TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Call For Papers: 2026 Poverty Law Conference On Scholarship, Pedagogy, And Community In A Time Of Attacks On The Vulnerable
• More California Bar Exam Chaos
• Shaviro: Now Is Now, And Then Is Then—A Memoir

Sunday:

• The Good Samaritan, God, And The Legal Profession
• Renn: The Problem Of Male Friendship
• Pope Leo Drops Papal Supremacy, Urging ‘Full Communion’ With ‘All Christians’
• The Secret To Workplace Happiness: ‘High-Quality Connections’
• Jeopardy! Champion Skips LSAT For Dream Job For Young Men: Stay-At-Home-Son
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

The Good Samaritan, God, And The Legal Profession

Allison McFadden (J.D. 2026, Cornell), Ignoring Drowning Babies (originally published in The Christian Lawyer (Spring 2025)): 

At some point in their first year torts class, law students read the “drowning baby” case: if a bystander walks by a baby drowning in a puddle, he can shield his eyes and walk on by. They learn that at common law, there is no affirmative duty to help someone in need if you did not engender that need. Some students are appalled. Some recount the case over dinner, as entertainment. Most are indifferent.

Besides pointing out that a few states have overridden this default rule by statute, the American legal education is content to stop there. Seldom is it also discussed that the American legal system evolved with a sense of its own limits, that jurists constrained opportunities for liability because they believed that a democratic society required a limited form of government. The point was to make room for the moral will of man and his other associations, like the church.

For Christians who follow the divine law of God, the bar is much higher than what the American legal system requires. In a scenario that parallels the “drowning baby” case, Jesus tells the story of a Samaritan who comes across a Jewish man beaten, robbed, and left lying on the side of the road. The Samaritan does not shield his eyes. He heaps the man onto his donkey, treats his wounds, and pays for his bed in an inn. In God’s Kingdom, Jesus reminds his followers, there is an affirmative duty to help one’s neighbor.

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Renn: The Problem Of Male Friendship

Aaron M. Renn (Author, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (2024)), The Problem of Male Friendship:

The lack of male friendships was the subject of a great article in the NYT Magazine [Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?]. The piece, by Sam Graham-Felsen, doesn’t just have great content. It’s also well-written, something that in itself helps explain the enduring dominance of the Times in America.

He explains the problem:

The notion that men in this country suck at friendship is so widespread that it has become a truism, a punchline. “Your dad has no friends,” John Mulaney said during an opening monologue on “Saturday Night Live.” “If you think your dad has friends, you’re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad’s friends.”

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Pope Leo Drops Papal Supremacy, Urging ‘Full Communion’ With ‘All Christians’

Jules Gomes (PhD Biblical Studies, Cambridge), Pope Leo XIV Drops Papal Supremacy, Urging ‘Full Communion’ with ‘All Christians’:

In his trailblazing inaugural sermon, Pope Leo XIV pointed to Christ, rather than Peter, as the foundational “rock” of Christianity, using the term “sister Christian churches” to mark his desire for ecumenical unity.

“Love and unity: these are the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus,” he told the 150,000 Catholics, as well as representatives from both Protestant and Orthodox churches, gathered at St. Peter’s Square for his inaugural Mass on Sunday morning.

Leo XIV noted that “the Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone,’” expressly designating Jesus as the founding rock of the Church.

“Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him,” the pontiff emphasized, in a significant departure from conventional Catholic interpretation, which identifies Peter as the “rock” on which Jesus built the Church.

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Reuters, Trump’s International Student Ban Would Decimate Harvard Law School's 1-Year LL.M. Program ($81,760 Tuition Generates $11 Million/Year)
2. Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland), & Donald Gifford (Maryland) et al., AI Gets Its First Law School A+s (And An A In Tax)
3. New York Times, Inside Trump’s Attack On The Harvard Law Review
4. Wall Street Journal, How Cheating Spreads At Law Schools
5. Chronicle of Higher Education, Professors Say They Need A Raise. They Probably Won’t Get One. (But Presidents Will.)
6. Reuters, 8th Circuit Joins 5th, 7th, And 11th Circuits In Dismissing Complaint Against Judges For Refusing To Hire Columbia Law Clerks
7. Jeff Sovern (Maryland), The Impact Of A $150,000 Cap On Government Loans For Law Students
8. Harvard Crimson, Harvard Law Review Forcefully Denies Racial Discrimination Accusations That Sparked Federal Inquiry
9. NALP, BigLaw First Year Associate Salaries Rise To $225,000 In Six Cities
10. LSAC, Reports On The 2024 1L Class
    Daniel Rodriguez (Northwestern), The Trump War On Universities And Law Schools 

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

Tax:

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Key Word In “Net Operating Loss”
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
3. Alex Zhang (Emory), The Forgotten Attribution Power
4. Assaf Harpaz (Georgia), Review Of The Global Minimum Tax And Intra Western Tax Competition By Rifat Azam (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya)
5. Harvey Dale (NYU), Daniel Hemel (NYU) & Jill Manny (NYU), What Are The Real Tax Risks For Harvard?
6. Edward McCaffery (USC), The Property-Tax Bundle Of Rights
7. Lawrence Lokken (Florida), Income Source In A Digital Age
8. Minnesota Law Review, Response Pieces To Bridget Crawford's Taxing Sugar Babies
9. Columbia Tax Policy Conference
1. Day 1
2. Day 2
10. UC Law SF Hosts Tax Conference Today
1. Day 1
2. Day 2

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

Faith:

1. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Religious Law Schools, Rankings, And Bias
2. The Dispatch (Patrick Brown), Reviews Of Ross Douthat’s Believe: ‘A Mere Christianity For The 21st Century’
3. Washington Post (John Connelly, UC-Berkeley), Pope Leo Teaches A Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To
4. The Free Press (Bill Ackerman), Things Worth Remembering On Memorial Day: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’
5. Christianity Today (Russell Moore), Panic, Pan, And Peter
   New York Times (Ross Douthat), JD Vance On His Faith

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• BigLaw First Year Associate Salaries Rise To $225,000 In Six Cities
• Giving Credit When You Are Due: Tax Credits For Birth Mothers Post-Dobbs
• Stephanie McMahon Receives 2025 Cincinnati Teaching Award
• Taxing Cultural Endowments

Sunday:

• Panic, Pan, And Peter
• Anxiety, Panic, And Faith
• NY Times: JD Vance On His Faith
• Podcast: Religious Law Schools, Rankings, And Bias
• Pepperdine Caruso Law Celebrates The Class Of 2025
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Panic, Pan, And Peter

Christianity Today: The Problem of Panic, by Russell Moore (Editor in Chief, Christianity Today):

Over 40 years ago, filmmaker Steven Spielberg terrified theatergoers with a movie that quickly embedded itself in the American cultural imagination. Like most scary stories, Poltergeist first lulled the audience with the familiar—a suburban home in a newly built housing development. It then disrupted that familiarity by injecting ghosts who are not content to occasionally moan or rattle a chain but create havoc and terror.

The malevolent spirits in Poltergeist upend the entire household and drive the family to the point of insanity. In the end, it’s revealed that the placid neighborhood is built on top of desecrated graves. The poltergeists’ goal is to cause panic, to overload the inhabitants’ limbic systems in order to revert the house to a place of deadness.

As I listened recently to a young Christian describe the way he saw the world around him, I wondered whether the Poltergeist story was a generation too soon, and whether that haunted house could be a metaphor for our present moment.

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Anxiety, Panic, And Faith

Christianity Today: Panic is Profitable, by Timothy Dalrymple (President & CEO, Christianity Today):

We live in an age of anxiety. Family pocketbooks and calendars are stretched to the breaking point. We worry for our children, then worry our children worry too much. We fear for the integrity of the church, for the political fabric of our society; we fear wars and pestilence, climate change and social change—and then we add anxiety atop anxiety, worrying about things over which we have little or no control.

The media landscape makes matters worse. Blazing headlines about crises scroll across our computer screens and mobile phones. Loudness is lucrative. Panic is profitable. Viciousness goes viral. We find ourselves in a public square filled with caricature artists and conflict entrepreneurs, fear peddlers and scorn merchants who flood the marketplace with counterfeits that make them rich and bankrupt the culture.

There are genuine causes for anxiety. But Scripture provides perspective.

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NY Times: JD Vance On His Faith

Following up on last week's post:

• Washington Post:  Pope Leo Teaches A Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To, by John Connelly (UC-Berkeley)

New York Times, JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies:

Ross Douthat:  [W]e’re here in Rome, the day after the papal inauguration, and you just met with Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope.

JD Vance: I did.

Douthat: So what did you talk about?

Vance: Well, I want to be respectful of the private conversation we had.

Generally, we talked about issues the Vatican cares a lot about. Obviously, they care about the migration issue. They care a lot about world peace. They care a lot about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. They care a lot about what’s happening with Gaza and Israel. It was a very productive conversation. I mean, amazing to me. As you know, I was one of the last world leaders to meet with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, before he passed away. ...

Vance: ... [I]n the life of one person’s faith who happens to be an American political leader, it’s been really an amazing three or four weeks. I’m sure I’ll have some time to think about it and reflect on what it all means, but I’m really just honored to be here and thrilled to be a part of it.

Douthat: How does being either a Catholic or just a Christian shape your politics? What are things that you feel like you believe or care about in politics that are specific to Christianity rather than conservatism, the Republican Party and so on? How would your worldview be different if you weren’t a Catholic Christian?

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Podcast: Religious Law Schools, Rankings, And Bias

Following up on my previous post, Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?:  Anton Sorkin (Director of Law Student Ministries, Christian Legal Society), Religious Law Schools, Rankings, & Bias:

With the release of U.S. News Rankings last month, renewed interest has surfaced regarding the parameters and impact of placement. Where law schools fall speaks to not only the quality of their perceived education, but also success regarding student employment and faculty publication. On this episode, I speak with Michael Conklin, a scholar who’s been measuring bias within the Rankings system, this time focusing his attention on religious law schools. His paper, soon to be published in the Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy, is entitled Religious Law Schools, Rankings, and Bias: Measuring the Rankings Penalty at Religious Law Schools.

Among the things we discuss includes how rankings systems work, what peers scores actually mean, how bias pervades religious law school rankings, the impact of this bias on students and faculty, and more.

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

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. New York Magazine, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. What Happens When They Get To Law School?
2. Jeff Sovern (Maryland), What Could A Hostile Federal Government Do To Law Schools?
3. Wall Street Journal, The Solution To Cheating On Exams With ChatGPT Is Painfully Old-School: Blue Books
4. Samantha A. Moppett (Suffolk), Preparing Law Students For The Artificial Intelligence Era
5. Chronicle of Higher Education, Statement On Academic Freedom And Harvard By Conservative Scholars, Lawyers, And Former Government Officials
6. ABA Legal Ed Council, Report On Law Schools With Distance Education J.D. Programs
7. New York Times, Professors Are Using ChatGPT. Students Aren’t Happy About It
8. ABA Journal Op-Ed (Austin Gergen), A Student's Perspective On The AI Revolution In Law School
9. Note, The Tradition of History at Harvard Law School
10. ABA Journal, How Some Law Schools Are Training Students In Generative AI
    Wall Street Journal, How To Stop Students From Cheating With AI

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

Tax:

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
2. University of Texas Law School, 10th Annual Texas Tax Faculty Workshop
3. Bloomberg, Tax Prof Must Pay New York Non-Resident Income Tax On Days He Taught Law Students On Zoom From His Connecticut Home When Cardozo Was Closed During Covid
4. Edward Morse (Creighton), Important Developments In Federal Income Taxation (2024)
5. Blaine Saito (Ohio State), Tax Regulations In A Loper Bright Light
6. John Holden (Indiana) & Kathryn Kisska-Schulze (Clemson), The Taxable Future Of College Sports
7. Conor Clarke (Washington University) & Wojciech Kopczuk (Columbia), Measuring Income And Income Inequality
8. Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia), Law For The Rich
9. Jonathan Choi (USC; moving to Washington University), Review Of Work Requirements And Child Tax Benefits
10. Mitchell Gans (Hofstra), Has The Supreme Court Already Resolved How Loper Bright Applies To Section 7805 Tax Regulations?

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

Faith:

1. White House Statement, President Trump Names Three Professors To Religious Liberty Commission's Advisory Board Of Legal Experts 
2. The Dispatch (Patrick Brown), Reviews Of Ross Douthat’s Believe: ‘A Mere Christianity For The 21st Century’
3. Washington Post (John Connelly (UC-Berkeley)), Pope Leo Teaches A Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To
4. Wall Street Journal Book Review (Andrew Crumey), The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein
5. Christianity Today (David Bahnsen), Work And The Meaning Of Life

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. 

TaxProf Blog Holiday Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• ABA Plan To Double Experiential Learning Accreditation Requirement Spurs Criticism About Accreditor Overreach
• Holden & Kisska-Schulze: The Taxable Future Of College Sports
• Kuehn & Joy: Measuring The Impacts Of Experiential Legal Education
• Today's Law, Society, And Taxation Panel

Sunday:

• Reviews Of Ross Douthat’s Believe ‘A Mere Christianity For The 21st Century’
• The Empty Ecstasy Of Digital Crowds
• Pope Leo Teaches A Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To
• Today's Law, Society, And Taxation Panels
• Velasco: Shortcomings Of Law School And Big Law
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Memorial Day:

• Things Worth Remembering On Memorial Day: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’
• Raskolnikov: Law For The Rich
• California Bar Notifies Another Tranche Of Test-Takers Who Were Told They Flunked But Actually Passed; Bar Petitions Supreme Court To Extend COVID-Era Provisional Licensure To Over 3,000 Victims Of Botched February Exam
• Curbing Multinational Digital Tax Avoidance With The General Anti-Avoidance Rule

Things Worth Remembering On Memorial Day: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’

The Free Press:  Things Worth Remembering: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’, by Bill Ackerman:

Of all American holidays, Memorial Day is beset by the most contradictions. Officially, it is a somber holiday, one where we honor our country’s war dead, but it is also the holiday that marks the unofficial beginning of summer. Over this long weekend, many of us will pull out our barbecues, or travel to our local beach, or check out the latest blockbuster. I grew up in a religious household and, for me, Memorial Day weekend meant it was the one Sunday I didn’t have to go to church; the Indy 500 was on, and I was allowed to watch the race with my dad.

Then I joined the Marines, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, Memorial Day took on a different, more specific meaning for me. In the early years, I’d spend the day visiting the graves of friends buried at Arlington. ...

Like countless others before me, I knew that, in the event I was killed, I wanted to have one last word with the people I loved. So I wrote a few letters, hid them, and told my best friend from high school where they were in case anything happened. Fortunately, they were never opened. Today, they sit in a drawer with some mementos from the war. My father, who one of the letters was addressed to, has since passed away. My children, who were then unborn, have no letters addressed to them. The letters are from a different time, as if written by a different person. I doubt I’ll ever open them. ...

The practice of writing a “death letter” is as old as war itself. In the summer of 1861, Sullivan Ballou, a 32-year-old Union major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment, wrote one such letter to his wife on July 14, one week before the First Battle of Bull Run. If you’re wondering how to remember the dead this Memorial Day, I recommend you spend a moment with this letter:

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Reviews Of Ross Douthat’s Believe: ‘A Mere Christianity For The 21st Century’

The Dispatch:  Something Spiritual This Way Comes, by Patrick T. Brown (Ethics and Public Policy Center):

Believe engages with materialism on its own terms. Roughly the first half of the book deals with consciousness and the cosmos, from the start of the universe to the end of life. Science, far from disproving religion, has deepened it. “We have much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind…than ancient or medieval peoples ever did,” Douthat argues. Some who presume faith and reason are incompatible may well have their eyes opened.

From there, he guides the reader in how to think about the variety of spiritualities on offer, with an expansive, egalitarian argument for belief over apathy. And it’s this second half that seems more likely to wiggle its way into human hearts than the more abstract first chunk. ...

Without quite fully lapsing into Huxley-esque perennialism—that is, the idea that every religion reflects different facets of a core truth, beneath cultural differences—Douthat argues that belief in anything is preferable to indifference. Even converting to the “wrong” belief system, he suggests, can rescue one from “the mire of meaningless and the snares of indecision.” ...

A book arguing it is good to go to church or mosque or synagogue, even if you don’t actually believe in the supernatural bits, would have been a trivially easy book for Douthat to write. Asking the reader to grapple with the claim that the spiritual, moral, and ethical claims of religion matter as much as, if not more than, the benefits community and fellowship provide, is a harder task. In a “spiritual but not religious” world, Douthat seems to be channeling C.S. Lewis, who said in 1952: “You can shut [Christ] up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 

The Atlantic:  How Ross Douthat’s Proselytizing Falls Short, by George Packer:

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else. ...

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The Empty Ecstasy Of Digital Crowds

Dispatch Faith: The Empty Ecstasy of Digital Crowds, by Brad Edwards (Pastor, The Table Church (Lafayette, CO); Author, The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism (2025)):

Should Christians support Black Lives Matter? Fifteen years ago that question would likely have been asked in good faith by a Christian in my congregation. But when someone in our church texted that question to me in early 2017, it had long since become a litmus test.

I wasn’t the only pastor to notice that sometime around 2014, church visitors and members alike began opting into or out of a church based on cultural and political alignment. That trend only accelerated during the pandemic. Many pastors, myself included, missed the significance of that shift because the early signs were still downstream of long-standing theological differences among Christian traditions (e.g., women serving as ordained clergy). But by 2020, alignment with socio-cultural positions became such an overwhelming priority for the typical churchgoer that agreement with theological principles became an afterthought.

This is just one of the clearer symptoms of a deeper shift in the American psyche. We’re in the midst of a fundamental change not only in what we view as ultimately important, but also from where we derive meaning. In an April 2024 article in The Atlantic, “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” Derek Thompson traces that shift to the widespread abandonment of religious institutions (emphasis added):

Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

More than any other change upstream, the “dechurching” of 40 million people over the last 25 years has severed society from long-standing sources of meaning. The culture wars have escalated from a mere conflict between divergent worldviews into an existential crusade for meaning. And as I have written in my recently released book The Reason for Church, these symptoms will continue until we deal with the root of what ails us: exchanging “durable forms of our common life” for disembodied counterfeits of historically proven sources of meaning.

Where institutions (e.g., a local church) provide meaning through shared purpose and belonging, these “digital crowds” promise meaning through easy belonging and affirmation. But because their meaning and belonging are both digital and conditional, neither are durable or transcendent. ...

The alternative to digital crowds: spiritual greenhouses.

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Pope Leo Teaches A Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To

Following up on my previous posts:

• Pope Francis vs. JD Vance On Immigration (Feb. 23, 2025)
• How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With Pope Francis (Apr. 27, 2025)

Washington Post:  Pope Leo Teaches a Lesson From Jesus That JD Vance Should Listen To, by  John Connelly (UC-Berkeley):

Soon after taking office, Vice President JD Vance stumbled into a dispute with the Vatican about the heart of church teaching: the duty to love one’s neighbor. In a TV interview, Vance elaborated a “Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Pope Francis responded that Christians do not dole out love “little by little” in ever weaker concentric circles, and an account under Leo’s name, when he was a cardinal, tweeted the headline of a column in the National Catholic Reporter: “JD Vance is wrong, Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Christians have always debated how to interpret the message of Jesus. There are four gospels and not one; their emphases differ; sometimes they seem to contradict one another. And there are centuries of tradition: Vance has a solid case in terms of very old teaching. Into the 1960s moral theology replicated Vance’s points quite precisely. ...

This sort of thinking is no longer taught in seminaries. ...

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. New York Magazine, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. What Happens When They Get To Law School?
2. Reuters, Northwestern Must Face Palestinian Law Grad's Discrimination Lawsuit
3. Samantha Moppett (Suffolk), Preparing Law Students For The Artificial Intelligence Era
4. Jerry Organ (St. Thomas), The 2024 Law School Transfer Market
5. ABA Legal Ed Council, Report On Law Schools With Distance Education J.D. Programs
6. U.S. News, Rankings Czar Bob Morse Retires
7. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Michael Clune (Case Western)), Left And Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs To Change
8. ABA Journal, How Some Law Schools Are Training Students In Generative AI
9. New York Times, Professors Are Using ChatGPT. Students Aren’t Happy About It.
10. The Recorder, California Bar Cops To Multiple Scoring Errors On Disastrous February Bar Exam; Third Party Will Do A Comprehensive Review

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

Tax:

1. Law & Society Association, Law, Society, And Taxation Panels
1. Thursday
2. Friday
3. Saturday
4. Sunday
2. Bloomberg, SALT Workaround Used By Doctors, Lawyers Axed In GOP Tax Bill
3. Columbia Journal Of Tax Law
1. Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 2025)
2. Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter 2024)
3. Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 2024)
4. Doron Narotzki (Akron), Review Of The Flip And Flop Of Taxing Alimony By Jeffrey Kahn (Florida State) & Rebecca Roman (Gibson Dunn, Dallas)
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy in the Trump Administration
1. May 18-24
2. May 11-17
6. Rebecca Morrow (Wake Forest), Tax On Tips
7. Conor Clarke (Washington University) & Wojciech Kopczuk (Columbia), Measuring Income And Income Inequality
8. Reid Kress Weisbord (Rutgers) & Naomi Cahn (Virginia), Repealing The Estate Tax Could Create Headaches For The Rich And Worsen Inequality
9. Hilary Escajeda (Mississippi College), Taylor Swift, Tortured Poets, And The Tax Code's Frankenstein
10. William Boyd (UCLA), The Tax Struggle And Renewable Power

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

Faith:

1. White House Statement, President Trump Names Three Professors To Religious Liberty Commission's Advisory Board Of Legal Experts
2. New York Times, Yeshiva University Reverses Itself And Bans LGBTQ Club
3. Wall Street Journal Book Review (Andrew Crumey), The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein
4. Dispatch Faith (Alastair Roberts), Is Empathy A Sin?
5. New York Times Op-Ed (Ross Douthat), What The World Needs From Pope Leo
   Holy See Press Office, Pope Leo's First Homily

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• SALT Workaround Used By Doctors, Lawyers Axed In GOP Tax Bill
• California Bar Cops To Multiple Scoring Errors On Disastrous February Bar Exam; Third Party Will Do A Comprehensive Review
• Survey: Political Climate And Trump's Election Are Driving Law School Applicant Surge
• Repealing The Estate Tax Could Create Headaches For The Rich And Worsen Inequality

Sunday:

• The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein
• Work And The Meaning Of Life
• Religious Lawyering In A Polarized Society
• NY Times: Yeshiva University Reverses Itself And Bans LGBTQ Club
• President Trump Names Three Professors To Religious Liberty Commission's Advisory Board Of Legal Experts
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein

Wall Street Journal Book Review:  Einstein’s Sense of Awe, by Andrew Crumey (Author, Beethoven's Assassins (2024)) (Reviewing Kieran Fox (UC-San Francisco), I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein (2025); and Diana Kormos Buchwald (Einstein Papers Project) & Michael D. Gordin (Princeton), Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein (2025)):

When asked his view of religion, Albert Einstein often invoked a 17th-century Dutch philosopher. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein told a New York rabbi in 1929. What exactly he meant by that has been debated ever since.

In “I Am a Part of Infinity,” Kieran Fox, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that Einstein’s ideas on religion “have always been approached in the wrong way.” The author claims that Einstein in fact wished to found a “cosmic religion” whose “mandate and meaning” was to remind us “that we embodied Infinity.” Spinoza, Mr. Fox suggests, was but one of many “radical geniuses who anticipated and inspired” the idea. These are bold claims—and I am not convinced. ...

Einstein’s message to Rabbi Goldstein was reported in the New York Times on April 25, 1929. When asked to expand on his views, the physicist sent an essay, which would be published in the Times’s Sunday magazine on Nov. 9, 1930, in which he made clear he did not believe in a personal God with influence over human affairs, or in a soul distinct from one’s body. Religion, he wrote, began with fear, then acquired a moral dimension. “But there is a third stage of religious experience,” Einstein wrote. “I shall call it cosmic religious feeling.” He described it as the desire “to experience the universe as a single significant whole.” Spotting an attention-grabbing phrase, a week later the magazine ran a symposium headlined “Professor Einstein’s ‘Cosmic Religion,’” in which eight church ministers gave their views. Most found Einstein’s essay stimulating, even if they disagreed with particular points. The following year, Einstein’s essay was published in a booklet under the title “Cosmic Religion.”

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Work And The Meaning Of Life

Christianity Today:  Work Matters to God Because We Matter, by David L. Bahnsen (Author, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (2024)):

If one were to summarize the underlying thesis of the contemporary faith and work movement in a single sentence, it would likely be “Your work matters to God.”

Dozens of books have been published on the subject and a seemingly significant movement of conferences, websites, and resources has gained traction in the past two decades. The answers to why our work matters to God and what that means practically may vary, but the message “Our work matters to God” has shaped much of the conversation in churches and Christian workplaces alike.

But I believe we need a more Kuyperian understanding of this concept. Our work matters to God because all of the created order belongs to Christ, and we find in the creation account not just the anthropological truths that matter to this subject (mankind is an image bearer of God) but the ontological truths as well (our very being is connected to our pre-Fall mandate to be the workers and cultivators of God’s creation). This foundational appeal to a theology of work requires a pre-Fall understanding of work and purpose and then a post-Fall application.

A Kuyperian understanding of this theology provides a vision for work that is, like all of nature, tainted by sin yet under the redemptive work of God’s plan in history. Human beings as image bearers of God, created with an incomprehensible capacity for productivity and creativity, demonstrate the lordship of Christ even in a fallen world and participate in the glorious redemption process as our earthly endeavors build God’s kingdom, business by business.

“Some people imagine the state of glory around God’s throne as though all labor will have ended, to taste heavenly bliss in pleasant idleness,” Abraham Kuyper has said. “These people know neither God nor his angels nor life as it will be in heaven.”

A declining view of work in the culture at large has managed to portray work as a meaningful contributor to stress, anxiety, desolation, and isolation. Humanistic assumptions, often subconsciously wedded to elitism, have given birth to the idea that standard market professions—often blue-collar or not requiring of a post-graduate degree—are “less than,” contributing to a societal nose-thumbing and to a severe worker dissatisfaction. This cause-and-effect dynamic is a vicious cycle that undermines fulfillment and flourishing.

The faith and work movement promises to be an antidote to this negative feedback loop. A high view of work negates the need to succumb to the thinking of a “dead-end job” and certainly avoids the temptation to exit the workforce all together (where degrees of despair are most magnified).

But I would argue that in the very creation mandate itself (Gen. 1–2) we find meaning in our earthly endeavors, which offers a remedy for this crisis of despair. Not only can we avoid the terribly counterproductive notion that work is causing these problems, but we can embrace the resolution that work may provide in solving these problems. ...

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Religious Lawyering In A Polarized Society

Amelia J. Uelmen (Georgetown), Religious Lawyering in a Polarized Society, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 99 (2024):

I am deeply humbled to be included in the stellar lineup of speakers in this lecture series and delighted for the occasion to be in conversation with the University of Detroit-Mercy Law School community. Thank you for the invitation. I open my reflections with a few autobiographical notes as a way to illustrate some insights into the history and trajectory of what is termed the "religious lawyering movement." Then I would like to offer a few suggestions for developments in the field against the backdrop of our current cultural terrain.

I came to the legal profession as part of an effort to live an integrative spirituality of unity as developed within one of the Catholic ecclesial movements that flourished in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the Focolare Movement. Having lived the Focolare spirituality since childhood, for me the first work of unity is interior: I see my work not as something to be "balanced" with the rest of my life, but rather as integrated into the whole of my identity as a religious and spiritual person. ...

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NY Times: Yeshiva University Reverses Itself And Bans LGBTQ Club

Following up on my previous post, Yeshiva University Agrees To Recognize LGBTQ Student Group After Five-Year Battle:  New York Times, Yeshiva University Reverses Itself and Bans L.G.B.T.Q. Club:

Two months after Yeshiva University said it would recognize an L.G.B.T.Q. student club on campus, bringing a yearslong legal battle to an end, the school has reversed course and banned the organization.

The school said the club, called Hareni, had violated both Jewish principles and the legal settlement. But lawyers for the students said it was leaders at the school, a Modern Orthodox Jewish institution with campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx, who had violated the agreement with hostile religious rhetoric.

In a letter to the community on Friday, the university repeated an argument it made unsuccessfully in state court in 2022, saying its undergraduate programs are “fundamentally religious.”

The school said that “recent actions and statements” from Hareni, which was formed after a legal battle with an unofficial club called the Pride Alliance, had led administrators to believe that it was “operating as a pride club under a different name and as such is antithetical to the Torah values of our yeshiva, as well as in violation of the approved guidelines and of the terms of the settlement agreement.”

“There is no place for such a club in yeshiva,” the letter continued, using the general term for an Orthodox Jewish educational institution. It said: “We remain fully committed to guiding our students in their challenges” in a manner consistent with Jewish religious law.

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President Trump Names Three Professors To Religious Liberty Commission's Advisory Board Of Legal Experts

White House Statement, President Donald Trump Names Advisory Board Members to the Religious Liberty Commission:

Today, President Donald Trump has designated the following individuals to serve on the advisory boards of the Religious Liberty Commission. On May 1st, the President signed an Executive Order establishing the Religious Liberty Commission. He designated Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick as chair and Dr. Ben Carson as vice chair, as well as 11 other commission members. Today, he has designated individuals to serve on the three advisory boards comprised of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay advisors, respectively. ...

Advisory Board of Legal Experts

1. Francis Beckwith. A Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies, Affiliate Professor of Political Science, and Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy at Baylor University, Dr. Beckwith teaches and publishes in the areas of religion, jurisprudence, politics, and ethics. A graduate of Fordham University (Ph.D. and M.A. in philosophy) and the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis (Master of Juridical Studies), he has published over 100 academic articles, book chapters, reviews, and reference entries.

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Projected 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Overall
2. New York Times, 89-Year Old Retired Florida Professor Left Bulk Of Her $2.8 Million Estate To 31 Former Students
3. Adam Bonica (Stanford), Adam Chilton (Chicago), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) & Maya Sen (Harvard), Law Professors Have Become More Liberal, But They Also Have Become More Conservative Than Their Students
4. ABA Press Release, ABA Legal Ed Council Votes Unanimously To Suspend Law School Diversity Accreditation Standard Until August 31, 2026 Due To Trump's DEI Crackdown
5. Manhattan Institute, It’s Time For Professors to Teach More
6. The Intercept, NYU About-Face: Law Students Can Take Exams Without Renouncing Protests
7. Brian Leiter (Chicago) & Daniel Rodriguez (Northwestern), Opposition Grows To ABA's Proposal To Double The Experiential Learning Accreditation Requirement
8. ABA Journal, ABA Legal Ed Council Proposes To Double Experiential Learning Accreditation Requirement To 12 Credits
9. Indiana-McKinney Law, Death Of James P. White, ABA Consultant On Legal Education (1974-2000)
10. Jonathan Turley (George Washington), Oregon Law Professor Accuses Oregon Law Review of Anti-Israeli Discrimination

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

Tax:

1. Wall Street Journal, Will Tax Complexity Force Pope Leo To Renounce His U.S. Citizenship?
2. Call For Tax Papers, Washington University Law Review Symposium On Taxing, Spending, And The Constitution
3. Trevor Fry (J.D. 2025, Boston College), For Everything Else, There's Taxes: Why Credit Card Rewards Should Stop Being Priceless
4. Rebecca Kysar (Fordham), The Stakes Of The Global Tax Deal For International Economic Governance
5. Brian Leiter (Chicago), Lucy Msall Joins Chicago Tax Faculty
6. ABA Tax Section, May Meeting Kicks Off In Washington, D.C.
7. Orly Mazur (SMU) & Adam Thimmesch (Nebraska), Cooperative Federalism And The Digital Tax Impasse
8. Bridget Crawford (Pace), Confronting Inequality: Three Eras Of Gender And Tax Scholarship
9. David Elkins (Netanya), Review Of The Normative Shift In Corporate Tax Policy After GloBE By Tarcisio Diniz Magalhães (Antwerp) & Allison Christians (McGill)
10. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers

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

Faith:

1. David Brooks, How To Survive The Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact
2. Harvard Law, ‘A Citizen of Heaven And Harvard’: Honoring The Life And Ongoing Impact Of Bill Stuntz
3. New York Times Op-Ed (Ross Douthat), What The World Needs From Pope Leo
4. Dispatch Faith (Alastair Roberts (Theopolis Institute)), Is Empathy A Sin?
5. Holy See Press Office, Pope Leo's First Homily
   Richard Murphy (Funding the Future), Christianity And ChatGPT

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Does Artificial Intelligence Have A Role In Legal Scholarship?
• For Everything Else, There's Taxes: Why Credit Card Rewards Should Stop Being Priceless
• ABA Legal Ed Council Votes Unanimously To Suspend Law School Diversity Accreditation Standard Until August 31, 2026 Due To Trump's DEI Crackdown
• Navigating The Complexities Of Cryptocurrency Taxation

Sunday:

• What The World Needs From Pope Leo
• Pope Leo's First Homily
• Is Empathy A Sin?
• Left And Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs To Change
• Happy Mother's Day From SNL
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

What The World Needs From Pope Leo

New York Times Op-Ed:  What the World Needs From Pope Leo, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

The name alone often speaks volumes. In choosing to reign as Francis, first of that name, Jorge Bergoglio signaled clearly the style of his pontificate, which aspired to the simplicity of the saint of Assisi while offering all sorts of ruptures with tradition.

A successor who chose Francis II or, for that matter, John XXIV or Paul VII (after the popes of the Second Vatican Council) would have signaled a further push for liberalization; a successor who opted for Benedict XVII or Pius XIII would have been promising a traditionalist swing.

Whereas the name Leo XIV promises, perhaps, some version of the “peace” that the former Cardinal Robert Prevost invoked in his first words from the papal loggia — peace between the church’s contending factions as well as in the wider world. The last Leo was long-reigning and popular and remembered fondly by Catholics of varying theological stripes. He’s famous for his interventions in 19th-century debates over capitalism and socialism and his support for the revival of Thomist philosophy, a legacy that’s neither “left” nor “right" but simply Catholic in a way that a divided church struggles to achieve today.

Perhaps no pope can achieve it, and certainly there is an interpretation of Leo XIV’s election that just emphasizes continuities with the Francis era: He’s a Francis appointee who entered the conclave as a favored candidate of some of the previous pope’s allies; he’s an American who’s also a critic, lately, of the Catholic vice president of the United States. One can tell a story where the last point was crucial to his election — where at least some cardinals wanted an anti-Trump American as pope — and where his name promises a less destabilizing but still liberal-leaning papacy.

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Pope Leo's First Homily

Holy See Press Office, Holy Mass of His Holiness Leo XIV with the College of Cardinals:

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.

Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.

This is the world that has been entrusted to us, a world in which, as Pope Francis taught us so many times, we are called to bear witness to our joyful faith in Jesus the Saviour. Therefore, it is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).

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Is Empathy A Sin?

Dispatch Faith:  Is Empathy a Sin?, by Alastair Roberts (Theopolis Institute):

Like other terms such as “freedom” or “love,” “empathy” is generally something of a “hurrah” word; people agree that, whatever it is, it is a very good thing. Recent decades have witnessed burgeoning literature on empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, suggested in 2001 that it was a panacea: “any problem immersed in empathy becomes solvent.” The Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric spoke in 2015 of an “empathy revolution” that has excited compassion for the humanitarian transformation of society, reforming institutions, extending rights, and deepening relationships. Perhaps most famously, Brené Brown, author of several New York Times bestselling books, has championed the power and importance of empathy in dealing with shame and feelings of inadequacy, in works such as I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).

Empathy is not an unchallenged good, however. Over the past few years there has been a growing movement opposing the privileged place the term enjoys in much Western psychology, ethics, and political thought. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, psychology professor Paul Bloom questioned the supposed virtue, arguing that empathy dangerously distorts judgment and can even encourage cruelty toward those deemed to threaten its objects. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, for example, many people angrily tore down posters of the Israeli hostages, while others expressed their indignance at footage and reporting of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza: in war, empathy can be a zero-sum game, and as we respond in empathy to our favored side we can become calloused to suffering on the other.

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview of the 2026-2027 U.S. News Law School Rankings: 
   1. First-Time Bar Passage
   2. Ultimate Bar Passage
   3. Employment
2. The Intercept, NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests Or Be Barred From Final Exams
3. The Recorder, California Supreme Court Lowers Passing Score on February Bar Exam, Orders Return to Multistate Exam in July
4. Inside Higher Ed, Georgetown Law Students Track 850+ Law Firms: Have They ‘Caved’ Or ‘Stood Up’ To Trump?
5. Derek Muller (Notre Dame) & Daniel Rodriguez (Northwestern), On ABA Accreditation Of Law Schools
6. Law360, 7th Circuit Denies Law School's Request For Rehearing En Banc Of Panel Decision Reviving Law Prof's Retaliation Claim; Easterbrook Says Public Universities Can Restrict Professors' Teaching And Scholarship
7. Reuters, Under Trump Pressure, ABA Is Poised To Suspend Law School DEI Accreditation Standard Through August 2026
8. New York Times Op-Ed (Jonathan Biss (Concert Pianist) & Christopher Serkin (Vanderbilt)), A Pianist And A Law Professor Meet At The Bar—Playing The Constitution Like A Piano
9. The Recorder, Pass Rate On February 2025 California Bar Exam Hits All-Time High, Due To Lowered Passing Score And Bonus For Taking Experimental Test
10. Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University), How New Lawyers Value Law School Experiential Training

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

Tax:

1. Wall Street Journal Op-Ed (Steven Davidoff Solomon (UC-Berkeley)), You Won’t Believe The Tax Breaks For Professors
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
3. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: No Equitable Tolling For Brain Farts
4. Victor Thuronyi (IMF), A Simpler Approach To Taxing Tips
5. Charles Delmotte (Michigan State), Beyond The Wealth Tax
6. Elizabeth Hoffmann (Purdue), Taxation, Lactation, And Validation: The Symbolic Power Of Tax Law To Legitimize Breast Milk Expression
7. Lauren Libby (Yale), Theories Of University Endowment Taxation
8. Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern), The Rise And Entrenchment Of The Antitax Movement
9. Tennessee Law, Andrew Appleby Leaves Stetson For Tennessee
10. Mirit Eyal (Alabama), Review Of Theories Of University Endowment Taxation By Lauren Libby (Yale)

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

Faith:

1. New York Times (David Brooks), How To Survive The Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact
2. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Three Law & Religion Articles
3. Washington Post (Peter Jamison), How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With The Pope
4. Harvard Law Today, ‘A Citizen of Heaven And Harvard’: Honoring The Life And Ongoing Impact Of Bill Stuntz
5. Christianity Today Op-Ed (Tish Harrison Warren), The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot Of Holy Week Underscores The Truth Of The Gospel
   Funding the Future (Richard Murphy), Christianity and ChatGPT

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Georgetown Law Students Track 850+ Law Firms: Have They ‘Caved’ Or ‘Stood Up’ To Trump?
• WSJ: Wealth Of 19 Richest U.S. Households Increased By $1 Trillion Last Year
• February Bar Exam Pass Rates Fall In More Than Half The States, Including NY & TX
• Brennen: The Chilling Effect Of SFFA v. UNC/Harvard On Race-Based Affirmation By Tax-Exempt Charities

Sunday:

• David Brooks: How To Survive The Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact
• Christianity And ChatGPT
• NY Times: The Cross Is A Hot Accessory, At The Intersection Of Faith And Culture
• Journal Of Christian Legal Thought Symposium: Law, Faith, And Artificial Intelligence
• 2025 ATL Law Revue Video Contest Finalists
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

David Brooks: How To Survive The Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact

Following up on my previous post, David Brooks: My Decade-Long Journey To Faith:  New York Times Op-Ed:  How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact, by David Brooks:

I had forgotten how exhausting it is to live in Donald Trump’s world. He’s not only a political figure. He creates a psychological and social atmosphere that suffuses the whole culture — the airwaves, our conversations, our moods.

If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is “pagan.” The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. ...

The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history. It was dammed up, somewhat, only by millenniums of hard civilizational work. The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again. The pagan ethos does not believe that every human was made in the image of God, does not believe in human equality, is not concerned about preserving the dignity of the poor. It does not care much about the universal feelings of benevolence, empathy and faithfulness toward one another, which, it turns out, are absolutely required for a democracy to function. ...

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Christianity And ChatGPT

Richard Murphy (Funding the Future), Christianity and ChatGPT:

I asked ChatGPT:

What is the essence of Christian teaching? Please ignore ideas promoted by St Paul. Focus on the Gospels.

It suggested this, based presumably on a web search:

Focusing solely on the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and setting aside the later interpretations of St. Paul, the essence of Jesus' teaching in the Gospels can be summarized around a few central themes:

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NY Times: The Cross Is A Hot Accessory, At The Intersection Of Faith And Culture

New York Times, A Hot Accessory, at the Intersection of Faith and Culture:

When Arianna Salerno first moved to Washington, D.C., in 2022 to attend Catholic University she didn’t see many people wearing cross necklaces. But in the past year, she says she has noticed an uptick of the jewelry each time she takes the Metro, and they are now a regular presence on Capitol Hill, where she’s held multiple internships.

As a millenniums-old symbol of Christian faith, the cross would seem somewhat immune to trendiness. But cross necklaces and pendants have been in vogue before and may be again as some feel more comfortable embracing their faith and seek community with others.

On red carpets, on social media, at protests by high-ranking Democrats and in the White House, necklaces with cross pendants are appearing with renewed prevalence. Chappell Roan wore an oversize one to the MTV Video Music Awards in September, and one dangled from Sabrina Carpenter’s neck in the music video for her single “Please Please Please.” The trendy online store Ssense sells them in nearly 50 variations, and mainstream jewelers like Kendra Scott and Zales carry numerous designs.

Lately, the cross necklaces flash across cable news screens several times a week, suspended between the collarbones of Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Ms. Bondi, 59, wrote in a statement that her necklaces are an expression of her “strong Christian” upbringing: “My faith is very important to me,” she said. “It is what gets me through each day.”

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Journal Of Christian Legal Thought Symposium: Law, Faith, And Artificial Intelligence

Symposium, Law, Faith, and Artificial Intelligence, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 1-62 (2024):

Articles

• Jason Thacker (Boyce College), Defining Humanity Down, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 1 (2024)
• Jordan Furlong (Law21), The Multifaceted Impact of Generative AI on Lawyers & Legal Services, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 8 (2024)
• Larry O. Natt Gantt, II (High Point University), More Than Machines, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 16 (2024)
• Alvin Velazquez (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar), Instructing AI Through the Exercise of Labor’s Solidarity, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 25 (2024)
• Joseph Chapa (U.S. Air Force), Legal Reviews of AI-Enabled Targeting Systems, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 34 (2024)

Student Note

• Michael Orcutt (J.D. 2024, Tulsa), Playing God or Playing Human?, 14 J. Christian Legal Thought 42 (2024)

Dialogue

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law School Rankings By First-Time Bar Passage Rate (2024)
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law School Rankings By Ultimate Bar Passage Rate (2022)
3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law School Rankings By 10-Month Employment Rate (2024)
4. Washington Free Beacon (Aaron Sibarium), Pervasive Pattern Of Racial Discrimination At Harvard Law Review
5. Los Angeles Times, California Bar Allowed Non-Lawyers To Use AI To Draft February Exam Questions, Will Ask Supreme Court To Lower Cut Score
6. The Recorder, California Bar May Delay Release Of Results Of Catastrophic February Exam, Further Punishing Applicants
7. Mike Spivey, The Implications Of Trump's Executive Order Targeting ABA Accreditation Of Law Schools
8. Los Angeles Times, Pressure Grows On California Bar To Switch To NCBE For July Exam Following February Exam Debacle
9. Wall Street Journal Essay, Bill Belichick: The Four Words Every Coach (And Dean) Needs To Say More Than Anyone Else On Their Team
10. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), 90% Through The Fall 2025 Law School Admissions Season: Applications Are Up At 190 Of 196 Law Schools

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

Tax:

1. Washington University, Jonathan Choi Leaves USC For Washington University
2. UC-Berkeley, Brian Galle Leaves Georgetown For UC-Berkeley
3. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
4. Sloan Speck (Colorado), Review Of The Past And Future Of Taxing “Incomes” By Clint Wallace (South Carolina) & Bret Wells (Houston)
5. Erick Sam (Utah), Distribution Through Taxation Versus Legal Rules, And The Epistemic Limits Of Law-and-Economics
6. Andrew Hayashi (Virginia), Presentation Of The Effect Of Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax On Financial Reporting At USC
7. Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.), Revoking Tax-Exemption For Pursuit Of DEI
8. Diane Ring (Boston College), Review Of Negotiating A UN Framework Convention On International Tax By Frederik Heitmüller (International Centre for Tax and Development
9. Wall Street Journal, ‘Accountant 2’ Opens Today: CPAs Are Geeked Up For Their Bean-Counting Badass ‘John Wick’
10. Bloomberg, Trump Nominates Donald Korb To Serve A Second Stint As IRS Chief Counsel

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

Faith:

1. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Three Law & Religion Articles
2. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?
3. Washington Post (Peter Jamison), How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With The Pope
4. New York Times (Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham), White House Of Worship: Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump
5. Harvard Law Today (Colleen Walsh), ‘A Citizen of Heaven And Harvard’: Honoring The Life And Ongoing Impact Of Bill Stuntz
   Christianity Today (Tish Harrison Warren), The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot Of Holy Week Underscores The Truth Of The Gospel

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• The Seven Essential Law School Simulation Courses
• Next Week’s Tax Workshops
• California Supreme Court Demands Answers From State Bar On Its Use Of AI In Preparing Bar Exam Questions
• Tax-Exempt Status For NIL Collectives

Sunday:

• Pope Francis's Legacy
• How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With The Pope
• ‘A Citizen of Heaven And Harvard’: Honoring The Life And Ongoing Impact Of Bill Stuntz
• Three Law & Religion Articles
• Pepperdine Caruso Law 3L Commissioning Service
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Pope Francis's Legacy

New York Times Op-Ed:  Francis and the End of the Imperial Papacy, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

Pope Francis, who passed to his reward on the morning after Easter at age 88, was a version of the liberal pope that many Catholics had earnestly desired all through the long reign of John Paul II and the shorter one of Benedict XVI — a man whose worldview was shaped and defined by the Second Vatican Council and whose pontificate sought a renewal of its revolution, a further great modernization of the Catholic Church.

In one way, at least, he succeeded. For generations, modernizers lamented the outsize power of the papacy, the anachronism of a monarchical authority in a democratic age, the way the concept of papal infallibility froze Catholic debates even as the world rushed forward. In theory Francis shared those concerns, promising a more collegial and horizontally oriented church, more synodal, in the jargon of the Catholic bureaucracy. In practice he often used his power in the same way as his predecessors, to police and suppress deviations from his authority — except that this time the targets were dissenting conservatives and traditionalists instead of progressives and modernizers.

But just by creating that novel form of conflict, in which Catholics who had been accustomed to being on the same side as the Vatican found themselves suddenly crosswise from papal authority, Francis helped to demystify his office’s authority and undermine its most imposing claims.

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How JD Vance, A ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled Into A Clash With The Pope

Washington Post, How JD Vance, a ‘Baby Catholic,’ Stumbled into a Clash With the Pope:

The first Catholic convert elected to the vice presidency has provoked an extraordinary string of conflicts within the church he joined six years ago.

Only three Catholics have won the presidency or vice presidency. For the first two, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden, faith was a muted note in their public lives — a source of pride to millions of American Catholics but rarely invoked as a direct influence on policy.

The third, Vice President JD Vance, a Republican, has launched his current career as the nation’s most prominent elected Catholic in a very different way. In less than three months, Vance has made a string of unusual forays into the fraught borderland between religion and politics, castigating the hierarchy of his own church and defending President Donald Trump’s “America First” nationalism through appeals to ancient Christian texts.

Vance’s pronouncements have divided his co-religionists and inflamed long-smoldering divisions within the church. In February, Pope Francis issued a remarkable letter to U.S. bishops that included a rebuke of Vance’s public theologizing. But the vice president has equally staunch defenders among conservative American Catholics who have repeatedly criticized the current papacy.

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‘A Citizen of Heaven And Harvard’: Honoring The Life And Ongoing Impact Of Bill Stuntz

Following up on my previous posts:

• Death of Bill Stuntz (Harvard)
• Harvard Law Review Tribute: Bill Stuntz

Harvard Law Today, ‘A Citizen of Heaven and Harvard’: Honoring the Life and Ongoing Impact of William J. Stuntz:

For William J. Stuntz, the law and religion were inseparable.

At a recent gathering to honor the late Harvard professor and influential scholar on criminal law and procedure, who wrote extensively on Christianity and legal matters, Jack Goldsmith recalled how his longtime friend and colleague infused his life and work with a kindness and care inspired by his strongly held evangelical Christian beliefs.

Stuntz joined the Law School faculty in 2000 and was named the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law in 2007. He died in 2011 at age of 52 after a long battle with cancer, but his insights and scholarship involving Christian legal theory, his groundbreaking contributions to the fields of criminal law and procedure, and his influence as a gifted mentor, giving friend, and gracious colleague live on at Harvard and beyond.

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Three Law & Religion Articles

Anton Sorkin (Director of Law Student Ministries, Christian Legal Society), Riding the Second Wave: Three Articles That Speak to the Mission & Purpose of Institute for Christian Legal Studies:

Throughout my work, I run across countless excellent articles that speak to the underlying richness of the law and religion tradition that feed into my work with students and attorneys alike. Articles that challenge the very foundation of our sense of self as a religious nation and the role of Christianity in shaping law and politics. Since last summer, many of these articles have made their way onto the Cross & Gavel Podcast as I sought to engage the authors in the quality of their ideas and bring to attention their work on a more popular level.

That is my aim here today, not only because of my recent assent to the directorship of the Institute for Christian Legal Studies (ICLS) at Christian Legal Society. But, more fundamentally, because this work has been captured well by three articles that strengthen the fibers of what ICLS strives to become in the years ahead. ...

[M]y focus here is to highlight three recent articles that speak to the heart of what ICLS hopes to achieve in the coming years!

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Pepperdine Caruso Law 3L Commissioning Service

We hosted our 13th annual 3L Commissioning Service at Pepperdine Caruso Law last week. Like many of the best things at our school, it is the brainchild of a student. In 2012, 2L Raija Churchill proposed that the last Wednesday night Dean's Bible study of the year model the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) as a send-off for our graduating 3Ls.

I was honored to give a gift to our 3Ls to encourage them to live the lives that God has called them to after they graduate: a paperweight to keep on their desks to remind them (on the top) of their time at Pepperdine Caruso Law and (on the bottom) a single word — the most powerful word that Jesus talked about and modeled for us — forgiveness. I shared several of the forgiveness stories I have chronicled on this blog, including this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

The highlight of the evening was when our faculty and staff spoke words of life over each of the graduating 3Ls (kudos to Tyler Clark (JD ’22) for beginning this wonderful tradition):

My wife Courtney closed the evening with a powerful commissioning prayer for the 3Ls:

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. U.S. News, 2025-26 Law Specialty Rankings
   1. Legal Writing
   2. Trial Advocacy
   3. Omnibus Specialty Rankings
   4. Omnibus Specialty Rankings v. Overall Rankings
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law Schools That Boycotted The U.S. News Rankings
3. Los Angeles Times, California Bar Allowed Non-Lawyers To Use AI To Draft February Exam Questions, Will Ask Supreme Court To Lower Cut Score
4. Matthew Sag (Emory), Forward Looking Academic Impact Rankings For U.S. Law Schools
5. ABA, Class Of 2024 Jobs Data: ‘Maximum Credit’ Jobs Rate Rises To 89.7%, Up From 88.0% Last Year
6. GQ, The Economy Is Frightening. Law School Won’t Save You.
7. White House, Trump Executive Order Targets College (And Law School) Accreditors (Including ABA), Blames DEI For Low Standards And Poor Student Outcomes
8. Reuters, Nearly All Elite Law Schools Move Up Summer Associate Job Interviews To May And June
9. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?
10. Law.com, A Growing Chorus Of Law School Deans And Faculty Are Speaking Out Against Trump’s Threat To The Rule Of Law

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

Tax:

1. The Atlantic (Conor Clarke, Washington University), Bob Jones And The Conservative Case For Not Revoking Harvard's Tax Exemption
2. Blaine Saito (Ohio State), Review Of Mobility, Territory, And Exclusive Source Taxation By Yariv Brauner (Florida)
3. Tracey Roberts (Cumberland), The Tax Trench Deepens
4. Wisconsin Law School, 28th Annual Critical Tax Conference
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
6. Ursula Ramsey (North Carolina), The Professional Employer Organization Regulatory Regime
7. Alex Raskolnikov (Columbia), Taxing The Ten Percent
8. SSRN, Tax Professor Rankings
9. Conor Clarke (Washington University), Presentation Of Apportioned Direct Taxes At Missouri
10. Harold Holzer (Hunter College), The First IRS Commissioner: ‘The Most Consequential Public Figure Americans Have Never Heard Of’

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

Faith:

1. Anton Sorkin (Christian Legal Society), Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?
2. Christianity Today (Esau McCaulley, Wheaton College), This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Palm Branches
3. New York Times (Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham), White House Of Worship: Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump
4. Jennifer Lee Koh (Pepperdine), Christian Lawyers In The Public Interest And Outside The Political Right
5. New York Times (Ross Douthat), Can The Jesus Of History Support The Christ Of Faith?
   Christianity Today (Tish Harrison Warren), The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot Of Holy Week Underscores The Truth Of The Gospel

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• Nearly All Elite Law Schools Move Up Summer Associate Job Interviews To May And June
• Haneman: The Liminality Of Transactional Relationships
• 2025-26 U.S. News International Law Rankings
• Tax Day At North Carolina Law School

Sunday:

• The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot Of Holy Week Underscores The Truth Of The Gospel
• Things Worth Remembering: The Resurrection Of The Body And The Immortality Of The Soul
• NY Times: White House Of Worship — Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump
• Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?
• Can Universities (And Law Schools) Still Diversify Faculty Hiring Under Trump?
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot Of Holy Week Underscores The Truth Of The Gospel

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  The Epic Jesus Follower Fail: The Cringe-Worthy Subplot of Holy Week Underscores the Truth of the Gospel, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):

From its earliest days, God has pursued and propelled the church in spite of our bumbling and failure.

And this week, Holy Week, we notice that in the midst of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection, we also find an embarrassingly painful display of the weakness, confusion, even imbecility of his earliest followers.

In each unfolding event of the week, the apostles disappoint. During the Last Supper, Jesus tells his friends that one of them will betray him and that they'll all abandon him. They respond by telling Jesus that he's underestimated them and arguing about who is the greatest, the most loyal disciple. Then, they fall asleep, more than once, in Gethsemene, too weak to be a friend to Jesus when he is most desperate for one. Then, they panic and draw swords against those who arrested Jesus. Next, in a scene recounted with cringe-worthy detail, Peter swears up and down that he doesn't know Jesus even though it's pretty obvious to everyone around him that he does.

As painful as it is to watch as those closest to Jesus abandon him, this subplot of Holy Week gives me hope. It is good news that the crux of Christianity, that which compels me to believe, is not the coherence of abstract principles writ by holy men or the perfect lives of Christ's followers, but is instead a claim to historic fact. This story of Jesus, this Holy Week, happened in time and space with messy, broken men and women who didn't understand at the time that their friend and teacher was in the process of saving the world.

This year I went through a brief, difficult season of doubt. During this period of struggle, I could not get away from a simple question: Was Jesus resurrected or not?

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Things Worth Remembering: The Resurrection Of The Body And The Immortality Of The Soul

Douglas Murray (The Free Press), Things Worth Remembering: The Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul:

Preacher-poet John Donne gave voice to his faith with a sermon on how God will raise the dead.

I wonder if there has ever been a bigger change in our collective way of thinking than in our transition from the age of faith to the age of doubt. Inevitably, it is on my mind this Easter.

Millions of people around the world believe in the literal resurrection, when God lifts His believers into heaven. I suppose untold numbers are unsure or doubtful about this, while keeping within the borders of faith. For myself, I can’t help looking back at the age of faith—or even certainty—with envy.

Last year, I wrote in this space about the great English poet John Donne. He was perhaps the greatest of the “metaphysical” poets, a man whose work was laced with a raciness and a realness that, for some, lay in contradiction with his position as a clergyman and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. ...

His very last sermon, given on February 25, 1631, and posthumously published as “Death’s Duel,” was given when Donne was so feeble that those who saw him give it said he already resembled a corpse.

In an age of doubt all this might have been depressing. But in an age of faith—and faith such as Donne’s—it was something beautiful. As he wrote in his Devotions: “I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.” ...

One of his greatest sermons, Sermon LXXXI, he preached at the Earl of Bridgewater’s House in London on November 19, 1627, where he reflected on one of the most curious aspects of the resurrection.

The problem he turns over in this sermon—given, astonishingly, at the marriage of the Earl’s daughter—is how God, on the day of resurrection, will reassemble the bodies of the faithful long after they have decayed. Some of the dead, he says, have left limbs in other lands, or their bodies have turned to mulch. Others have ended up in the sea’s mouth. So how is it, on the day of resurrection, that God can call even one of these bodies, let alone all of these bodies, together? Donne both addresses these questions unsparingly and gives an answer that is wonderful—wonderful in its faith, and in its theology also. But perhaps most astonishing to me is the wonder of Donne’s language.

For me, this sings beautifully on the page, but it sounds even better to the ear [read by Douglas Murray here]. 

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NY Times: White House Of Worship — Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump

New York Times, White House of Worship: Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump:

A cappella hymns rising in the Roosevelt Room.

Prayer “in Jesus’ name” proclaimed from the Cabinet Room.

Hands stretching out in the Oval Office, as pastors invoke Bible passages about how kings are established by God.

From the moment Donald J. Trump was re-elected to the presidency, his conservative Christian supporters have rejoiced in a second chance for their values to have power. And now, week after week, scenes like these are taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as they seize on this opportunity.

Routinely, and often at Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic direction, senior administration officials and allied pastors are infusing their brand of Christian worship into the workings of the White House itself, suggesting that his campaign promise to “bring back Christianity” is taking tangible root.

The result at times is an atmosphere inside the White House of a president operating with a divine mission. Amid his administration’s combative postures on issues of economic tariffs, drastic cuts to foreign aid and immigrant deportations, there is an enduring sense among many of his Christian supporters that Mr. Trump miraculously survived an assassination attempt last summer to remake America.

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Are Faith-Based Law Schools Fairly Ranked By U.S. News?

Anton Sorkin (Director of Law Student Ministries, Christian Legal Society):

Interesting observation from David Lat: “schools with a strong ideological brand, including religiously affiliated law schools  . . .  tend to fare well in rankings[.]”

Imagine how well they'd fare if there wasn't a peer ranking penalty, tabulated by Michael Conklin at 17.65 in his upcoming paper [Religious Law Schools, Rankings, and Bias: Measuring the Rankings Penalty at Religious Law Schools].

Latest rankings has the peer reputation average for the most devout law schools: ...

The RED [above] is all the schools that fare worse among their peers vs. their overall rank. The GREEN are the same schools as last year with positive peer scores. 

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education: 

1. U.S. News, 2025-26 Law Specialty Rankings
   1. Constitutional Law
   2. Contracts/Commercial Law
   3. Criminal Law
   4. Dispute Resolution
   5. Environmental Law
   6. Health Care Law
   7. Intellectual Property Law
   8. International Law
2. Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed (Phillip Levine (Wellesley College & Brookings Institution)), These 77 Colleges (And 45 Law Schools) Have The Most To Lose From Trump’s Cuts
3. CUPA-HR, Tenure-Track Faculty Raises Continue To Lag All Other Higher Ed Workers; Inflation-Adjusted Salaries Are 10% Lower Than In 2017
4. MLive, Hundreds Of ‘Stunned’ Michigan Law Alums Blast DEI Cuts
5. Reuters, ‘White Students Not Eligible to Apply’: ABA Sued Over Race-Based Law School Scholarship
6. Washington Free Beacon, At ‘Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon,’ Harvard Law Students Target Pages Of Law Firms That Criticized School's Response To Anti-Semitism
7. The Walrus, UBC Law School Faces Fresh Allegations Of Discrimination
8. James Ming Chen (Michigan State), Principia Bibliometrica: Modeling Citation And Download Data In Legal Scholarship
9. ABA Journal, California Bar Still Can't Decide How To Make Applicants Whole After Botched February Bar Exam
10. Bloomberg Law, Law Students Sue EEOC Over Big Law Diversity Scrutiny

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

Tax:

1. Florida Bar, Winners Of The 2025 National Tax Moot Court Competition
2. Brian Galle (Georgetown), David Gamage (Missouri) & Bob Lord (Patriotic Millionaires), Taxing Dynasties
3. Richard Winchester (Brooklyn), Presentation Of A Tax Policing Paradox At Columbia
4. Gladriel Shobe (BYU) & Matthew Johnson (Cravath, New York), Geographic Inequality And The SALT Deduction
5. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
6. Samantha Strimling (J.D. 2024, Harvard), Good Governance Is Taxing: The Implications Of Tax Policy For Separation Of Powers And The Major Questions Doctrine
7. University of New South Wales, 16th International ATAX Tax Administration Conference: Getting It Right
8. Diane Lourdes Dick (Iowa), Creative Tax Writing At Iowa
9. Emily Cauble (Wisconsin), Channels Of Tax Law (Mis)Information
10. Manoj Viswanathan (UC Law-SF), Presentation Of Damage Award Taxation And Distributive Justice At Duke

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

Faith:

1. Christianity Today (Esau McCaulley (Wheaton College)), This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Palm Branches
2. Jennifer Lee Koh (Pepperdine), Christian Lawyers In The Public Interest And Outside The Political Right
3. New York Times (Ross Douthat), Can The Jesus Of History Support The Christ Of Faith?
4. The New Yorker (Adam Gopnik), Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Jesus
5. Alistair Begg (Parkside Church, Cleveland), The Essence Of Good Friday: The Man On The Middle Cross

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. 

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• 7th Circuit Judicial Council Dismisses Misconduct Complaint Against Federal Judge For Columbia Law Clerk Boycott
• Good Governance Is Taxing: The Implications Of Tax Policy For Separation Of Powers And The Major Questions Doctrine
• 2025-26 U.S. News Constitutional Law Rankings
• Winners Of The 2025 National Tax Moot Court Competition

Sunday:

• This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Palm Branches
• Good Friday Reminds Us Of The Ephemerality Of Human Power
• The Essence Of Good Friday: The Man On The Middle Cross
• Praying In The Shadow Of Gethsemane And Good Friday
• Tenure-Track Faculty Raises Continue To Lag All Other Higher Ed Workers; Inflation-Adjusted Salaries Are 10% Lower Than In 2017
• 2025-26 U.S. News Contracts/Commercial Law Rankings
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Palm Branches

Christianity Today:  This Palm Sunday, Ponder Donkeys, Not Branches, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton College; Author, The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary  (2024)):

Christian churches throughout the world will begin our holiest week of the year on what is popularly known as Palm Sunday. It commemorates one of the few events in the life of Jesus recorded in all four gospel stories: his entry into Jerusalem, followed by a raucous and warm welcome and a lot of waving branches. (Only John 12:13 mentions they were palms.) In Israel today, churches still reenact the journey from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem—the route supposedly taken by Jesus all those centuries ago.

As I study this story in Scripture, I’m struck by the fact that the primary symbol for this day—a palm—was not chosen by Jesus.

John writes, “They took palm branches and went out to meet him” (John 12:13). Why did the crowd choose palm branches? It could simply have been that palms were nearby. But history tells us there might have been a deeper reason: Those plants were symbolically linked to military victories and Messiahship.

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