Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, November 3, 2024

The Christian Case For Voting Democrat, Republican, And Third Party

Christianity Today Voting

Christianity Today, Bulletin: Stop. Look. Listen:

The Bulletin is a weekly (and sometimes more!) current events show from Christianity Today hosted and moderated by Clarissa Moll, with senior commentary from Russell Moore (Christianity Today’s editor in chief) and Mike Cosper (director, CT Media). ... [O]ur special Stop. Look. Listen. miniseries ... features thoughtful reflections from Christians on who they’re voting for in November’s presidential election.

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November 3, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Presidential Candidates Break Out Faith References In The Final Days Of The Campaign

Christianity Today, Candidates Break Out Faith References ‘For Such a Time as This’:

Overall, there’s been less focus on religious outreach by either campaign this election cycle, less talk of religion, and fewer faith events. Most Americans don’t see either candidate as particularly religious.

But in the final days of the campaign, both former president Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are doing more to evoke God in their messaging—and to appeal to Christian voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan.

Trump and Harris have held events in Georgia churches in recent weeks. They each offered remarks to different crowds on how the country needs faith—with contrasting ideas of how to live that out in office. ...

A new survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution has found that Christian support for the candidates splits on racial lines. 

CT

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November 3, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Unity Before And After November 5th

I sent the following email to our students last week:

Our Pepperdine Caruso Law community will join others across our nation in casting votes for leaders of our federal, state, and local governments this Tuesday, November 5, 2024. In this 60th presidential election in our nation’s history, we will once again exercise the power of self-government and embody the virtues of liberty, equality, and the rule of law upon which our constitutional republic stands.

As we cast our votes and await the collective will of our fellow citizens, our law school community will remain rooted in faith, hope, and love.

My wife Courtney and I invite you to come and share a meal together and hear a message of unity at the Dean’s Bible Study this Wednesday, November 6, at our on-campus home. All are welcome, regardless of your faith tradition (if any).

* 6:00 pm Dinner
* 7:00 pm Message (Bound Together in Christ: Embracing Unity in a Divided World) ...

Thank you for your commitment to one another and for being part of this very special community.

Trump Harris

Larissa Phillips (The Free Press), Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor:

I’m a Democrat living in a red, rural county. Trump supporters have mowed my lawn, walked my dog, and eroded my prejudices with their humanity.

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November 3, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink

Saturday, November 2, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Derek Muller (Notre Dame), Recent Trends In Law School Lateral Hiring, 2019-2024
  2. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Richard Amesbury (Arizona State) & Catherine O'Donnell (Arizona State)), Stop Defending Amy Wax: Academic Freedom Doesn’t Authorize Unprofessional Conduct
  3. American Enterprise Institute, College President Rankings
  4. Kris Franklin (New York Law School) & Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Defining The Discipline: Six Pillars Of Academic Success Programming In Law Schools
  5. Victoria Sutton (Texas Tech), Online Learning In Law Schools: The Pandemic Experiment
  6. National Law Journal, More Young Lawyers Are Entering Big Law With Mental Health Issues. Are Firms Ready To Accommodate Them?
  7. Inside Higher Ed, Faculty Presidential Election Survey: 78% Harris, 8% Trump
  8. Reuters, UC-San Francisco Law School Applications Surge 64%, Thanks To Alumna Kamala Harris
  9. Josh Blackman (South Texas), How To Reform Law Schools: Boycott Law Clerks (Judge Ho) Or Divest Funding (Judge Thapar)?
  10. Pepperdine  Newsroom, Pepperdine Caruso Law School Awards Honorary Degree To 98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor David Wiener

Tax:

  1. Tax Notes, 2024 Student Writing Competition Winner: Nicholas Lott (BYU)
  2. Call For Papers, The Law And Economics Of Wealth Management And Transmission
  3. Florida Seeks to Hire A Tax VAP
  4. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo), Review Of Taxing The Wealthy At The State Level By Brian Galle (Georgetown), David Gamage (Missouri) & Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)
  5. Benjamin Leff (American), Challenging The Johnson Amendment: What SAFE SPACE Gets Right — And Wrong
  6. Heather Field (UC-San Francisco), Tax Enforcement By The Private Sector—Deputizing Tax Insurers
  7. Itai Grinberg (Georgetown), Lecture On Pillar 2 And The OECD Tax Function At Vienna University
  8. Cliff Fleming (BYU), Robert Peroni (Texas) & Stephen Shay (Boston College), The U.S. Tax System’s Curious Embrace Of Manufacturing Job Losses
  9. SSRN, Tax Professor Rankings
  10. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo), International Tax Implications For Private Equity Investments

Faith

  1. Dispatch Faith (Samuel D. James), Our Curated Lives Are Walling Us Off From Others, And Ultimately From God
  2. Notre Dame Symposium, Liberalism, Christianity & Constitutionalism
  3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Pepperdine Caruso Law Bibles At The Supreme Court
  4. New York Times Op-Ed (Ross Douthat), Is the World Ready For A Religious Comeback?
  5. Pepperdine Newsroom, Pepperdine Caruso Law School Awards Honorary Degree To 98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor David Wiener

November 2, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, October 27, 2024

NY Times Op-Ed: Is the World Ready For A Religious Comeback?

New York Times Op-Ed:   Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?, by Ross Douthat:

Book coversThe world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground — especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia — as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief. 

It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for “cultural” Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.

I have skin in this game, since I will be offering my own attempt at persuasion next year. But the past few months have brought three religious books that enter this debate — covering the philosophical, the scientific and the experiential cases for a religious perspective on the world.

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October 27, 2024 in Book Club, Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

You Don’t Need A Rule of Life. You Need A Church.

Christianity Today:  You Don’t Need a Rule of Life. What You Need Is a Church., by Myles Werntz (Abilene Christian University; Google Scholar; Author, From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together (2022)):

Christianity TodayContemporary culture is brimming with exhortations to discipline. From Jordan Peterson’s runaway bestseller 12 Rules for Life to Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, we have no shortage of guidance for embracing a life of order. And that guidance isn’t all bad; wisdom from many corners can deepen our understanding of how to live well. Psychologists, Stoics, and even motivational speakers have contributions to make.

Some are even noticeably resonant with Scripture. Peterson’s rule “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world” echoes Jesus’ admonition to “take the plank out of your own eye” before issuing judgment (Matt. 7:3–5). And Clear’s suggestion that we reduce exposure to bad habits before building good ones fits well with Psalm 1:1. For popular fare, we could do worse than commending self-control in a culture entranced by the illusion of endless possibility.

The Christian take on this genre is more explicitly scripturally attuned and increasingly described, with a nod to the monastics, as a “rule of life.” These books offer practical instruction for Christians seeking to bring their finances, prayers, and daily habits into one cohesive vision, and some try to recover classical disciplines rooted in the Decalogue or in historic catechisms. But they can evince too little distinction from their secular counterparts and, relatedly, too little use for the church. 

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October 27, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Slog, Sacrifice, And Religion

Dispatch Faith:  Slog and Sacrifice: You Don’t Have to be Religious to Appreciate What Millennia of Religion Have Given Us., Jonah Goldberg (The Dispatch):

Dispatch Faith“Religiously informed culture,” Kevin Williamson recently wrote, “is another way of writing ‘culture.’” ...

Even the supposedly religion-free zones of modern life—science, law, Harvard faculty meetings, etc.—would not exist but for the Judeo-Christian foundation they stand upon. If a religion-free society is a garden, you can pluck virtually any flower from the soil and find long religious roots dangling below. (Indeed, to strain the metaphor further, some of the plants in the garden are more like potatoes or turnips than flowers in that they’re nearly all religious root, with the bits breathing secular air little more than a hint of what lurks below.) Human rights, universal equality, the sovereignty of the individual, higher education, and scientific inquiry—even the idea of secularism itself—are products or byproducts of Jewish and Christian thought.

For instance, Western science flows straight out of the Abrahamic revolution. “Postulating a single creator for the entire universe,” writes Walter Russell Mead, “leads to the belief that the universe is predictable and rule driven.” Therefore, the universe outside of our heads is discoverable and knowable through investigation. The scientific method has many catalysts —from alchemy to dye-making to the necessities of war—but even these things had religious aspects, and the systemization of science itself was the product of religious scholastic orders and institutions (like Harvard used to be). Modern astronomy is largely a Christian invention. (Yes, the Chinese had astronomers, too. But when they discovered that the Christians were better, they imported Jesuits to jobs the Chinese couldn’t do.) 

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October 27, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Pepperdine Caruso Law School Awards Honorary Degree To 98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor David Wiener

Wiener 2

Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law Presents Holocaust Survivor David Wiener with Honorary Law Degree:

On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law awarded 98-year-old Holocaust survivor David Wiener an honorary juris doctor degree during a ceremony at the Brock House on the Malibu campus. The event not only recognized Wiener’s remarkable life and resilience but also celebrated his lifelong dedication to Holocaust education.

Though he survived the horrors of Auschwitz and several labor camps during World War II, as recounted in his memoir Nothing to Lose But My Life, Wiener’s parents and all but one of his siblings were killed by the Nazis. Wiener immigrated to the United States in 1946, where he built a thriving upholstery business. Alongside his wife, also a Holocaust survivor, he contributed to various charitable organizations, including the Boys and Girls Club of Fontana, the US Holocaust Museum, and Hatzalah Israel. Wiener’s life of philanthropy and dedication to justice reflects the core values of Pepperdine, and the ceremony underscored the enduring importance of Holocaust remembrance. ...

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October 27, 2024 in Faith, Legal Ed News, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink

Saturday, October 26, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), 15% Through The Fall 2025 Law School Admissions Season: Applicants Are Up 25% (Black Applicants Are Up 45%)
  2. Wall Street Journal, Suspended Penn Law Professor Says She Has No Regrets
  3. Bloomberg Law, Law Firm Drops Columbia Law Prof As Client Over Israel-Gaza Speech
  4. Bloomberg Law, Conservative Federal Judge Urges Donors To Withhold Gifts Until Law Schools Hire Ideologically Diverse Faculty And Teach Originalism
  5. Penn State University News, Ten Years After Splitting Law School Between Two Locations, Penn State To Reunify In Carlisle
  6. Mark Pulliam (James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal), The ABA's Shift From Diversity Mandate To ‘Holistic’ Admissions Is Backdoor To Racial Preferences
  7. Raj Ashar (Harvard), BigLaw's Campus Reach
  8. NALP, Class Of 2023 Achieved Record Jobs Results, But Racial/Ethnic Disparities Persisted
  9. Call For Papers, 11th Annual Michigan Junior Scholars’ Conference
  10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), 5-Year Anniversary Of $50 Million Pepperdine Caruso Law Naming Gift

Tax:

  1. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  2. Critical Approaches to Taxation and Society, Conference On Taxation Without Borders
  3. Henry Ordower (St. Louis), Tax As Hybrid Law: Borrowing And Convergences
  4. DePaul Symposium, HBO's Succession
  5. Wei Cui (British Columbia), False Idols In The Early History Of International Taxation
  6. Wall Street Journal, He Was A Monk, Then A Billionaire, And Now An Alleged Tax Cheat
  7. Alex Zhang (Emory), The Origins Of U.S. Territorial Taxation And The Insular Cases
  8. ABA Tax Section, The Tax Lawyer Publishes New Issue
  9. Alex Zhang (Emory), Presentation Of Fiscal Autonomy In Subnational Taxation At UC-Irvine
  10. Sloan Speck (Colorado), Review Of A Theory Of The REIT By Jason Oh (UCLA) & Andrew Verstein (UCLA)

Faith

  1. Andrew Hayashi (Virginia), Christianity And The Liberal(ish) Income Tax
  2. Dispatch Faith (Samuel James), Our Curated Lives Are Walling Us Off From Others, And Ultimately From God
  3. New York Times Op-Ed (David French), Pope Francis Is Turning Certainty On Its Head
  4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Pepperdine Caruso Law Bibles At The Supreme Court
  5. Notre Dame Symposium, Liberalism, Christianity & Constitutionalism

October 26, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Our Curated Lives Are Walling Us Off From Others, And Ultimately From God

Dispatch Faith:  To Renew Culture, Give Up Control, by Samuel D. James (Digital Liturgies):

Dispatch FaithMusic streaming apps ... are a perfect example of how technology can now offer us almost total control over what we encounter. We can pick our songs, put our customized playlists on repeat, and skip anything we don’t want to listen to. We do not encounter music with surprise or serendipity. Some even opine that the traditional album, with its progressive track-by-track anticipation, is a dying artifact. Instead of unleashing our delight in music, the controllability of the streaming app mostly inspires us to make it background noise.

Yet with so much technological control, Americans and others in the West report higher levels of anxiety, depression, and despair than at any other recorded time in modern history. The modern therapeutic crisis comes as Western people possess an enormous amount of personal power over their daily lives, at least relative to previous generations. Yet the very aspects of life that have become more controllable are the ones that seem to be closest to the source of our angst.

Consider marriage and relationships. Dating apps have succeeded in giving singles much more control over their experiences; they can see pictures, read profiles, get “matched,” and swipe left or right without the frustration or risk of actually having to meet the person. On paper, this kind of matchmaking mastery should lead to fulfillment en masse. But it has not. In fact, marriage and fertility rates are in historic decline across many developed nations. Singles today are less likely than ever to be going on dates or even looking for a relationship. Loneliness, unfulfilled desires, and simmering resentment and polarization between the sexes are on the rise. ...

Living contrary to the secular worldview, by contrast, displaces the individual self from the center of the universe. If there are higher realities than me, then I must humbly accept my limits, including the limits of my control. Christians, for example, believe that God is completely in control of our lives, and that even suffering ultimately serves a purpose. This conviction means that the point of life cannot be merely to run from suffering or minimize risk. Even the things that cause us suffering can be reconciled as part of a divine plan to bless us.

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October 20, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

The Wild Robot: A Radical Sense Of Belonging And The Power Of Christian Hospitality

Mia Staub (Christianity Today), Behind the Story:

I recently watched a video of Andrew Garfield tearing up as he read aloud a love letter. He tearfully said, “This is why art is so important, because it can get us places that we can’t get to any other way.”

@nytimes "I'm sad at the transience of certain relationships in my life. I'm sad at losing my mother." The actor Andrew Garfield talked about love, loss and grief on "Modern Love." The result was a conversation unlike any other in the history of the show. Tap the link in bio to listen. #AndrewGarfield #loss #grief ♬ original sound - The New York Times

The Wild Robot does that. Watching it is like taking an emotional deep breath. Some of the emotions are easy to explain. Parents can empathize with the themes of motherhood and parenthood. Anyone who has felt like an outcast can see themselves in many of the characters throughout the film. But other emotions lie deeper below the surface and are much harder to explain. Why am I crying … in public … on a Saturday night … watching a beaver and a bear cuddle next to each other? Film, and art more generally, can reveal things within us that couldn’t be excavated any other way. The Wild Robot is art. It is beautiful, both stylistically and emotionally. There were shots where I genuinely gasped at how gorgeous they were. The film felt like a necessary reminder of the art of animation and story in a time where so many films are remakes, sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. The Wild Robot also presents us with a radical sense of belonging, reminding the Christian of the power of kingdom hospitality. Watching The Wild Robot was sort of like receiving a hug after crying in front of a friend.

Christianity Today, The Robot Will Lie Down With the Gosling:

Based on Peter Brown’s eponymous 2016 novel and brought to the screen in painterly style, the film tells the story of a robot stranded on an island and forced to adapt to her woodland surroundings. Programmed to be helpful, she soon takes as her task raising a gosling and preparing him for an upcoming migration.

Reminiscent of Ice Age, Wall-E, and The Iron GiantThe Wild Robot speaks to the vocation of motherhood, the clashes between nature and technology, and climate change. It also beautifully demonstrates the humility involved in hospitality. For the Christian, it’s a reminder of the countercultural practice of welcome. ...

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October 20, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Notre Dame Symposium: Liberalism, Christianity & Constitutionalism

Symposium, Liberalism, Christianity & Constitutionalism, 98 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1439-1730 (2023):

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October 20, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Scholarship | Permalink

Pepperdine Caruso Law Bibles At The Supreme Court

Last week, I had the honor of participating in one of my favorite events of the year:  moving the admission of Pepperdine Caruso Law alums into the U.S. Supreme Court Bar:

After the swearing-in ceremony, we watched the oral argument in Bufkin v. McDonough, No. 23-713. The issue in the case is whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims must ensure that the benefit-of-the-doubt rule in 38 U.S.C. § 5107(b) was properly applied during the claims process in order to satisfy 38 U.S.C. § 7261(b)(1), which directs the court to “take due account” of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ application of that rule. For coverage of the oral argument, see Law360, Justices Torn On Interpretation Of Veterans Benefits Law.

We added a new tradition this year by giving each of our alums Pepperdine Caruso Law-branded Bibles to mark the special occasion:

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October 20, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink

Saturday, October 19, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. NY Times, The University Of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong?
  2. Amy Levin (Loyola-L.A.), Law Students Aren't Alright
  3. California Supreme Court, No Alternative Path To Attorney Licensure; Bar Exam May Test CA Law On All Subjects (Not Just CivPro & Evidence)
  4. Virginia State Bar, July 2024 Bar Exam Results: Liberty Is #1
  5. Pittsburgh Symposium, Modern Legal Education And The Unmaking Of American Lawyers
  6. MacArthur Foundation, Dorothy Roberts (Penn) Named MacArthur Fellow
  7. Michael Conklin (Texas A&M), The Politics Of Prestige: Increasing Ideological Discrimination In Law School Rankings
  8. Reuters, 18% Surge In LSAT Registrants Augurs Well For Robust Fall 2025 Law School Admissions Season
  9. Scott Rempell (South Texas), A Blueprint To Reclaim Legal Education From External Rankers
  10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Visits Pepperdine Caruso Law School

Tax:

  1. Andrew Hayashi (Virginia), Christianity And The Liberal(ish) Income Tax
  2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Biden Administration
  3. Colin Heath (NYU), Taxing “Borrow” In “Buy/Borrow/Die”
  4. Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia), Presentation of Taxes And Tournaments At Columbia
  5. David Elkins (Netanya), Review Of The Realization Rule As A Legal Standard By Sloan Speck
  6. William Jordan (Iowa), Why 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt Status Does Not Count As Federal Financial Assistance Under Title IX
  7. ATPI Symposium, Hidden Gender Bias In Tax Law And Policy
  8. Lawrence Lokken (Florida), Dividend Equivalents
  9. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) & Darien Shanske (UC-Davis), State Digital Services Taxes: A Good And Permissible Idea
  10. Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) & JJ Wang (Michigan), Tax Delegation Post-Loper Bright

Faith

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Great Unfinished Pepperdine Caruso Law Symphony
  2. Andrew Hayashi (Virginia), Christianity And The Liberal(ish) Income Tax
  3. New York Times Op-Ed (David French), Pope Francis Is Turning Certainty On Its Head
  4. Christianity Today, Some Of Christianity’s Biggest Intellectual Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts
  5. Wall Street Journal, The Bible: A Global History

October 19, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Malice Toward None; Charity For All: Lincoln’s Vision Of Reconciliation For All Americans

Thomas J. Stipanowich (Pepperdine; Google Scholar), Malice Toward None; Charity for All: Lincoln’s Vision of Reconciliation for All Americans, ABA Dispute Resolution Magazine (Sept. 2024):

Lincoln Dispute Resolution Magazine Cover 2024With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.

The closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address are among the most remarkable ever spoken by any leader—let alone a war leader looking ahead after four years of civil conflict that tore a nation apart, divided families, and inflicted untold bloodshed and suffering. Though the war still raged, Lincoln’s towering rhetoric framed an appeal to Americans North and South to look forward to a time when hatred and bloodletting gave way to healing and mutual understanding. It was an extraordinarily hopeful vision, especially given the centuries-old common heritage at the heart of the conflict: Black slavery. Thanks largely to Lincoln’s leadership, millions of enslaved Black Americans were now free, or hopeful of freedom from enslavement. Lincoln’s vision of reconciliation included them all.

The task Lincoln faced during his presidency may be viewed as a kind of vast, complex “negotiation” involving interactions with a wide array of stakeholders with disparate interests and aims. In this mega-negotiation, Lincoln brought to bear a variety of tools and sources of power and leverage, of which military power was but one. Over time, the aim of preserving the Union evolved into creating a more perfect Union by means of what might be called “Lincoln’s Triad”: restoring the integrity of the Union, Emancipation of Black slaves, and, finally, mutual reconciliation on a national scale. Along the way, a major “new” group of stakeholders, Black Americans, would be invited to the table from which they had so long been barred.

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October 15, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink

Sunday, October 13, 2024

NY Times Op-Ed: Pope Francis Is Turning Certainty On Its Head

New York Times Op-Ed:  Pope Francis Is Turning Certainty on Its Head, by David French (Author, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (2020)):

French (2024)Pope Francis made two comments last week that touched off a tempest in Christendom.

First, during an interreligious meeting at Catholic Junior College in Singapore, he said that religions are “like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. And if God is God for all, then we are all sons and daughters of God.”

The idea that we are sons and daughters of God is basic Christian doctrine. He is the creator, and we are his creation. But the pope’s statements go farther than simply recognizing God’s sovereignty. He indicated that other faiths can reach God as well. “But,” he continued, “‘my God is more important than your God!’ Is that true? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language, so to speak, in order to arrive at God.”

Then, in a news conference on his flight home, he addressed the American presidential election and criticized both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. “Both are against life,” the pope said, Harris because of her stance on abortion and Trump because of his stance on immigration. Pope Francis would not choose between them. Instead, he said, “Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

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October 13, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Who’s The Christian Presidential Candidate? Americans Say Neither

Christianity Today, Who’s the Christian Candidate? Americans Say Neither:

Most Americans don’t see either of this year’s presidential candidates as particularly religious or Christian.

In a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, 64 percent of adults said they don’t consider former president Donald Trump religious and 53 percent said they don’t consider Kamala Harris religious. A majority also agreed that they wouldn’t describe either as “Christian.”

A plurality of Americans—41 percent—say neither Trump nor Harris represents their religious views.  

AP NORC

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October 13, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Hayashi: Christianity And The Liberal(ish) Income Tax

Andrew T. Hayashi (Virginia; Google Scholar), Christianity and the Liberal(ish) Income Tax, 38 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 129 (2024):

Notre dame jleppLiberalism is back on its heels, pushed there by political movements in the United States and Europe and by the critiques of legal scholars and political theorists. Some of the most vigorous recent critiques of liberalism have come from Christian scholars arguing from Christian perspectives. These scholars criticize what they regard as liberalism’s false neutrality and false anthropology, defects alleged to threaten both religious freedom and human flourishing more generally. Some propose to commandeer the state’s legal apparatus to steer society toward the common good as they understand it. Others only want the liberal state to accommodate insular Christian communities. Tax law is a natural place for both sets of critics to focus their attention, given the pervasive influence tax has over individual and corporate activity. And yet, tax law has been mostly ignored. In this article, I evaluate just how “liberal” is federal income tax law, and I explore sites of tension between Christian commitments and the income tax’s liberal features. I conclude that income tax law is liberal—in the main and generally in its aspirations—but that even Christian scholars with misgivings about liberalism should leave tax law with its liberal features.

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October 13, 2024 in Faith, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Saturday, October 12, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. New York Times Op-Ed (John McWhorter), Amy Wax Is Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous. She Shouldn’t Be Punished.
  2. George Mason University News, Statement On Scalia Law School Finances: ‘Most Law Schools Would Run Deficits If They Relied Only On JD Revenue’
  3. The Recorder, California Bar Examiners Endorse Switch To Kaplan Exam; Ball Is Back In Supreme Court's Court
  4. AALS, Statements Of Good Practices For Faculty Recruitment, Hiring, Retention, And Resignation
  5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), July 2024 Florida Bar Exam Results: For The First Time In Ten Years, Florida International Is Not #1
  6. Brian Leiter (Chicago), ABA Journal & Law.com, More Commentary On The ABA's Proposed Changes To Law School Diversity Accreditation Standard
  7. Salt Lake City Tribune, BYU Law School Dean Contributed To Project 2025 — And Then Later Had His Name Removed
  8. Law360, Law Firm Reactions To Campus Protests May Chill DEI Efforts
  9. NBC News, Notre Dame Law School’s Growing Influence On The Supreme Court
  10. Reuters, Bar Exam Pass Rates Are Up In 70% Of States

Tax:

  1. Washington Post, Meet The Black-Belt, Tattooed IRS Official Who Saved 23 Children From Their Abusers
  2. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: To Get Deductions For Criminal Activity, Make It Your Business
  3. Donald Tobin (Maryland), Presentation of Have Your Cake And Eat It Too, An Apportioned Wealth Tax At Boston College
  4. William Gale (Brookings Institution), Jeffrey Hoopes (North Carolina) & Kyle Pomerleau (American Enterprise Institute), Sweeping Changes And An Uncertain Legacy: The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Of 2017
  5. Law.com, Cravath's Len Teti On ‘The Human Side Of Tax Law’
  6. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  7. Doron Narotzki (Akron), Narotzki Posts Two Tax Papers On SSRN
  8. Sloan Speck (Colorado), The Realization Rule As A Legal Standard
  9. Edward McCaffery (USC) & Darryll Jones (Florida A&M), The Curiouser And Curiouser Case Of Carried Interests
  10. Diane Ring (Boston College), Presentation of The Conflictual Core Of Global Tax Corporation At UC-Irvine

Faith

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Great Unfinished Pepperdine Caruso Law Symphony
  2. Christianity Today, Some Of Christianity’s Biggest Intellectual Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts
  3. Wall Street Journal, The Bible: A Global History
  4. New York Times Op-Ed (Ross Douthat), The Impact Of A Masculine Religious Revival On The Church And Society
  5. Pepperdine Graphic, Pepperdine Caruso Law School Hosts Discussion On Abortion And Religious Freedom

October 12, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

October 7, 2023 And 2024

Last year, I wrote:

Personal Statements on October 7I am the dean of a law school with four Jewish full-time faculty and perhaps the largest cohort of Jewish students among Los Angeles area law schools. One of those professors was in Israel for the High Holidays with his family on October 7 and taught his 1L contracts class remotely from Israel on October 9 in between visits to bomb shelters. On October 11, I attended a moving and overflowing community gathering hosted by our Jewish Law Students' Association and Associate Dean for Student Life and Spiritual Development. On October 18, for the first time in our six years hosting the weekly dinner and Bible study, my wife Courtney and I spoke to the gathered students, staff, and faculty. On October 23, another of our Jewish professors will open our monthly faculty meeting in prayer.

Now, two weeks after October 7, I feel compelled to share my thoughts, not in my capacity as dean, but as a human being and a Christian horrified by the savagery unleashed by Hamas on that day. My three dear friends on Pepperdine Caruso Law's senior leadership team also welcomed the opportunity to share their personal views as well.

Yesterday, October 7, 2024, my Courtney and I hopped on a bus in the law school parking lot with a group of students and faculty to visit the Nova Exhibition, which powerfully shows what happened at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October 7, 2023:

Bus

Nova Exhibition

At our law school dinner two weeks ago, Michael Avi Helfand, our Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion, shared what it has been like for Jewish students and professors at our Christian law school over the past year:

October 8, 2024 in Faith, Legal Ed News, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Some Of Christianity’s Biggest Intellectual Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts

Christianity Today:  Some of Christianity’s Biggest Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts, by Nathan Guy (Harding):

Christianity Today[A] new religious movement seems to be underway, perhaps just as offbeat as the Jesus People of the 1970s. I am talking about the growing number of “intellectual Christians”—people whose turn to faith is tethered far more to cognitive knowledge than to subjective experience. The general cultural trend on the ground is still shifting away from Christianity—most easily recognized by the exponential rise of the “nones.” But a curious trend is taking place among the elite, as a growing number of high-profile thought leaders and public figures are repudiating their antireligious paradigms in favor of the Christian framework.

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October 6, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

NY Times: The Impact Of A Masculine Religious Revival On The Church And Society

Following up on last week's post, New York Times, In A First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women:  New York Times Op-Ed:  The Possible Meanings of a Masculine Religious Revival, by Ross Douthat:

Douthat (2024)For some time now, going back to the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, if not earlier, I’ve been hearing anecdotes about young men showing up at churches in unexpected numbers. Unexpected because a gender gap in religion, where women are more likely to identify with and practice Christianity, has been a consistent feature of the American religious landscape going back generations.

But maybe not any longer, or at least not for America’s younger generations. My newsroom colleague Ruth Graham has a report this week that cites data from the American Enterprise Institute showing that more Gen Z women than Gen Z men describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated — a reversal of the pattern for every older age group. And she gives life to that data point with vignettes from the religious culture of Waco, Texas, where both church and campus life (at the Baptist-founded Baylor University) offer examples of greater male investment paired with female disaffection.

Since this is a newish trend, it’s amenable to all manner of speculative interpretations, but two competing ones stand out. A masculinization of American Christianity could be seen as yet another force driving the polarization of the sexes — the diverging ideological and educational paths of men and women that are probably linked to the declining rate at which they’re pairing off. Or it could be seen as a potential answer to that polarization, a positive sign for male-female relations in the long run. ...

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October 6, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

The Bible: A Global History

Wall Street Journal:  ‘The Bible’: A Book on a Mission, by Barton Swaim (reviewing Bruce Gordon (Yale Divinity School), The Bible: A Global History (2024)):

The Bible“One hundred years from my day,” Voltaire is supposed to have remarked, “there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.” Things haven’t worked out that way. The Bible is the foundational Scripture of a religion claiming a third of the planet’s population. Millions of copies are printed and sold every year, in hundreds of languages. Millions more are downloaded as apps and audiobooks. The Bible is printed and read illegally in some places, mocked and vilified in others, argued over everywhere. Its texts are studied, memorized, preached, interpreted and reinterpreted in churches, seminaries, small groups and prisons in every part of the world.

In “The Bible: A Global History,” Bruce Gordon chronicles the Christian Bible’s progression from a collection of ancient Hebrew and Greek texts—our word “Bible” is derived from the Greek biblia, “books”—to its present status as, in the author’s appropriately ambiguous phrase, “the most influential book in the world.”

Mr. Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale, is an accomplished historian of the Protestant Reformation; his 2009 biography of John Calvin is the finest modern life of the reformer. “The Bible,” in many ways a history of Christianity itself, is a marvelous work of scholarship and storytelling. Mr. Gordon chronicles the Christian canon’s beginnings and the early efforts to collect manuscripts into codices. He describes the Bible’s profound influence on the largely illiterate population of medieval Europe and its transformation into a source of individual spirituality in the Reformation and after. He relates the cultures of Bible-reading that sprang up in Europe and the New World and finally the Bible’s spread to India, Africa, South America and East Asia by the work of numberless translators, zealots, preachers and missionaries. ...

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October 6, 2024 in Book Club, Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Pepperdine Caruso Law School Hosts Discussion On Abortion And Religious Freedom

Pepperdine Graphic, Law School Hosts Discussion on Abortion and Religious Freedom:

Jessie hill-michael helfandThe Nootbaar and Ken Starr Institutes organized and held a lively discussion on abortion restrictions and reproductive rights, particularly on how several ongoing cases across the country relate to constitutional law and religious freedom at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law with around 50 attendees. ...

Jessie Hill, ... professor of law and associate dean for Research and Faculty Development at Case Western Reserve University, discusses abortion rights and religious freedom. Pepperdine professor Michael Helfand, ..., the Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion, moderated the discussion at the Caruso School of Law. ...

“We generally associate abortion with the liberal left and religion with the conservative right. Now we have a marriage of political ideas,” Hill said, while pointing to partisan policy and politics as a core reason. ...

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October 6, 2024 in Faith, Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, October 5, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Jewish News of Northern California, Protesters Force UC-Berkeley FedSoc Event On Judicial Reform in Israel To Shift Online; Dean Chemerinsky To Pursue Disciplinary Action Against Disruptive Students
  2. ABA, Guidance Memo On Standard 208: Academic Freedom And Freedom Of Expression
  3. Law360, King & Spalding Fights Bias Suit By Straight, White Female Over Summer Associate Diversity Fellowship Program
  4. Daily Business Review, 2025 Hourly Billing Rates For Elite Law Firms: $3,000 For Senior Partners, $1,000 For First Year Associates
  5. Derek Muller (Notre Dame) & Mike Spivey, Projected 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: 1-11
  6. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Alan Levinovitz), Are Colleges (And Law Schools) Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?
  7. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Great Unfinished Pepperdine Caruso Law Symphony
  8. Reuters, Critics Say Cutting 'Race And Ethnicity' From ABA Law School Diversity Accreditation Standard Goes Too Far
  9. Sam Williams (Idaho), Dissecting The Frog: How A Meme Explains The Westlaw/Lexis And Generational Divide
  10. David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), Ambitious Law Students Must Choose To Be On ‘Team Blue’ Or ‘Team Red’

Tax:

  1. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  2. University Of Florida Tax Incubator, Complexities, Discontinuities, And Unintended Consequences Of U.S. International Tax Rules
  3. Brian Leiter (Chicago), The 10 Most-Cited Tax Faculty
  4. Wall Street Journal Tax Report, A Tax-Shelter Crackdown Uncovers A Dentist’s ‘Smile High Trust’
  5. Tax Prof Jobs
  6. Daniel Schaffa (Richmond), Reimagining The Deduction For Employee Compensation
  7. Jack Wroldsen (Cal Poly), Section 1031 Offramps: Incentives For Small Investors To Sell Single-Family Rental Homes
  8. Blaine Saito (Ohio State), Review Of Winning By Losing: The Strategy Of Adverse Letter Ruling By Noah Marks (Duke)
  9. Kristelia García (Georgetown), Taxing Collusion
  10. SSRN, Tax Professor Rankings

Faith

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Great Unfinished Pepperdine Caruso Law Symphony
  2. Fox News Op-Ed (Mike Kerrigan), What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First
  3. Madeleine Kearns (The Free Press), The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils
  4. Christianity Today, Taste And See If The Show Is Good: How A Christian Can Revel In Breaking Bad And Better Call Saul
  5. New York Times, In A First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women

October 5, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, September 29, 2024

The Great Unfinished Pepperdine Caruso Law Symphony

I had the honor of speaking at our annual Pepperdine Caruso Law School Dinner last Saturday night at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles:

I previously blogged about the daily challenge I face Deaning While Stuttering. I am deeply grateful that my university and law school community continue to embrace me and overlook my shortcomings.

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September 29, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Pepperdine Legal Ed | Permalink | Comments (0)

NY Times:  In A First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women

New York Times, In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women, by Ruth Graham:

Grace Church WacoAt Grace Church in Waco, Texas, the Generation Z gender divide can be seen in the pews. It has the potential to reshape both politics and family life.

On a beautiful Sunday morning in early September, dozens of young men in Waco, Texas, started their day at Grace Church.

Men greeted visitors at the door, manned the information table and handed out bulletins. Four of the five musicians onstage were men. So was the pastor who delivered the sermon and most of the college students packing the first few rows.

“I’m so grateful for this church,” Ryan Amodei, 28, told the congregation before a second pastor, Buck Rogers, baptized him in a tank of water in the sanctuary.

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

The dynamics at Grace are a dramatic example of an emerging truth: For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

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September 29, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Trump Says He's Thinking More About God After Recent Assassination Attempts

The Christian Post, Trump Says He's Thinking More About God After Recent Assassination Attempts:

Trump PhotoFormer President Donald Trump suggested during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News' late-night show "Gutfeld!" that God allowed him to escape the two recent assassination attempts against him.

Making his first appearance on a broadcast or cable late-night show in an election cycle since 2016, Trump at first made light-hearted remarks with host Greg Gutfeld about the most recent attempt against his life on a golf course in Palm Beach, Florida. ...

The discussion took on a more serious tone as Trump reflected that being president is dangerous, especially if one's presidency is seen as "consequential."

"The only good thing is that it's always a consequential president that gets shot at, and fortunately so far, I've been very lucky," Trump said, adding, "Or [there is] something is greater than all of us."

"Something is up there; someone is up there, maybe watching over us," Trump said.

Gutfeld then asked Trump if his repeated brushes with death have led him to reflect more on God, mortality and the afterlife.

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September 29, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, September 28, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. New York Times, Penn Law Suspends Tenured Prof Amy Wax For One-Year With Half-Pay For Making Racist Remarks
  2. Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), How Penn Law Tried To Buy Amy Wax’s Silence
  3. Jewish News of Northern California, UC-Berkeley Law Prof Targeted As ‘Zionist McCarthyist’ Outside Of His Antisemitism Course
  4. Law360, George Mason Law School: $13m Budget Deficit In FY25 ($38m Over 6 Years); Dean Charged With Balancing Budget And Maintaining #28 U.S. News Ranking
  5. Daily Business Review, Former Tenured Professor Sues St. Thomas College Of Law Again
  6. ABA Journal, California Supreme Court Rejects State Bar's Plan For New Bar Exam
  7. Law360, Blind Law Student Sues Wayne State For Failure To Accommodate Her Disability
  8. U.S. News & World Report, 2025 U.S. News College Rankings
  9. Chronicle of Higher Education, How Can Professors Learn Students’ Names?
  10. Brian Leiter (Chicago), Federal Judge Grants Michigan Law School Summary Judgment In Professor's Discrimination Lawsuit

Tax:

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Biden Administration 
  2. Noah Hertz Marks (Duke), Winning By Losing—The Strategy Of Adverse Letter Rulings
  3. ABA Tax Section, Virtual Fall Meeting
  4. Andrew Hayashi (Virginia), Presentation of The Federal Architecture Of Income Inequality At NYU
  5. New York Times, How Trump Could Upend Taxation In America
  6. Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina), Here’s How Harris’s Standard Business Deduction Could Work
  7. Adam Rosenzweig (Washington University), BEPS—Endgame 
  8. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Next Week’s Tax Workshops
  9. Sloan Speck (Colorado), Transforming Tax Expenditures
  10. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers

Faith

  1. Fox News Op-Ed (Mike Kerrigan), What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First
  2. Darryll Jones (Florida A&M), What Is The Difference Between A Church And A Religious Organization? 
  3. Madeleine Kearns (The Free Press), The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils 
  4. Christianity Today, Taste And See If The Show Is Good: How A Christian Can Revel In Breaking Bad And Better Call Saul
  5. A Call to Revival, Over 300 Christian Leaders Sign ‘Confession Of Evangelical Conviction’ Ahead Of 2024 Election

September 28, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Taste And See If The Show Is Good: How A Christian Can Revel In Breaking Bad And Better Call Saul

Christianity Today, Taste and See If the Show is Good:

Streaming ServicesTaste. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for it—but Christians are certainly inclined to try. We’re told to turn our thoughts to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” (Phil. 4:8). So which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. As CT’s culture editor, I often encounter writers trying to discuss their favorite pop albums or hit summer movies this way. Don’t worry, they argue, this is actually Christian! Or at least it has Christian themes. The film mentions gardens and water and wine. The song touches on love and hope in ways that resonate with Scripture. It’s okay for Christians to like this show because it’s not just good TV. It’s true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.

This kind of analysis usually falls flat. It tends to feel like a stretch—silly at best, disingenuous at worst. And yet, I understand the appeal. We don’t want the works of art we love to run counter to the claims of our faith. We want to follow Paul’s injunction to “set our minds on things above,” so we go looking for loftiness in sitcoms and pop songs (Col. 3:2). We fear returning to a reflexive fundamentalism that sees “worldly” music, literature, or cinema as inherently dangerous.

Truth is, the best music, literature, and cinema do reference our faith, in a way. These works tell stories, and Christianity tells the grand story underneath them all. Insofar as works of art tell the truth about human nature and the world in which we live, we’ll be able to find those threads of connection—even if only as simple as “sin is real.”

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September 22, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils

Madeleine Kearns (The Free Press), The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils:

Veils 2Nicole Moore, 30, wears a veil to church every Sunday. Sometimes called a mantilla, these sheer head coverings are usually made of lace or silk. ... Worn by women throughout the Catholic church’s history, chapel veils fell out of favor during the late twentieth century, but in recent years there’s been “an explosion of veiling,” says Moore, who attends St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Manhattan.

Her pastor, Father Peter Martyr Yungwirth, 39, tells The Free Press he has also noticed an increase in veiling over the last two decades. Indeed, Veils by Lily, a website that sells mantillas, has gone from filling 30 to 60 orders per month to an average of 900 in the last ten years. And it seems to be young Catholics driving the trend. “I have definitely noticed an increase of women, especially young adult women, wearing veils,” says Father Roger Landry, 54, Catholic chaplain of Columbia University. He interprets the veiling trend “as an attempt to be maximally reverent to God at Mass and in receiving Holy Communion.”

That may be the ultimate reason for veiling, but it’s not the only one. To better understand what’s behind the boom, I reached out to over a dozen Catholic women, ranging in age from 19 to 42, who choose to wear a veil to church. ... [A]ll the women I spoke to say veiling has become a profoundly meaningful religious practice in their lives.

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September 22, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Over 300 Christian Leaders Sign ‘Confession Of Evangelical Conviction’ Ahead Of 2024 Election

A Call to Revival, Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction (signatories):

Confession of Evangelical ConvictionONE: We give our allegiance to Jesus Christ alone.

We affirm that Jesus Christ is God's Son and the only head of the Church (Colossians 1:18). No political ideology or earthly authority can claim the authority that belongs to Christ (Philippians 2:9-11). We reaffirm our dedication to his Gospel which stands apart from any partisan agenda. God is clear that he will not share his glory with any other (Isaiah 42:8). Our worship belongs to him alone (Exodus 20:3-4), because our true hope is not in any party, leader, movement, or nation, but in the promise of Christ's return when he will renew the world and reign over all things (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).

We reject the false teaching that anyone other than Jesus Christ has been anointed by God as our Savior, or that a Christian's loyalty should belong to any political party. We reject any message that promotes devotion to a human leader or that wraps divine worship around partisanship.

TWO: We will lead with love not fear. ...

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September 22, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, September 21, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Inside Higher Ed, Female Law Deans, Faculty, And Students Across The Country Are Getting Unsettling Texts
  2. Judicial Council for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, 11th Circuit Joins 5th Circuit In Dismissing Complaint Against Judges For Refusing To Hire Columbia Law Clerks
  3. Chronicle of Higher Education, These 90-Something Professors Are Still Publishing
  4. Tiffany Li (San Francisco), A Guide To Becoming A Law Professor
  5. Donald Campbell (Mississippi College), Nick Saban, ‘The Process’ And The Bar Exam
  6. Fordham Symposium, The Legal And Ethical Implications Of ChatGPT And Other Emerging Technologies
  7. Law360, In Appeal Of Dismissal Of Law Prof's Retaliation Claim Over Use Of Redacted Slur On Exam, 7th Circuit Asks: Should Law School Be A Safe Space?
  8. Jonathan Bremen (Loyola-L.A.), Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light For Legal Education?
  9. Inside Higher Ed, One Year After Massive Budget Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators
  10. Jonathan Zimmerman (Penn), Why Professors Can’t Teach

Tax:

  1. Above the Law, Weil Gotshal & Manges Tax Associate's Funny Departure Memo Includes A Clever ‘Rickroll’
  2. Wall Street Journal, Rich Americans Prep Fail-Safe Estate Plans Ahead Of Election
  3. Tax Prof Jobs
  4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), The Impact Of Jarkesy On Civil Tax Fraud Penalties
  5. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  6. Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia), Presentation of A New View Of Formal Equality At Columbia
  7. Harvard Gazette, Lessons From The Biggest Business Tax Cut In U.S. History
  8. Mitchell Gans (Hofstra), Does The End Of Chevron Deference Mean A Weaker IRS?
  9. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) & Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), The International Tax Revolution
  10. Call for Nominations, AALS Section on Taxation 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award

Faith:

  1. Fox News Op-Ed (Mike Kerrigan), What Bluegrass-Loving Friars Taught Me About A Life Of Faith: Put First Things First
  2. Darryll Jones (Florida A&M), What Is The Difference Between A Church And A Religious Organization?
  3. Washington Post Op-Ed (Anne Lamott), Living For The Unremarkable Moments
  4. Christianity Today Op-Ed (Anna Broadway), It Is Not Best For Man To Eat Alone
  5. Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & Hannah Anderson, The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children

September 21, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, September 15, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 15, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 15, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

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

CCB

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

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

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

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

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September 15, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily | Permalink

Saturday, September 14, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

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

Tax:

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

Faith:

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

September 14, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Thursday, September 12, 2024

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

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

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

September 12

Welcome Remarks 

Keynote Address 

  • Tania Tetlow (President, Fordham) 

Opening Panel: Religious Perspectives on Stewardship 

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

Workshop #1: Stewardship and Welcoming the Stranger

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

Workshop #2: Stewardship and Loving Your Neighbor

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

September 13

Workshop #3: Stewardship and Caring for the Environment

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

Concluding Panel 

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

September 12, 2024 in Conferences, Faith, Legal Ed Conferences, Legal Education | Permalink

Sunday, September 8, 2024

WaPo Op-Ed: Living For The Unremarkable Moments

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Living for the Unremarkable Moments, by Anne Lamott (Author, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (2024)):

Somehow 2

Age grants us permission to be curious about every ordinary day.

In the year since I began writing these little columns on getting older, I’ve seen death up close a few times. One man I know has the same devastating, angry variety of Alzheimer’s that my mom had. A dear old girlfriend has the gentle, spaced-out version, as if dementia had freed the tender prisoner all locked up since childhood. When her mind grew soft, we saw the prison bars of a lifetime collapse.

I would like to put in an order, while they’re still available, for the latter.

But we have no choice in the matter. These days, all I can bank on is love. Much of the rest departs. Even our bodies shrink smaller and then smaller. Carl Sagan said about all of us, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” This is doubly true for the elderly.

Love emerges flagrantly as the real coin of the realm. The people I’ve spent significant time with at the end of their lives do not talk about their degrees, promotions or having successfully kept their weight down. They talk about the times and places of love. Loving memories are the fields in which we walk with them near the end. ...

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September 8, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

It Is Not Best For Man To Eat Alone

Christianity Today op-ed: It Is Not Best for Man to Eat Alone, by Anna Broadway (Author, Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling (2024)):

Solo PlanetWhen the waiter brought out my long-awaited high tea that day, I didn’t expect I’d still be grieving it decades later.

I was 21 and enjoying my first “real” spring break during a debt-building week away in London. After years of devouring chaste romances set in England, I’d learned that Harrods was the best place to experience the glories of scones, clotted cream, and tiny sandwiches, all served on tiers of gleaming china and, of course, washed down with hot tea. So on my inaugural trip across the sea, it seemed only right to indulge my credit card’s largesse on a high tea at Harrods. Alone.

As I looked around the room that day, I knew I’d made a grave mistake. Not even the tender scones and decadent clotted cream could balance the bitter taste of regret. They worsened it. With each new delight, I felt more keenly the lack of someone to share my enjoyment with.

When I was doing fieldwork for my book on singleness, someone told me it might be worse to eat alone than sleep alone. Eating alone is certainly a problem for people who live by themselves. But with 21st-century work schedules, sports practices, and other structural realities, even those with seemingly “built-in” meal companions in spouses or children or roommates often dine solo too. When we do share supper, allergies and dietary restrictions can create other divides. This shift has even changed apartment and home designs as dining rooms fall out of fashion.

Sometimes, the solitude of a meal alone feels welcome. Perhaps an introvert drained by a day of meetings wants nothing more than time alone to decompress. And for some harried parents, a quiet cup of coffee—a reward for getting up before the rest of the household—might feel like a rare and precious solace.

But for Christians, the question of how and with whom we eat involves more than our own preferences. What is God’s design for our meals?

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September 8, 2024 in Book Club, Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children

Dispatch Faith, The Unbearable Lightness of Choosing Children, by Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & Hannah Anderson (Author, Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes (2023)):

Dispatch FaithPronatalist arguments—that in order to be a well functioning society we need to be having more babies—are nothing new. But the resurfacing of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s 2021 “childless cat lady” remarks has added a new, overtly partisan dynamic to the conversation.

Few religious Americans would argue that having more children won’t have positive effects for society as a whole, but today Hannah Anderson argues that our reasons for having children matter: Do we think having children is good because they help us right what we might regard as a wayward societal ship? Or is having children good because … it’s good to have children?

Anderson’s argument is a bit more substantive than that, and the words “grace and hope” factor prominently. On that point: Before my wife and I said “I do,” folks told us being married would reveal to us our own selfishness in spades. That was true, but in that regard, being a parent has eclipsed marriage (which before we had kids felt more like an 24/7 honeymoon with jobs thrown in). My own mistakes in parenting my four kids have underscored my often errant understanding of God. At times I am unloving or unkind to my children because in my folly I take him to be unloving or unkind. Other times I am too removed or uninvolved because I fail to see how much he cares for his people.

That’s why I appreciate what Anderson writes about bringing tiny people into this world and caring for them as best you can: It must be shot through with grace and hope, not agendas and culture-warring.

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September 8, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, September 7, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Patrick Lynch (Law & Liberty), Yale Law School's Keith Whittington: ‘A Conservative Free-Speech Rock Star’
  2. ABA Journal, St. Thomas College of Law Reinstates Fired Tenured Professor, Will Start Termination Hearings
  3. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Noah Feldman, Harvard), Radical Legal Academics May Regret Their Attacks On The Constitution 
  4. Steven Chung (Tax Attorney, Los Angeles), Closing Of Golden Gate Law School Leaves Students And Alumni In A Bind
  5. Alabama Symposium, Legal Education — Our History, Our Future
  6. Nikita Aggarwal (Miami), Survey Of Law Fellowships And VAPs (2022-23 & 2023-24)
  7. Law360, Chicago Bears Settle Hiring Bias Suit From White Male Law Student 
  8. Washington University Symposium, Advancing DEI In Legal Education And The Legal Profession
  9. ABA Journal, Moneybor Lawyers: Should ‘Relative Performance Measure’ Replace Billed Hours In Determining Attorney Productivity?
  10. NCBE, July Multistate Bar Exam Mean Score Is Highest Since 2013 

Tax:

  1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Form Trumps Substance On Phantom S Corp Income 
  2. Tax Prof Jobs
  3. Stephanie Hoffer (Indiana-McKinney), Disaster! Tax Legislation In Crises
  4. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  5. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo), Presentation Of Algorithmic Tax Ownership At Vanderbilt
  6. Steven Bank (UCLA), Presentation Of The Golden Age Of Tax Dodging: Celebrities, Hollywood, And The Publicity Effect Today At Temple
  7. Michael Simkovic (USC) & Meirav Furth-Matzkin (Tel-Aviv University), Taxing Contractual Complexity
  8. Call For Tax Papers And Panels, Law & Society Annual Meeting
  9. Society Of Legal Scholars, Tax Presentations At The Annual Conference
  10. Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, Conference On Reimagining Global Tax Governance

Faith:

  1. Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus 
  2. Washington Post Op-Ed (Allison Raskin), Why Don't I Have Any Close Friends? I Live In Los Angeles.
  3. New York Times Op-Ed (Matthew Schmitz), Catholic Converts Like JD Vance Are Reshaping Republican Politics
  4. Christianity Today, The Olympics’ Most Iconic Photo Has A Christian Message
  5. Zach Rausch (NYU), Religious Teens Are Happier Than Their Secular Peers — Dramatically So For Religious Conservatives

September 7, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, September 1, 2024

Jesus And The Powers: Christian Political Witness In 2024

Christianity Today Book Review:  T. Wright: What Jesus Would Say to the ‘Empire’ Today (reviewing N.T. Wright (University of St Andrews) & Michael F. Bird (Ridley College), Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024):

Jesus and the PowersIn a year seeing over 50 countries at the polls—half of which could shift geopolitical dynamics—the timing of Jesus and the Powers’ release was no accident.

A few years ago, N. T. Wright (author of Surprised by Hope) and Michael F. Bird (Jesus Among the Gods)—who had collaborated on The New Testament in Its World—realized there was a lack of biblical guidance on how Christians should engage with politics, and they decided to do something about it.

“We both had the sense that most Christians today have not really been taught very much about a Christian view of politics,” Wright said. “Until the 18th century, there was a lot of Christian political thought, which we’ve kind of ignored the last 200–300 years—and it’s time to get back to it.”

The “gateway” to political theology, Wright believes, is the idea that, until Christ’s return, “God wants humans to be in charge.” And while all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God” according to Scripture, he says, Christians are called to “take the lead” in holding them accountable.

“The church is designed to be the small working model of new creation, to hold up before the world a symbol—an effective sign of what God has promised to do for the world. Hence, to encourage the rest of the world to say, ‘Oh, that’s what human community ought to look like. That’s how it’s done.’”

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September 1, 2024 in Book Club, Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

NY Times Op-Ed: Catholic Converts Like JD Vance Are Reshaping Republican Politics

New York Times Op-Ed:  Catholic Converts Like JD Vance Are Reshaping Republican Politics, by Matthew Schmitz (Founder & Editor, Compact):

VanceDespite institutional decline and internal conflict, Catholicism retains a surprising resonance in American life — especially in certain elite circles. It has emerged as the largest and perhaps the most vibrant religious group at many top universities. It claims six of the nine Supreme Court justices as adherents. It continues to win high-profile converts, and its social teaching exerts an influence (often unacknowledged) on public debates, inspiring political thinkers who seek to challenge both the cultural left and the laissez-faire right.

The Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism after attending Yale Law School, exemplifies this phenomenon. When he was baptized into the church in 2019, he joined an influential group of conservative converts, including the legal scholars Erika Bachiochi and Adrian Vermeule, the political scientist Darel Paul, the Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the theologian R.R. Reno and the writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari, one of my colleagues at the online magazine Compact. (I am also a convert to Catholicism, and I work or have worked with many of these figures.)

Such thinkers disagree, sometimes sharply, on important matters, not least the value of populism and the merits of Donald Trump. But all share a combination of social conservatism and a willingness to question many of the free-market orthodoxies of the pre-Trump Republican Party. In doing so, they can claim justification from Catholic social teaching, a body of thought that insists on a traditional understanding of the family while embracing a living wage and trade unions as means of promoting “the common good.” See, for example, Mr. Vance in 2019: “My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching.”

This group’s economic thinking distinguishes its members from an earlier cohort of conservative Catholic intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Michael Novak. Those men laid a stress on free markets, in part because the threat of Soviet Communism had led Catholic thinkers to emphasize the relative virtues of a liberal and capitalist system that had long been subject to Catholic critique.

By contrast, for Mr. Vance and others like him, Catholicism seems to be a resource for pushing back against the excesses of cultural and economic liberalism. As for so many converts before them, the church represents an alternative to the dominant ethos of the age. ... Many of today’s converts look to resist the left-right fusion of libertarian cultural attitudes and free-market economics that has reshaped Western society over the past three or four decades. But rather than precipitating a radical overhaul of society, as some fear and others hope, they have exerted a subtler influence that is nonetheless significant: altering how the Republican Party approaches policy, and in some cases helping build a new consensus across party lines. ...

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September 1, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Fall 2024 Pepperdine Law & Religion Workshop Series

Surf Report, Nootbaar Institute Course, Current Issues in Law, Faith, and Religion, Invites Leading Scholars to Pepperdine Caruso Law:

Pepperdine Caruso Logo Expanding on Pepperdine Caruso School of Law’s many law, faith, and religion courses, the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics offered a groundbreaking new course in fall 2023, Current Issues in Law, Faith, and Religion. The course, returning in fall 2024 in partnership with the recently launched Ken Starr Institute for Faith, Law, and Public Service, features bi-weekly discussions by leading law and religion scholars, enriching academic discourse by bringing diverse perspectives on the intersection of law, faith, and religion into the classroom. Michael Helfand, co-director of the Nootbaar Institute, taught the course in its first year alongside fellow co-director Jennifer Koh, and notes that the guest speakers have been key in expanding students' understanding of complex and evolving issues.

“This unique and engaging course provides students with regular exposure to diverse perspectives and specialized knowledge in law and religion while maintaining the continuity of their ongoing coursework,” says Helfand. “We believe that incorporating speakers on important law and religion topics in the classroom not only enriches the educational experience but is also a testament to our commitment to fostering a culture of innovation, diversity, and excellence within our academic community.” ...

For fall 2024, the course will focus on topics such as religion in the workplace, religion and family law, the Supreme Court's historical and traditional approach to the Constitution’s religion clauses, and new trends in Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Helfand and Caruso Law professor Donald "Trey" Childress will host this year’s colloquium. ...

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September 1, 2024 in Faith, Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, August 31, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. USA Today Op-Ed (John Yoo, UC-Berkeley), The Leftward Ideological Slant Of Law Schools Will Degrade American Law And Erode Fundamental Rights
  2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Fall 2024 Law School Admissions Season: Applicants Are Up +5.7%, With Smallest Increase Among White Applicants
  3. Chronicle of Higher Education, Nearly 20% Of University Of Florida Faculty Flunked Post-Tenure Review
  4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Legal Ed News Roundup
  5. Reuters, Ex-Bank Robber, Now Georgetown Law Prof, Charged With Felonies In Domestic Abuse Case
  6. Keith Hand (UC-San Francisco), California Law Schools Must Encourage Viewpoint Diversity
  7. ABA Legal Education Section, Law School Accreditation News
  8. Robert Nelson (Northwestern), Ronit Dinovitzer (Toronto), Bryant Garth (UC-Irvine), Joyce Sterling (Denver), David Wilkins (Harvard), Meghan Dawe (Harvard) & Ethan Michelson (Indiana), The Making Of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality And Opportunity In The American Legal Profession
  9. New York Times, Harvard Names Conservative Law School Dean John Manning University Provost
  10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Most-Cited Deans At The 64 Most-Cited Law Schools

Tax:

  1. New York Times, What We Know About Kamala Harris’s $5 Trillion Tax Plan
  2. TaxProf Jobs 
  3. Andy Grewal (Iowa), Tax Regulations After Loper Bright
  4. Chris William Sanchirico & Reed Shuldiner (Penn), Deferring Income With Tiered And Circular Partnerships
  5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Biden Administration
  6. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Most-Cited Tax Faculty At The 64 Most-Cited Law Schools
  7. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
  8. Ari Glogower (Northwestern) & Andrew Granato (Yale), Reforming The Taxation Of Life Insurance
  9. Susan Morse (Texas), How Late Is Too Late To Challenge Old Tax Regs?
  10. Penn Wharton Budget Model, Analysis Of Budget Implications Of Harris And Trump Taxing And Spending Plans

Faith:

  1. Washington Post Op-Ed (Allison Raskin), Why Don't I Have Any Close Friends? I Live In Los Angeles.
  2. Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus
  3. Christianity Today, The Olympics’ Most Iconic Photo Has A Christian Message
  4. Zach Rausch (NYU), Religious Teens Are Happier Than Their Secular Peers — Dramatically So For Religious Conservatives
  5. Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & John Inazu (Washington University), Not Everything Is Cancel Culture

August 31, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

Sunday, August 25, 2024

WSJ: Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus

Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk’s Walk With Jesus:

MuskElon Musk is publicly offering his own interpretation of Jesus’ teachings with an Old Testament twist.

“Christianity has become toothless,” the billionaire posted recently on his X social-media platform. “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

As Musk tweeted about Christianity, a friend of his, Jason Calacanis, replied jokingly: “If you’re going into your born again era we’re so here for it.”

Responded Musk: “I believe in the principles of Christianity like love thy neighbor as thyself (have empathy for all) and turn the other cheek (end the cycle of retribution).”

 For all of his pursuits, Musk isn’t generally thought of as theologian. 

With the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive’s recent political transformation, however, we are increasingly seeing Musk invoke religion as he discusses his worldviews on topics ranging from parenthood to freedom of speech.

He has talked about his core beliefs several times this summer, including this past week when describing how he defines empathy and its place in governing. ...

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August 25, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

NY Times Op-Ed: What The Olympics Can Teach Us About Excellence

New York Times op-ed:  What the Olympics Can Teach Us About Excellence, by Brad Stulberg (Michigan; Author, The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds — Not Crushes — Your Soul (2021)):

Groundedness 3We are drawn to stories of individuals who not only embody the pursuit of excellence, but also have humility.

Think of the American gymnast Simone Biles, who worked through mental health issues that kept her mostly sidelined at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and went on to win three gold medals at the Paris Games. Perhaps the most iconic image from these Games occurred after one of the few gymnastics events she didn’t completely dominate, the individual floor competition. At the awards ceremony, Biles, who earned silver, and her teammate Jordan Chiles, who took bronze, bowed to show respect to the gold medal winner, Rebeca Andrade of Brazil. ...

Excellence is not perfection or winning at all costs. It is a deeply satisfying process of becoming the best performer — and person — you can be. You pursue goals that challenge you, put forth an honest effort, endure highs, lows and everything in between, and gain respect for yourself and others. This sort of excellence isn’t just for world-class athletes; it is for all of us. We can certainly find it in sports, but also in the creative arts, medicine, teaching, coaching, science and more.

Understanding that excellence lies in the pursuit of a lofty goal as much as in the achievement of that goal allows us to expand our definition of success. Excellence is a process. That process can, and must, be renewed every day. The real reward for excellence is not the medal or the promotion, but the person you become and the relationships you forge along the way. In 2007, the psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar coined the term “arrival fallacy” to describe the trap of thinking that reaching a goal will bring lasting contentment or fulfillment. Anyone who has ever thought, “If I achieve such-and-such goal, then I’ll be happy,” understands this. ...

Pursuing excellence is, at its core, retaining respect, compassion and empathy for others even in pursuit of being your best, and, sometimes, winning. Yes, you must be driven and fierce and at times try so hard that people may think you are crazy. But it’s precisely because of this determined commitment — and the recognition of how hard it can be — that you gain immense empathy and respect for others in the arena. ...

The Olympics may be an example of excellence and achievement at a pinnacle few of us can imagine, but they do offer us a moment to reflect on our own versions of excellence. How should I spend the time I have? How do I summon the focus to pursue my interests with care? What does this say about the values I hold and my desire to practice them? At a time of disconnect and alienation, the pursuit of excellence offers a powerful and necessary path to intimacy with ourselves, our work and our communities. It is, at root, what it means to be the best humans we can be.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here

August 25, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

WaPo Op-Ed: Why Don't I Have Any Close Friends? I Live In Los Angeles.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Would You Be Mine? Could You Be Mine? Won’t You Be My Friend?, by Allison Raskin (MPsych 2023, Pepperdine):

My dad was in town recently, and one morning I had to take him to urgent care. He had felt a shooting nerve pain in his arm for a few months, and it had reached the point of agony. As we were driving there — following a delicious breakfast at IHOP, because even bad days can have glimmers of joy — he told me that I should just drop him off so I could go back home and do my work. I replied, “Would you just drop me off?” Game point. Discussion over.

I was raised in a family that prioritized taking care of one another. When my mom had knee surgery in 2018, I flew home to take care of her. And when I had knee surgery in 2022, both my parents flew out to take care of me. There is an underlying understanding that loving someone means being there for them both emotionally and physically whenever possible. I feel so grateful to have this type of dynamic ingrained in me. But I have struggled as an adult to re-create it in my friendships. Especially after I left the chaos of my 20s and our lives became more and more separate.

There was a popular TikTok making the rounds a while ago in which content creator Amelia Montooth discussed how, due to capitalism and an obsession with prioritizing our productivity, we have moved away from the “small-favors economy.” Basically, in past generations, it was more normalized to rely on people in our community to help us out. Asking for a ride to the airport wasn’t a great offense but an opportunity to show someone that you cared about them.

@ameliamontooth if ur my friend and ur seeing this lets b radical anticapitalists together while you drive me home from LAX 😈 #wlw #friends #friendship #20s #femalefriends #friendgroup ♬ original sound - Amelia

But as independence has become more and more glorified, people have been less likely to ask others for help. This limits how close we are able to get to the people we care about so much.

For years, I have tried to figure out how to feel more connected to my friends. Instead of just catching up every few weeks (or, more honestly, every few months), I want to re-create the dynamic I have with my family. Where if someone has a bad day, they feel comfortable calling me to vent. Or if they really need help with something, they just ask me because that is what we do for each other. I have seen other people have these types of friendships (my sister and mother included), and I’ve often worried that the issue is me. That I am not the type of person people want to get that close to, even though I am often waving my hands and basically shouting, “Let me love you!” Maybe something in my nature prevents the level of intimacy my older sister has curated through her multiple group texts and seemingly endless backyard BBQs.

But, in an effort not to be so mean to myself, I have tried to take a step back and see other explanations. This exercise helped me land on a less personal reason for my lack of strong connections.

To put it simply, I live in Los Angeles, which is a large, sprawling city that makes it difficult to just pop in on a friend because they live 50 minutes away.

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August 25, 2024 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Saturday, August 24, 2024

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Top 10 Taxprof Blog Posts - LinkedinLegal Education: 

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Fellowships For Aspiring Law Professors (Updated 2024-25 Edition)
  2. ABA Legal Ed Counsel
  3. Gregory Sisk (St. Thomas-MN), Adam Bent (Florida), et al., The 64 Most-Cited Law Faculties
  4. Symposium, Teaching Legal Research, Writing, Communication, And Feedback
  5. Symposium, Deans' Leadership In Legal Education 
  6. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Weekly Legal Education Roundup
  7. Law.com, Kamala Harris (UC Law SF) Would Be Second Lawyer-President With A Non-T14 Degree; Joe Biden (Syracuse Law) Is The Other
  8. Joe Regalia (UNLV), From Briefs To Bytes: How Generative AI Is Transforming Legal Writing And Practice
  9. UC-Berkeley, UC-Berkeley Is First Law School To Offer AI-Focused Degree
  10. ABA Journal, Tenured Professor Sues St. Thomas College of Law After Firing
    New York Times, Harvard Names Conservative Law School Dean John Manning University Provost

Tax:

  1. Tax Prof Jobs
  2. David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) & Ari Glogower (Northwestern), The Policy And Politics Of Alternative Minimum Taxes
  3. Informa, Evan Gershkovich, Other Freed Hostages Hit With IRS Tax Penalties For Their Time As Russia's Hostages
  4. Jack Bogdanski (Lewis & Clark), Supreme Court's Tax Decisions (Moore, Estate Of Connelly) Undercut By Non-Tax Decisions (Loper Bright, Cover Post, Jarkesy)
  5. Brigham Brau (North Carolina), Jeffrey L. Hoopes (North Carolina), Junyoung Jeong (North Carolina) & Mark H. Lang (North Carolina), Crime And The EITC
  6. Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), July's Tax Reflections With Reuven Avi-Yonah
  7. David Weisbach (Chicago), An APA For Tax
  8. Richard Kaplan (Illinois), Analyzing The New Planning Opportunities In SECURE 2.0 For Retirement Plan Participants
  9. David Hasen (Florida), Update: Florida Tax Review Symposium On Moore v. United States
  10. Mirit Eyal-Cohen (Alabama), Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Eyal-Cohen Reviews Weisbach's An APA For Tax

Faith:

  1. Newsweek, Conservative Christian Colleges Are Facing Cancel Culture Problems
  2. Christianity Today, The Olympics’ Most Iconic Photo Has A Christian Message
  3. Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University), Do Educated People Believe In God More Or Less?
  4. Zach Rausch (NYU), Religious Teens Are Happier Than Their Secular Peers — Dramatically So For Religious Conservatives
  5. Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & John Inazu (Washington University), Not Everything Is Cancel Culture

August 24, 2024 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink