wonder that this simple maxim transcends political and cultural divides. The Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale —Christian, conservative, mentor to Republican presidents—urged his followers to drop the very word “regret” from their vocabularies. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg —Jewish, liberal, appointee of Democratic presidents—concurred. “Waste no time on…regret,” she counseled in her 2016 book, “My Own Words.” Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald recorded a song called “No Regrets” in 1968—as did country star Emmylou Harris in 1989 and rapper Eminem in 2020. Some people endorse this world view so deeply that they tattoo the two-word credo on their bodies.

Yet for all its intuitive appeal, the “No Regrets” approach is an unsustainable blueprint for living. At a time like ours—when teenagers are battling unprecedented mental-health challenges, adults are gripped by doubt over their financial future, and the cloud of an enduring pandemic casts uncertainty over all of our decisions—it is especially counterproductive.

For the last three years, I have examined several decades of research on the science of regret. At the same time, I have collected and analyzed more than 16,000 individual descriptions of regret from people in 105 countries who responded to my online survey invitation. ...

The conclusion from both the science and the survey is clear: Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up. ...

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Livingston: Tax And Culture

Michael A. Livingston (Rutgers), Tax and Culture: Convergence, Divergence, and the Future of Tax Law (Cambridge University Press 2020):

Tax scholars traditionally emphasize economics and assume that all tax systems can be evaluated in more or less the same way. By applying the insights of anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences, Michael A. Livingston demonstrates that tax systems frequently pursue different values and that the convergence of tax systems is frequently overstated. In Tax and Culture, he applies these insights to specific countries, such as China and India, and specific tax issues, including progressivity, tax avoidance, and the emerging area of environmental taxation. Livingston concludes that the concept of a global tax culture is, in many cases, merely a reflection of Western hegemony, and is unlikely to survive the changes implicit in the rise of non-Western nations and cultures.

The book Tax and Culture: Convergence, Divergence, and the Future of Tax Law, by Michael Livingston, makes an exceptionally valuable contribution to the field of critical tax scholarship, and to tax legal scholarship more broadly. — Ann Mumford, British Tax Review

If You Can Only Read One Book In 2022: Believing Is Seeing Is A Life-Changing Choice

Following up on my previous post, Why Atheists Need Faith:  Mark Tapscott (HillFaith), Believing Is Seeing: Once Upon a Time, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away:

If you can only read one book in 2022, Believing is Seeing by Dr. Michael Guillen could well be a life-changing choice regardless whether you are a determined atheist, a hard-nosed scientific materialist, or a Bible-believing Christian.

The subtitle of the book describes this work perfectly: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith.

But Guillen is not just any physicist, he’s one with expertise in physics, astronomy and mathematics, an award-winning former Harvard professor and for years the ABC News Science Editor.

To get a deeper idea of why I recommend this book so highly, check out the following excerpt from pages eight and nine of the book as he describes the beginning of his realization as a Cornell graduate student that the universe is vastly more complicated than he had ever dreamed:

Very quickly, I learned that galaxies rotate slowly, like enormous merry-go-rounds. According to a scientific law called the Virial Theorem, the more massive the galaxy, the faster it spins.

I also learned that galaxies spin much faster than they should, in apparent violation of the Virial Theorem. It’s as if they are far more massive than they appear — like they’re bloated with some kind of unseen material that makes them spin abnormally fast. My astronomy professors called this mystery the Missing-Mass Problem.

Today, we call this hypothetical missing mass Dark Matter. Based on what little we know, we speculate it could be an entirely new invisible form of matter, ruled by an entirely new kind of force. But honestly, we don’t know what it is — or even if it really exists.

More recently, we’ve discovered another oddity about the heavens that is also totally invisible: Dark Energy. From what we can tell (which is precious little), it behaves like a repulsive force that causes the universe to balloon out an accelerating speed.

And get this: Together, Dark Matter and Dark Energy seem to constitute 95 percent of the entire universe. That’s right, scientist now believe that 95 percent of the universe is invisible to us.

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Law Teaching Strategies For A New Era: Beyond The Physical Classroom

Tessa L. Dysart (Arizona) & Tracy Norton (Touro), Law Teaching Strategies for a New Era: Beyond the Physical Classroom (2021):

The abrupt move to online legal education in Spring 2020 accelerated the move to online legal education that has been slowing gathering steam in recent years. As more institutions consider the potential to expand their reach with online courses and programs, law professors must move past “pandemic teaching” and seriously consider how they can create and deliver quality legal education online.

Law Teaching Strategies for a New Era: Beyond the Physical Classroom, the first comprehensive book on online legal education, explores techniques, tools, and strategies that can assist all types of law professors in that endeavor. The thirty-four chapters, authored by law professors from across the country, provide a comprehensive look at expanding legal education beyond the traditional classroom experience. Divided into four sections, the book starts by offering tips for getting started and fostering inclusion in online courses.  It then moves to suggestions for course design of blended, synchronous, and asynchronous courses, including a chapter on measuring success through empirical research.

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Steven Dean Hosts A Conversation With Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Today On Race For Profit At Brooklyn

Steven Dean (Brooklyn) hosts a conversation today at Brooklyn with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Princeton), author of the book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (University of North Carolina Press 2019) at 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM ET.

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Law Prof Novel: Cost Of Arrogance; L.A. Book Launch On Nov. 12

Although I read a lot of my faculty's scholarship, Cost of Arrogance: A Jake Clearwater Legal Thriller by Harry Caldwell is the first faculty novel I've read. A book launch event will be held this Friday, November 12, from 2:00 - 5:00 PM PT at the Figueroa Brewing Company in Westlake Village, California:

A despicable client hell-bent on being executed, a vengeful and formidable opponent, and a reluctant Supreme Court, confront Jake Clearwater as he undertakes a daunting and unforgiving challenge.

Clearwater, a law professor [at a fictional law school in Malibu, California] and former prosecutor, is urged by a group named the Death Penalty Project to help stem the tide of wrongful death penalty convictions by agreeing to represent Duane Durgeon, a hulking, hard-boiled bad ass, despite Durgeon's demand to be executed. What follows is a riveting tale of courtroom drama, suspense, and the exquisite working of law and ultimately of justice.

Paul Caron
5.0 out of 5 stars  A Great Courtroom Thriller

Cost of Arrogance is written with all the élan and verve of a John Grisham novel. Jake Clearwater is an unforgettable character who takes us inside the halls of a fictional law school in Malibu and august California courtrooms. This is a legal thriller in the best sense: a fascinating plot with surprising twists and turns that leave the reader rooting for Jake to prevail against all odds. Lawyers and law students will love this book, as will anyone who enjoys a rollicking read about the pursuit of justice in 21st century America.

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The Afterlife Of Rachel Held Evans: Wholehearted Faith

The New Yorker:  The Afterlife of Rachel Held Evans:

When the beloved Christian thinker died, at thirty-seven, she left behind a legacy of constant spiritual questioning—and an unfinished memoir. ...

Although she was only thirty-seven when she died, Held Evans had become a beloved figure in the landscape of American religion. The author of five popular books on Christianity [Faith Unraveled (2010); A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012); Searching for Sunday (2015); Inspired (2018); What is God Like? (2021)], she employed self-deprecating wit and practical exegesis to critique the conservative evangelical subculture in which she was raised. Held Evans embodied a movement that emerged in the two-thousands among people who were becoming disillusioned with evangelicalism. Many were fleeing their churches—the portion of white evangelicals in the population dropped from twenty-three per cent to fourteen per cent between 2006 and 2020—and, to outsiders, their departure looked like the secularization of America. But the demographic was more varied than it seemed; many evangelicals were leaving megachurches with praise bands and coffee bars, but not abandoning a belief in Jesus.

To these earnest seekers, Held Evans became a patron saint. “Every generation needs dissenters, and Rachel was a sharp, faithful prophet in our midst,” Anthea Butler, the author of “White Evangelical Racism,” told me. With humility and openness, Held Evans helped reintroduce a mode of spiritual inquiry in America that was based in seeking mystery, not certainty. “She made Christianity seem like a decent place to be while you asked questions, rather than something you had to abandon to be free,” Kathryn Lofton, a professor of religious studies at Yale, said. Held Evans quickly became a major spiritual figure, appearing on television shows and serving as one of President Obama’s faith advisers. “I think Rachel would be the first person to scoff at any attempt to beatify her,” Sarah Bessey, her friend, told me. “She’s one of the few spiritual teachers I’ve known who had the humility to regularly ask herself, ‘What if I’m wrong?’ ”

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NY Times Op-Ed: How I Learned That Jesus Is Black

New York Times op-ed:  How I Learned That Jesus Is Black, by Danté Stewart (Author, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (2021)):

For years, I made my home with white people in white churches. I knew how to run and to hide and to move my body in ways that made white people feel more safe and less racist and more godly and less violent. Whether on the football field or in the pulpit, my performance gave them what they never deserved: confidence that the world was OK.

It started in college at Clemson University, where I played on the nationally ranked football team. Many young Black athletes like me left home and quickly found ourselves around white Christians because they were the ones who had greatest access to us. Between Bible studies and church outings, our worlds became white, our Jesus became a blond-haired and blue-eyed savior. This Jesus cared about touchdowns and Bible verses written in white letters underneath our eyes over the black paint.

As the weeks and months and years went by, I found myself closer and closer to white people. After graduating from college, I joined a white evangelical church and entered seminary in the hopes of becoming a pastor there. In my pursuit to be a better person and a better athlete and a better Christian, I viewed Black sermons and Black songs and Black buildings and Black shouting and Black loving with skepticism and white sermons and white songs and white buildings and white clapping with sacredness.

But before long, images of Black people dying started appearing all over our televisions and newspapers and newsfeeds. And too many of the nice white people around me just didn’t seem to care. And I knew: I had to find a way to get free and survive. ...

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NY Times Op-Ed: What Does A University Owe Democracy?

New York Times op-ed:  What Does a University Owe Democracy?, by David Brooks:

Last November, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, posted a series of slide presentations on YouTube making a case against the use of group identity as a primary criterion in selection processes. He was immediately targeted for cancellation.

So Robert Zimmer, Chicago’s magnificent president (now chancellor), stepped in with a clear statement of support for academic freedom. The controversy evaporated.

Then, in August, Abbot and a co-writer published an op-ed in Newsweek making the case that diversity, equity and inclusion policies violate “the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.” It led to another cancellation campaign, this time in protest of his invitation to deliver the prestigious Carlson Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was going to speak about “Climate and the Potential for Life on Other Planets.”

This time, the campaign worked. As Abbot has detailed, a department chair called to tell him the school would be canceling the lecture “in order to avoid controversy.”

The two episodes are a stark illustration of the difference between the culture of intellectual courage nurtured by Zimmer and the Coward Culture at work at M.I.T. and other institutions ostensibly invested in the cause of free expression.

It’s also a reminder that our universities are failing at the task of educating students in the habits of a free mind. Instead, they are becoming islands of illiberal ideology and factories of moral certitude, more often at war with the values of liberal democracy than in their service.

I’ve been thinking about all this while reading “What Universities Owe Democracy” by Johns Hopkins University’s president, Ronald Daniels.  ...

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The Secret To A Happy And Meaningful Life: Choose Suffering

Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay:  Why We Choose to Suffer: The Struggle for a Meaningful Life, by Paul Bloom (University of Toronto; Author, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning):

In the search for a meaningful life, simply seeking pleasure isn’t enough. We need struggle and sacrifice.

The simplest theory of human nature is that we work as hard as we can to avoid ... [painful] experiences. We pursue pleasure and comfort; we hope to make it through life unscathed. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. ... .

But this theory is incomplete. Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for. ...

Consider ... chosen suffering. People, typically young men, sometimes choose to go to war, and while they don’t wish to be maimed or killed, they are hoping to experience challenge, fear and struggle—to be baptized by fire, to use the clichéd phrase. Some of us choose to have children, and usually we have some sense of how hard it will be. Maybe we even know of all the research showing that, moment by moment, the years with young children can be more stressful than any other time of life. (And those who don’t know this ahead of time will quickly find out.) And yet we rarely regret such choices. More generally, the projects that are most central to our lives involve suffering and sacrifice.

The importance of suffering is old news. It is part of many religious traditions, including the story in Genesis of how original sin condemned us to a life of struggle. It is central to Buddhist thought—the focus of the Four Noble Truths.

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Can Robert’s Rules Of Order Help Cure What Ails Universities, Law Schools, And America?

Inside Higher Ed, Author Discusses Robert’s Rules of Order and Why It Matters for Colleges and Universities Today: 

Robert’s Rules of Order was first published in 1876. And today it continues to influence many organizations that use the book, including colleges, universities and academic organizations. Princeton University Press has just published the original book along with an essay by Christopher P. Loss, associate professor of education and history at Vanderbilt University, under a new title, Robert’s Rules of Order and Why It Matters for Colleges and Universities Today (Princeton University Press Sept. 2021).

Loss responded to questions about the book via email. ...

Q: You note that Robert’s Rules was embraced by American higher education at a time when “white male privilege” dominated student and faculty life. Why shouldn’t Robert’s Rules fade away with white male privilege?

A: American higher education in the late 19th century in many ways reflected the intellectual and social interests and sensibilities of white men like Henry Martyn Robert, West Point Class of 1857. Some would argue it still does. At the same time, the higher education sector was far more institutionally diverse than is often recognized and included liberal arts colleges and a mix of public as well as private Black-serving institutions and women’s colleges and normal schools that also used Robert’s Rules. For example, Howard University was an early adopter, and women’s organizations were and remained among Robert’s most devoted followers. American higher education, like our nation, had to work hard to realize its democratic potential in the 20th century, and it turns out that Robert’s Rules played a key, if surprising, role in that still-unfinished process. ...

Q: Many associate American campuses with uncivil debate. Could Robert’s Rules change that?

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Peter Thiel Gamed Silicon Valley, Donald Trump, And Democracy To Make Billions, Tax-Free

Bloomberg Businessweek, Peter Thiel Gamed Silicon Valley, Donald Trump, and Democracy to Make Billions, Tax-Free:

In an exclusive excerpt from The Contrarian, a new biography, the disruption-preaching power broker is revealed as just another rich guy desperate to keep his fortune from the IRS.

Trump’s presidency would not end badly for Thiel, who didn’t comment for this article, adapted from my forthcoming book, The Contrarian. Thiel’s companies would win government contracts, and his net worth would soar—and it would, crucially, remain in the legal tax shelter that he’s spent half his career trying to protect. As a venture capitalist, Thiel had made it his business to find up-and-comers, invest in their success, and then sell his stock when it was financially advantageous to do so. Now he was doing the same with a U.S. president.

Thiel is sometimes portrayed as the tech industry’s token conservative, a view that wildly understates his power. More than any other living Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur—more so even than Bezos, or Page, or Facebook co-founder and Thiel protégé Mark Zuckerberg—he has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley today: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly, with little if any regard for potential costs or dangers to society. Thiel isn’t the richest tech mogul, but he has been, in many ways, the most influential. ...

By the fall of 2020, published estimates were putting Thiel’s personal net worth at around $5 billion, roughly double what it had been before Trump was elected. This was a reflection of his stake in Palantir, which had gone public in August at a valuation of around $20 billion. Thiel then owned about 20% of the company and also held stakes in a number of others whose fortunes had soared. Besides Anduril, there was SpaceX, which was now worth as much as $100 billion thanks in part to a booming business with the federal government, and Airbnb, which had recently gone public. By any financial measure, it had been a good four years.

But those who know Thiel say that even these estimates were probably way too conservative and that his true net worth was closer to $10 billion, possibly much more. That was partly because he had quietly accumulated stakes in a handful of private companies with exceedingly high valuations, including the online payments startup Stripe; a person close to Thiel figures his share is worth at least $1.5 billion. But it was also because Thiel was shielding a large percentage of his investment assets from taxes of any kind.

The strategy was legal, even if it was, from the standpoint of any normal sense of fairness, outrageous.

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WSJ: How A Tech Mogul Pushed Through The Opportunity Zones Tax Break

Wall Street Journal Essay:  How a Tech Mogul Pushed Through a Tax Break, by David Wessel (Brookings Institution; Author, Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age (Oct. 2021)):

Sean Parker lobbied to create Opportunity Zones to encourage development in low-income areas, but so far the main beneficiaries are investors wanting lower taxes.

The U.S. tax code is larded with provisions that the wealthy use to reduce their taxes. Some get a lot of attention, while some are inserted into tax bills very quietly—like Opportunity Zones, or OZs.

Six pages tucked into the sprawling 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act led to the creation of 8,764 of these tax havens across the U.S., ostensibly to lure private capital to poor neighborhoods. Anyone can invest capital gains from a previous investment in a building or business in a census tract designated as an OZ by a state’s governor, defer and reduce taxes on that initial gain, and then pay zero capital-gains tax on any profits from that OZ investment, provided that they stick with it for 10 years. Other than holding on to an appreciated asset until you bequeath it to your children, there aren’t many other ways to avoid capital-gains taxes altogether. This one has a huge advantage: “You don’t have to die,” says Brad Cohen, a Los Angeles tax lawyer.

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Podcast: The History Of Female Law Professors With Patricia Cain

I previously blogged the release of the new book, Herma Hill Kay, Paving the Way: The First American Women Law Professors (Patricia A. Cain (Santa Clara), ed. University of California Press 2021). 

Check out the podcast, The History Of Female Law Professors With Patricia Cain (27 minutes)

Kathryn interviews Patricia Cain, one of the authors of Paving the Way, about the twists and turns of her life and career: from going to law school, being part of a circus troupe to starting a career in the legal academia. Patricia highlights her experiences not only as a teacher but also her experiences in law school. She also shared the best lessons she learned, especially for those who want to start a life in legal academia.

Episode Highlights

• Introducing the guest: Patricia Cain. - 0:38
• The reasons why Patricia decided to go to law school. - 1:24
• The twists and turns: How she went from law school, a theater member, to being a teacher. - 4:20
• Patricia’s involvement in the Paving the Way book project. - 9:14
• A shift from being introduced to Herma Hill Kay to continue writing the book. - 12:08
• Linking histories: Knowing the difference of the process back in the ’70s to her experience. - 17:16
• It wasn’t until other women joined the faculty that Ellen Peter’s voice could be heard during faculty meetings. When you’re the one woman in the room, you say something and nobody says anything back then 5 minutes later a man says the same thing and everybody thinks it’s brilliant. I experience that every time. - 18:57
• The adoption process. - 21:17
• The best lessons that people who want to start a life in academia can take away. - 23:46

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NY Times: Why A Duke Professor With Stage IV Colon Cancer Will Not Make A Bucket List Before She Dies

Following up on my previous post, I Just Learned I Only Have Months To Live. This Is What I Want To Say.:  New York Times op-ed:  One Thing I Don’t Plan to Do Before I Die Is Make a Bucket List, by Kate Bowler (Duke Divinity School):

I wish someone had told me that the end of a life is a mathematical equation.

At 35, the doctors tell me I have Stage IV colon cancer and a slim chance of survival.

Suddenly years dwindle into months, months into days, and I begin to count them. All my dreams, ambitions, friendships, petty fights, vacations and bedtimes with a boy in dinosaur pajamas must be squeezed into a finite and dwindling number of hours, minutes, seconds.

My precarious diagnosis triggers a series of mental health assessments at the cancer clinic during which lovely and well-meaning counselors, all seemingly named Caitlin, are telling me to “find my meaning.” They wonder if I should consider making a “bucket list,” as many other patients have found the process to be clarifying. ...

It had not occurred to me, until now, that life’s wide road narrows to a dot on the horizon. I enjoyed the somedays I learned to conjure as a spectacularly unpopular child with a useful imagination. For several summers, I dreamed up a life on a farm on Prince Edward Island to attend a country school with Anne of Green Gables and her kindred spirits. ...

I did not understand that one future comes at the exclusion of all others.

Everybody pretends that you die only once. But that’s not true. You can die a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.

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Asserting Our American Christian And Classical Heritage: A Summer Of Reading On The Constitution

Matthew G. Andersson (B.A. Texas; MBA Chicago), Asserting Our American Christian and Classical Heritage, A Summer of Reading on the Constitution:

Order in the new republic was impossible without law, but law impossible without morality, and morality was impossible without religion. For early American jurists and scholars, in an attitude quite foreign to us now, the common law was of “obligation indispensable” and of “origin divine.” Indeed, to one United States Supreme Court Associate Justice, Joseph Story, it was the duty of the American government to promote the Christian religion, to aid in the salvation of American citizens.
—Stephen Presser, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus, Northwestern University School of Law

It is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a Divine revelation, to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects.
—Joseph Story, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, Dane Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States 260 (1840)

In the beautiful summer months of America, many of us make a stack of books that we meant to get to during the rest of the year. ...  [W]e have some peace and solitude, to read, contemplate, and enjoy some great books.  I’ve read several in the subjects of American constitutional law and history, and thought I would share with you, some of these books, and most importantly, what messages they contain about our great Nation, and the traditions we should be proud of, along with some challenges, and risks, that we will have to confront. ... 

Over this Summer I’ve read many books in law, as part of a larger law book project that I’ve undertaken. A few of these (out of dozens) have struck me as especially poignant, if inspirational (and a few cautionary) and I’d like to share some of them with you, in a brief discussion concerning the philosophical basis of our country, which in my view needs continuous refreshing and remembrance, but more, a continuous effort in understanding, and an effort that results in personal “ownership” of American principles that invite us to strive for higher order functioning among ourselves, independently, and as a group, seeking a more unitary, rather than divisive, culture. ...

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Hamilton Reviews The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path From Student To Lawyer

Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas; Google Scholar), Book Review, 69 J. Legal Educ. 224 (2019) (reviewing Patrick Emery Longan (Mercer), Daisy Hurst Floyd (Mercer) & Timothy W. Floyd (Mercer), The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer (2020)): 

The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer provides much-needed concise and effective curriculum to address two closely related fundamental challenges for each law student and law school. The fundamental challenge for each law student is how to grow from being an aspiring entrantto-the-profession student to being a lawyer with adequate competency on the full array of capacities and skills that employers and clients want and need. The fundamental and complementary challenge for each law school—and for higher education for the professions generally—is how most effectively to foster each new student’s growth from being an aspiring-entrant student to being a licensed contributing member of the profession.

Starting more than twenty years ago, medical educators realized that emphasis on doctrinal medical knowledge and cognitive analytical skills, even when those skills are being applied in a clinical context, was insufficient to meet patient and population needs. Medical education has been moving toward more emphasis on patient-focused and teamwork centered medical care. 

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Federal Tax Procedure (2021 Practitioner Edition)

John A. Townsend (Houston), Federal Tax Procedure (2021 Practitioner Ed.) (1,060 pages):

Federal Tax Procedure is a book originally prepared for a course on Tax Procedure taught by Adjunct Professor Townsend at the University of Houston School of Law (through the Fall of 2015). The book is updated annually in August. This is the 2021 edition. The book and related materials contain text discussion, relevant Code Section citations, and certain cases designed to encourage students to think about the Tax Procedure process. The book is in electronic format (Adobe Acrobat PDF format) and is in two versions: (1) a Student Edition (no footnotes); and (2) a Practitioner Edition (same as Student Edition but including footnotes). This is the Practitioner Edition. Both versions are available on Mr. Townsend's SSRN web page.

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NY Times: Why We Need To Start Talking About God

New York Times op-ed:  Why We Need to Start Talking About God, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year) , :

Karl Barth, a 20th-century Swiss theologian, is credited with saying that Christians must live our lives with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth, who was a leader of a group of Christians in Germany resisting Hitler, understood that faith is not a pious, protective bubble shielding us from the urgent needs of the world. It is the very impetus that leads us into active engagement with society. People of faith must immerse ourselves in messy questions of how to live faithfully in a particular moment with particular headlines calling for particular attention and particular responses.

While Christians and other religious people may wonder how broader culture affects our faith (or why we must hold a newspaper in one hand), others may wonder why faith is relevant to the contemporary world at all (or why we hold a Bible in the other). Membership in a house of worship has declined steadily in the United States over the past eight decades and, according to a Gallup poll, dropped below 50 percent this year. ...

As a pastor, I see again and again that in defining moments of people’s lives — the birth of children, struggles in marriage, deep loss and disappointment, moral crossroads, facing death — they talk about God and the spiritual life. In these most tender moments, even those who aren’t sure what exactly they believe cannot avoid big questions of meaning: who we are, what we are here for, why we believe what we believe, why beauty and horror exist.

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NY Times: A More Secular America Is A Problem For Both Republicans And Democrats

New York Times op-ed:  A More Secular America Is Not Just a Problem for Republicans, by Ryan Burge (Baptist Pastor; Author, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (2021); and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Eastern Illinois University):

Since 1988, the General Social Survey has been asking Americans of different ages what they believe about God. For decades, the answer did not change much. Around 70 percent of members of the Silent Generation said that they “know God really exists” and “have no doubts about it.” That same sentiment was shared by about 63 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers.

But in 2018, millennials expressed a lot less certainty. Only 44 percent had no doubts about the existence of God. Even more doubtful were members of Generation Z — just one-third claimed certain belief in God.

Today, scholars are finding that by almost any metric they use to measure religiosity, younger generations are much more secular than their parents or grandparents. In responses to survey questions, over 40 percent of the youngest Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just a quarter say they attend religious services weekly or more.

Americans have not come to terms with how this cultural shift will affect so many facets of society — and that’s no more apparent than when it comes to the future of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

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10 Summer Book Recommendations For Tax Attorneys

Law360, 10 Summer Book Recommendations For Tax Attorneys:

As practitioners monitor the latest developments in tax legislation on Capitol Hill or tax controversy in the courts, they may want to take a break at the beach or pool with a captivating book.

Here, Law360 recommends 10 books for tax practitioners' summer reading lists. ...

The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — and How We Can Fix It by Dorothy A. Brown

In The Whiteness of Wealth, Emory University tax law professor Dorothy Brown takes a deep dive into the racial biases that exist in the Internal Revenue Code and how they contribute to the growing wealth gap between Black and white Americans.

Francine J. Lipman, a law professor at the University of Nevada, said the book was a must-read for anyone interested in law, economics, finance or civil rights because it is a thoroughly researched explanation of historic and current racism in the federal tax system.

Brown's writing is engaging because she is a natural storyteller who recounts not only her family's story but the stories of many Black families who have been subject to excess taxation because of the color of their skin, Lipman said.

"The storytelling includes American history and seminal tax cases that evince white privilege and the federal institutions that supported and support our exploding racial wealth gap," she said. "Brown closes the book with proposals that include several constitutional law discussions that are critical to understand as America focuses on remedying past wrongs."

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Escaping The Efficiency Trap—And Finding Some Peace Of Mind

Wall Street Journal Essay:  Escaping the Efficiency Trap—And Finding Some Peace Of Mind, by Oliver Burkeman (Author, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)):

The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important is that you definitely never will. The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: There’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.

That’s because if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goal posts start to shift: More things will begin to seem important, meaningful or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. Figure out how to spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend more time exercising or to join the parent-teacher association—oh, and isn’t it finally time you learned to meditate? Get around to launching the side business you’ve dreamed of for years, and if it succeeds, it won’t be long before you’re no longer satisfied with keeping it small.

The general principle in operation here is what we might call the “efficiency trap.”

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Morse Reviews Brown's The Whiteness Of Wealth

Susan Morse (Texas; Google Scholar), Tax and Race (JOTWELL) (reviewing Dorothy A. Brown (Emory), The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It (2021)):

Almost twenty-five years ago, Professor Dorothy Brown started writing law review articles (such as here, here and here) in which she applies critical race theory to tax law. This year, she published The Whiteness of Wealth, a book that not only claimed waves of popular and media attention but also provides a definitive statement of her longstanding scholarly project. The book offers a detailed case study of structural racism in law. It merits sustained attention from teachers and researchers, tax and otherwise.

Brown’s project has a descriptive component and a normative component. The descriptive component is based in cold logic, though made more accessible with stories from original interviews and from Brown’s family history. The logical equation is this: facially neutral tax law doctrine plus empirically different experiences based on race equals disparate impact that systematically favors white taxpayers and white wealth. In 2016, the median wealth of Black households was $17,100; of Latinx households, $20,600; of white households, $171,000. (P. 18.) Brown explains that tax law–not personal choice–explains a large part of this wide and persistent divide. She further argues that as a normative matter, equity and fairness require tax policy to reject rules that disadvantage “black families’ financial and social structures.” (P. 41.) ...

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Hartung Reviews Levit & Rostron's Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning And Making A Difference In Law

Stephanie Roberts Hartung (Northeastern), Book Review, 69 J. Legal Educ. 217 (2019) (reviewing Nancy Levit (UMKC) & Allen Rostron (UMKC), eds., Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law, Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2019): 

Scott Turow’s One L, the widely read account of his first year at Harvard Law School in 1975, is said to have “frightened, informed, and inspired a generation of lawyers-to-be”. Beyond One L: Stories About Finding Meaning and Making a Difference in Law, published nearly 45 years later, is billed as a “collection of stories taking a further look at the often dramatic and sometimes traumatic experience of embarking on the study of law”. While One L ostensibly described “universal truths” (xi) about law school in the 1970s, Beyond One L illustrates how dramatically the law school experience has changed since Turow arrived at Harvard as part of a first-year class that was overwhelmingly “male, white, and straight”. At the same time, Beyond One L’s collection of essays, which includes entries from several well-known figures in legal education, reminds us how many aspects of legal education remain the same.

In the face of difficult and polarizing times, when lawyering and the rule of law are frequently perceived as under attack, Beyond One L offers “an antidote to disillusionment with the legal profession” through storytelling.

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Martinez Reviews Infanti's Our Selfish Tax Laws

Leo P. Martinez (UC-Hastings), Book Review, 47 Hastings Const. L.Q. 467 (2020) (reviewing Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh; Google Scholar), Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves (MIT Press 2018)) (reviewed by Bridget J. Crawford (Pace; Google Scholar) & Ashley Unangst (J.D. 2020, Pace), A Picture of Society with Critical Tax Theory As Its Interpreter, 41 J. Am. Tax'n Ass'n 128 (2019); and Clint Wallace (South Carolina), Tax Policy and Our Democracy, 118 Mich. L. Rev. 1233 (2020)):

Professor Infanti does everyone a service by using comparative law principles to inform the tax policy debate. The lack of discipline overlap—tax law and constitutional law come easily to mind—only worsens the scarcity of scholarship that examines the Code in nuanced and constructive ways.

In his book, Tony Infanti uses comparative law principles to show how effective it can be to look at tax law in a different light Professor Infanti has chosen two separate areas as his vehicles for comparative illustration and examination of the selfishness of tax law: (1) U.S. housing policy and (2) the concept of the tax unit. With this part of the book, he delves into each area and points out how they fail to serve those who are already underserved. These areas are worthy of his insights because both are fundamental to the way the tax system affects taxpayers.

Conclusion
My friend Professor Emerita Margaret Montoya, has observed “budgets are moral documents; budgets, including tax expenditures, expose and reveal our lawmakers’ values and commitments.” While she is undoubtedly correct and unquestionably eloquent in her observation, Professor Infanti’s book reveals that she was too narrow in her formulation. The Code exposes not only lawmakers’ values and commitments but our own. As Professor Infanti would agree, we can do better.

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Regulation and Tax in Space

Galya Savir, Regulation and Tax in Space (Wolters Kluwer 2021):

Regulation and Tax in Space, authored by a tax attorney with first-hand knowledge of the aerospace issues involved, is the first book to delve deep into the yet-to-be-resolved practicalities of taxation of resources mined in space. By international consensus, space is considered as a commons for all humanity. Now, however, as space activities and technologies are chiefly focused on commercial interests in extraterrestrial mineral resources, the mechanisms for allocating space mining resources must be sketched out to balance the efficient use of resources with a fair and stable tax system.

What’s in this book
Arguing that the space mining industry should be regulated in a way that will ensure an attractive investment climate for space entrepreneurs and the existence of a stable fiscal regime that will finance the costs of conservation and utilization of space resources, the author advocates for an international royalty system to help achieve industry goals, such as efficiency, administrative convenience, and sustainability. The book explores the following aspects of the topic:

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Infanti & Crawford: A Taxing Feminism

Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh; Google Scholar) & Bridget J. Crawford (Pace; Google Scholar), A Taxing Feminism, in The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Law in the United States (Deborah L. Brake (Pittsburgh), Martha Chamallas (Ohio State) & Verna Williams (Dean, Cincinnati) eds. 2021):

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. The first academic piece bringing a feminist perspective to bear on tax law dates to the early 1970s, when Grace Blumberg published Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers. Contemporaneously, none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg (along with her tax lawyer husband Marty Ginsburg) brought a feminist perspective to bear on tax law when she argued Moritz v. Commissioner before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as depicted in the movie On the Basis of Sex. Since then, numerous other contributions have been made to the tax literature identifying ways in which a feminist perspective might influence tax reform debates.

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Colella Reviews Rebellion, Rascals, And Revenue: Tax Follies And Wisdom Through The Ages

Frank G. Colella (Pace), A Look Back at the Global Certainty of Taxation Across the Centuries, N.Y.L.J., Vol. 265, No. 90, p. 6 (May 11, 2021) (reviewing Michael Keen (IMF) & Joel Slemrod (Michigan; Google Scholar), Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages (Princeton University Press 2021)):

While modern medicine continues to push the boundaries of longevity, if death were ever miraculously vanquished, taxation would nevertheless survive (albeit sans estate and inheritance taxes) – leaving us with only one of the two former certainties.

If Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod’s eye-opening tour of the global history of taxation teaches one overarching lesson, it is that, whatever the society, its rulers will extract a “tax” from the citizenry. The tax stories they relate span from the earliest victors who took payment via the “plunder” of their victims to taxation in the digital age.

Other reviews of Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages:

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Michelle Singletary Reviews Dorothy Brown's Whiteness Of Wealth: 'Go Big Or Go Home'

Michelle Singletary reviews Dorothy Brown's new book, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It (2021), in the Washington Post:

Dorothy Brown thought tax law was colorblind.

But decades of research proved otherwise. Now a professor of law at Emory University, Brown has written a book laying out how racism is built into the U.S. tax system, contributing to the wealth gap for Black people.

“What people tend to say is, ‘Well, the tax laws can’t discriminate, because there’s nothing in the tax law that says Blacks pay more, Whites pay less.’ And that’s true,” Brown said in an interview.

But if you look at how certain provisions got into the tax code, there’s a racialized history that has generally favored White Americans.

“Our tax laws were designed with White Americans in mind,” she writes. “That’s why no solution proposed by either the right or left — not better jobs, not increased homeownership, and not more access to higher education — will be effective without significant and fundamental tax reform.”

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Two Great Books: Settle It! ... And Be Blessed And The Problem Solver

One of the many great joys of deaning is getting to meet amazing alums. I recently had lunch with Tom Gehring ('79) and was spellbound to hear about how Tom has fused Pepperdine's twin pillars of excellence and faith in his 42-year career as embodied in his two books:

Settle It! ... And Be Blessed:

There comes a time in your life when you have to settle it. Be done with it. It’s time. Do not let things drag on. Weigh you down. Stop you from progressing. Stop you from proceeding with your mission in life. It’s not worth it. It never is. It never will be. You, who are reading this, are a precious person. Your potential is real. Your potential is unfathomable. You have much to give. Whatever it is in your life that you need to settle, a lawsuit, a dispute with a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a business partner, a personal problem, a bad habit, an addiction—do it now. You will be blessed if you do. And you will be a blessing to others. Settle It! Now. And get back to your blessing.

Tom has worked tirelessly with my son, Matthew, and me for the last fifteen years at the
Dream Center. I've seen the results of his work in our outreach programs, on the streets of
Los Angeles, and in some of the most sophisticated and complex courtrooms in the country.
Read this book and understand what he means when he says, Settle It! ...and be Blessed.
-Pastor Tommy Barnett, Founder of the Los Angeles Dream Center

Columbo and Atticus Finch meet Jesus Christ...and they are a powerful team...in and out of
court. Get ready to meet Lukewarmers, Blue Angels, Tunic Collectors, Assyrians, and a whole cast of characters in this parable, yet 'journaling' life story. Tom Gehring's journey from secular to Christian lawyer reads like a mystery novel...you can't wait for the next clue. It's a story of despair yet faith, perseverance yet resignation and ultimately the triumph of the soul. A must read for both believers and non-believers. Christians 10, Lions 0.
-California Congressman David Dreier

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How An Autistic Man With Cerebral Palsy Found His Faith

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  The Faith of an Autistic Man, by Jory Fleming (Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University; Author, How to Be Human: An Autistic Man’s Guide to Life (2021)):

It was an unlikely connection. A literal, logical person, challenged by basic verbal communication, and an unseen spirit, who communicates through the Word. Yet I reached out to God, and he reached out to me. We both answered the other’s call.

As an autistic person, I struggle to make connections. I did not communicate much as a young child and only barely as an adolescent. Even now, my thoughts exist independent of language. My mind undergoes a vast translation process, back and forth, to relate to the human world.

Yet the Christian faith spoke to me through one word: love. I often feel as if, by relying on only a single word, God designed this message for people like me. There is no complicated work to interpret that message. You are loved by your Creator. You are commanded to love others and also to love yourself.

It frequently surprises people that my faith is based entirely on logic and reason. It has no emotional base. Many may wonder how that squares with the message of love. But to me, it comes down to the principle of mutual recognition: If you believe in a Creator, then you believe that the Creator knows his own handiwork. You believe that each of us has a place, has equal value, and fully belongs in this world. There is not one correct path to life or to God. Mine may be unusual, but it can still be strong.

I first contemplated the Christian faith when I was in high school and began engaging more with the outside world. Beyond autism, I have a metabolic condition and cerebral palsy. The limits placed on me by my disabilities were a daily reminder of my own brokenness. The only part of my body that was not negatively impacted was my mind. And I used it to come to a fuller understanding of God. ...

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Academic Law Libraries And Legal Education: A Primer For Deans And Provosts

Academic Law Libraries Within the Changing Landscape of Legal Education: A Primer for Deans and Provosts (Joan S. Howland (Minnesota), Scott B. Pagel (George Washington) &  Michelle M. Wu (Georgetown) eds., 2020) (2021 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award):

In a world where technology advances appear daily, deans and provosts often have questions about law libraries, their purposes, and whether technological innovations should lead to changes in library spaces, collections, and/or services. This book seeks to answer those questions, which came straight from deans, examining the factors involved in an analysis of what a community needs from their library, and demonstrating why the answer to these questions might vary from library to library.

The commentaries by multiple directors will be useful to highlight different approaches in analysis as well as changing cultures in law libraries. This valuable title will be of help to newer and experienced law library directors, law school deans, and university provosts (where the university has a law school).

Contributors:

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Law Professor’s Desk Reference: A Handbook For Work And Life In The Legal Academy

Jon M. Garon (Nova), Law Professor’s Desk Reference: A Handbook for Work and Life in the Legal Academy (2021):

Law Professor's Desk Reference serves as a how-to guide for faculty members, addressing the everyday issues that shape legal education as well as the growing external social and economic pressures reconceptualizing the study of law. Law school faculty members are expected to be legal scholars, effective teachers, and engaged institutional partners, but the information essential to develop these fundamentals skills has not been published in one single source, until now.

The book provides a foundation to help faculty develop the best practices for student learning and engagement. It provides an important summary of learning outcomes, formative assessment, summative assessment, course design, and the operational mechanics needed to be an effective classroom and online teacher.

The book offers faculty members a roadmap to develop meaningful scholarship with practical advice on how best to create a sustainable scholarly agenda. It explores the role faculty play in shared governance for their institutions. It addresses academic freedom, hiring procedures, tenure, and status issues. It also covers accreditation and various regulations on accessibility, accommodation requirements, Title IX, employment laws, plagiarism, and much more.

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NY Times: How Long Should It Take To Give Away Millions?

New York Times, How Long Should It Take to Give Away Millions?:

The billionaires, former government officials and academics gathered in a Manhattan conference room to brainstorm solutions to a problem they had all been working on from various angles: how best to update the laws governing philanthropy, most of which were half a century old.

Over sandwiches, sketching their ideas out on whiteboards, they discussed donor-advised funds, a kind of financial way station that allows givers to claim all the tax benefits of donations upfront while leaving the money parked with large firms like Fidelity Charitable or Schwab Charitable or with large community foundations like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Today, one out of every eight dollars bound for charities in the United States is channeled into a donor-advised fund.

The participants wanted, among other reforms, to ensure that money stashed in donor-advised funds, which had already earned those donors significant tax savings, ended up in the hands of working charities more quickly. But there was a general recognition in the room that movement would be slow and incremental, if it happened at all.

That was January 2020.

On Wednesday, the effort will make its way to Congress, where Senators Angus King of Maine and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa are introducing legislation to attempt a version of what the group outlined in that first brainstorming session: a way of ensuring that money promised to charity more quickly gets to the people who need it.

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Phillips: The Cost Of My Faith

Jack Phillips (Owner, Masterpiece Cakeshop), The Cost of My Faith: How a Decision in My Cake Shop Took Me to the Supreme Court (May 25, 2021): Why I Didn't "Just Bake the Cake":

My decision in the cake shop that summer afternoon in July 2012—and my continuing decision to stand by it ever since—has cost me at least tens of thousands of dollars in revenue and eight years and counting of physical threats to my family, insults to my character, and untold hours tied up in legal action of one form or another. Given this, I’m sure there’s an excellent chance that you’re wondering, “What on earth is this guy’s thing about marriage? Is it really that big a deal? Is it really worth all of this pain and aggravation?” Or, as many people have put it, “Why not just bake the cake?”

My hesitation was not with the men making the request. My objection is never to the person, the customer, asking me to create a cake with a particular message. My objection—in this case—is to the message itself. I can and cheerfully will serve anyone. I cannot and won’t communicate every message.

I have demurred from creating a lot of non-wedding cakes. I don’t do Halloween cakes, for instance. I personally cannot see Jesus celebrating that day, or encouraging me to do so, especially if the motivation is to glorify things the Bible so explicitly condemns. ...

Where do we think artistic creativity comes from? Something outside of ourselves? Of course not. It’s water from the fountain of our soul. It comes from that deep-down place inside each of us where our experiences, our understanding, our intuitions, and our deepest beliefs and convictions about life all stir together. Those can’t be separated from each other any more than you can sift out the various ingredients from a cake after it’s baked.

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To Boost Productivity, Lawyers And Law Students Should 'Socially Distance' From Their Phones

Karen Sloan (Law.com0, To Boost Productivity, Lawyers and Law Students Should 'Socially Distance' From Their Phones:

Suffolk University law professor Shailini George wrote the book on distracted law students—literally.

Her new book, titled, “The Law Student’s Guide To Doing Well and Being Well,” relies on neuroscience research to map out how lawyers and law students can curb the many distractions of modern life (ahem, smartphones) and increase their focus and productivity. George makes the case that multitasking drains our mental energy and that all-night cram sessions are less effective than focused, 50-minute study periods.

Law.com caught up with George to discuss her findings, how lawyers and law students can be more efficient with their time and why smartphones remind her of an infant’s pacifier. Her answers have been edited for length. ...

Has the advent of the smartphone exacerbated this distraction problem?
It absolutely has. I’ll be honest, this is me too. But what you see with students is that the phone never leaves their hands. It reminds me of my children when they were infants, who liked pacifiers. They didn’t need the pacifier in their mouth—they wanted to hold onto the pacifier. Just knowing it was there was comforting. I think it’s a similar phenomenon with people and their phones—in the grocery store, in class, driving. Everybody has a phone in their hand, and they’re filling every spare moment of their time scrolling on their phones. It does cause you not to be able to keep your focus on any one item. ...

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Shanske: A Brief Theory Of Taxation And Framework Public Goods

Darien Shanske (UC-Davis), A Brief Theory of Taxation and Framework Public Goods, in Tax Justice and Tax Law: Understanding Unfairness in Tax Systems (Dominic de Cogan (Cambridge) & Peter Harris (Cambridge) eds. 2020):

The literature on the question of how best to distribute the burden of taxation is technical and vast. However, in order for there to be a tax burden to distribute, there must first be a relatively stable social order that establishes, among other things, property rights. But the establishing of property rights is not costless; some revenue must have already been collected. How does one evaluate the distributive implications of a system of revenue collection that is a precondition for distributive questions? The dominant response to this question is to move beyond it by noting that, as a matter of fact, we are no longer in this liminal position and so we can sensibly discuss how best to distribute the tax burden.

In this short chapter I argue for two basic points: First, as to the funding of the set of basic goods that make distributive questions possible, which I call “framework” goods, there is a strong argument that we should relax our demands for use of the “best” tax system.

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Legal’s AI Rocket Ship Will Be Manned

Dan Currell (AdvanceLaw), Legal’s AI Rocket Ship Will Be Manned:

Will the world still need lawyers once AI gets really good?

The short answer is yes—and I believe it will still be yes no matter how good AI gets. My view is not universally accepted, so I will need to lay it out, and that will involve some claims about what humans are and whether a machine can ever be like that. This will shed considerable light on what lawyers essentially do, and help us to see how machines can help us to be better lawyers. ...

For this post, I will limit myself to three questions:

1. How are lawyers like humans?
2. Can AI do what humans do?
3. Will the world still need lawyers once AI gets really good?

Two really important books
Artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived in the legal profession.  Whether we should call it “intelligence” should, I think, be contested—but that is for a later post.  Whatever we call it, machines have matured to the point where every legal leader must urgently consider what advanced machines mean for his or her business.

At the same time, of course, AI has arrived in the world.  Few corners of society, economy and culture will be unaffected.

Fortunately, there are two books to meet this moment.  They can be easily read in self-contained chapters; you can put them both on the nightstand and alternate.  Your bedtime reading will foretell some of the most consequential legal and societal developments of the next decade.

• Noah Waisberg & Alexander Hudek, AI For Lawyers (2021)
• Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI (John Brockman ed. 2020)

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