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Paul L. Caron
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Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Resources

By Paul Caron

Update: 

Following up on my previous posts: 

In the current 2024-25 methodology, resources count 7% in the overall ranking:

  • Student-Faculty Ratio (5%)
  • Librarian-Student Ratio (2%)

Below are two resource rankings. The first is a simple ranking using the above weights. The second uses Z-scores with the above weights to better approximate the U.S. News methodology. 

Rank School Student-Faculty Ratio Rank Library Resources Rank Weighted Rank
1 Jacksonville 1 (3.24) 1 (20.00) 1.00
2 Stanford 5 (4.20) 3 (33.24) 4.43
3 Hawaii 4 (4.15) 8 (39.76) 5.14
3 University of Arizona 2 (3.45) 13 (44.35) 5.14
5 Yale 8 (4.33) 2 (21.34) 6.29
6 George Mason 6 (4.21) 11 (42.31) 7.43
7 Cleveland State 3 (4.06) 27 (54.95) 9.86
8 Minnesota 10 (4.63) 10 (40.91) 10.00
9 New Mexico 15 (4.81) 6 (37.50) 12.43
10 Penn 14 (4.76) 12 (42.58) 13.43
11 Florida State 12 (4.71) 18 (50.78) 13.71
12 Northwestern 7 (4.22) 44 (62.67) 17.57
13 SUNY-Buffalo 19 (4.89) 16 (48.22) 18.14
14 BYU 26 (5.05) 4 (36.90) 19.71
15 Chicago 13 (4.74) 37 (59.40) 19.86
16 Connecticut 25 (5.05) 9 (40.39) 20.43
17 Richmond 22 (4.94) 19 (51.00) 21.14
18 Utah 17 (4.82) 35 (58.20) 22.14
19 Washington Univ. 21 (4.91) 29 (55.79) 23.29
20 Texas A&M 9 (4.63) 68 (74.28) 25.86
21 Pittsburgh 11 (4.67) 65 (70.55) 26.43
22 Duke 30 (5.41) 21 (51.86) 27.43
23 UCLA 33 (5.62) 17 (49.24) 28.43
24 Cincinnati 31 (5.58) 28 (55.29) 30.14
25 Catholic 41 (5.84) 5 (37.30) 30.71
26 Colorado 35 (5.69) 26 (54.56) 32.43
27 UC-Irvine 40 (5.84) 14 (45.05) 32.57
28 Boston Univ. 34 (5.68) 34 (57.23) 34.00
29 Virginia 38 (5.74) 33 (56.94) 36.57
30 Georgia State 36 (5.72) 47 (64.67) 39.14
31 Temple 18 (4.87) 93 (88.67) 39.43
32 Vanderbilt 37 (5.73) 46 (64.00) 39.57
33 Maryland 47 (6.06) 25 (53.01) 40.71
34 George Washington 28 (5.11) 73 (78.60) 40.86
35 Georgia 48 (6.07) 24 (53.00) 41.14
36 Cornell 20 (4.90) 98 (90.15) 42.29
37 North Carolina 54 (6.19) 15 (47.67) 42.86
38 Ohio State 46 (6.04) 38 (59.41) 43.71
38 Quinnipiac 16 (4.82) 113 (97.33) 43.71
40 Tennessee 50 (6.12) 30 (56.29) 44.29
41 UC-Berkeley 32 (5.59) 76 (80.23) 44.57
42 Boston College 45 (5.98) 45 (63.75) 45.00
43 NYU 29 (5.40) 87 (85.44) 45.57
44 Georgetown 23 (4.95) 103 (91.98) 45.86
45 Indiana (Maurer) 58 (6.22) 36 (58.78) 51.71
46 Alabama 60 (6.33) 32 (56.80) 52.00
47 Vermont 27 (5.10) 120 (102.00) 53.57
48 Columbia 49 (6.09) 67 (74.21) 54.14
49 William & Mary 67 (6.47) 22 (52.80) 54.14
50 Drexel 42 (5.86) 85 (85.20) 54.29

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March 4, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

17 Deans Ask California High Court To Provisionally License Grads Who Fail February Exam And Scrap New Kaplan-Written Questions And Revert Back To In-Person Exams In July

By Paul Caron

The Recorder, Deans Ask California High Court to Provisionally License Grads Who Fail February Exam:

California Supreme CourtSeventeen California law schools on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to scrap the state bar's new remote-testing platform and to return to in-person testing in time for the July bar exam.

In a four-page letter to Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, deans of the American Bar Association-approved schools also called on the court to grant provisional law licenses to anyone who fails the February test that was marred by severe technical failures last week.

Dear Chief Justice Guerrero and Members of the California Supreme Court:

We write to offer our partnership in your efforts to restore the public’s trust after the myriad and widely reported issues in the content and administration of the February Bar Examination. Like you, we have collectively fielded thousands of communications from students, graduates, and members of the Bar over the last several days expressing deep and justifiable concern about what the absence of a valid and reliable mechanism for assessing preparedness for licensure means for candidates and the public. We are committed to offering every resource we have at our disposal to address both the immediate and emergent challenges created by the new exam.

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March 4, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

DOGE Presses To Check Federal Benefits Payments Against IRS Tax Records

By Paul Caron

Washington Post, DOGE Presses to Check Federal Benefits Payments Against IRS Tax Records:

Doge LogoOfficials with Elon Musk’s group say they want to search for fraud. Privacy law bars the IRS from disclosing tax information to other parts of the government.

Officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have expressed interest in using personal tax records to check federal benefits payments for fraud, which would mobilize the IRS to drive the Trump administration’s campaign to cut government spending, according to three people familiar with the situation and records obtained by The Washington Post.

Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, DOGE representatives embedded at the tax agency, on Friday asked IRS lawyers to assist in creating an “omnibus” agreement with other federal agencies that would allow a broad swath of federal officials to cross-reference benefits rolls with taxpayer data, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

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March 4, 2025 in IRS News, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News | Permalink

Monday, March 3, 2025

Tax Workshops: Fleischer At Columbia, Leenders At Oxford

By Paul Caron

Miranda Perry Fleischer (San Diego; Google Scholar) presents The Case for a Universal Child Allowance at Columbia today as part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Michael Love:

Miranda fleischer“Helping families” is a hot topic, with policymakers ranging from J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio on the right to Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren on the left unveiling proposals that would benefit families with children. And later this year, Congress will almost certainly revisit family-friendly tax benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC), discussing expansions and reforms. Yet once again, the same, seemingly intractable debate will likely ensue. Should aid be limited to children whose parents work, or should we help all low-income children? Should strings be placed on how parents spend aid, or should we trust parents to decide what is best for their child? A key contributor to this quagmire is that policymakers often conflate distinct goals—helping working families, alleviating poverty generally, or reducing the tax burden on low-income workers—when discussing these programs. What emerges is a mishmash of programs that, in trying to fulfill multiple goals at once, fail to achieve any single one particularly well. This lack of focus is especially troublesome when talk turns to reform. Policymakers compare apples to oranges, muddying discussions of program design.

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March 3, 2025 in Colloquia, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Tax Workshops | Permalink

Legal Ed News Roundup

By Paul Caron

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March 3, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Bankman & Gergen: How Trump’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Could Replace The Corporate Income Tax

By Paul Caron

Washington Post Op-Ed:  How Trump’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Could Solve a Tax Problem, by Joseph Bankman (Stanford) & Mark P. Gergen (UC-Berkeley):

Trump SWPresident Donald Trump has signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund — a government-owned fund that could invest in stocks, real estate or other private assets, allowing the American people to share those companies’ profits. Countries as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Norway have used their oil revenue to set up such funds, which are generally thought to have been quite successful. But the U.S. government doesn’t have that revenue because most oil here is privately owned.

However, there is a way the United States can establish a sovereign wealth fund and, at the same time, dramatically increase corporate productivity: by eliminating the corporate income tax and instead requiring corporations to issue a calculated number of nonvoting shares directly to the government. The government fund would be required to hold the shares as an investment, and the income they generate would replace the tax.

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March 3, 2025 in Tax, Tax News | Permalink

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Student Outcomes

By Paul Caron

Update: 

Following up on my previous posts: 

In the current 2024-25 methodology, student outcomes count 58% in the overall ranking:

Below are two student outcome rankings. The first is a simple ranking using the above weights. The second uses Z-scores with the above weights to better approximate the U.S. News methodology.

Rank School First-Time Bar Passage Rank Ultimate Bar Passage Rank Employment Rank Weighted
Ranks
1 Virginia 4 9 2 3.47
2 Penn 9 14 3 6.19
3 Duke 10 5 5 6.55
4 Chicago 6 1 10 7.67
5 Michigan 2 19 12 9.74
6 Texas A&M 25 15 1 10.14
7 NYU 11 7 13 11.66
8 Yale 5 12 16 12.10
9 Wake Forest 18 32 6 12.86
10 Northwestern 20 21 8 13.29
11 North Carolina 8 53 9 14.00
12 Washington Univ. 24 41 4 14.67
13 UCLA 14 26 15 16.02
14 Columbia 17 39 11 16.24
15 Harvard 1 6 28 16.97
16 Vanderbilt 7 24 22 17.59
17 Stanford 3 4 31 19.05
18 Minnesota 35 13 17 22.10
19 Georgia 29 10 23 23.29
20 Texas 22 16 26 23.55
21 Wisconsin 13 3 34 23.74
22 Boston College 15 29 30 25.22
23 Notre Dame 19 49 24 25.47
24 Boston Univ. 38 17 21 25.79
25 UC-Berkeley 20 8 37 28.22
26 SMU 59 58 6 28.72
27 Alabama 28 33 29 29.17
28 Georgetown 33 40 25 29.29
29 George Mason 51 30 18 29.69
30 Baylor 23 28 35 30.43
31 Cornell 27 48 33 32.95
32 Utah 36 18 36 33.83
33 Washington & Lee 48 66 20 34.24
34 Florida State 58 71 19 37.38
35 Iowa 63 90 14 38.38
36 Ohio State 30 34 46 39.59
37 USC 45 20 43 40.84
38 Kansas 42 22 49 43.57
39 Fordham 52 25 44 44.19
40 Penn State-Univ. Park 46 55 42 44.81
41 William & Mary 12 27 68 45.67
42 BYU 26 2 66 45.86
43 George Washington 62 43 38 46.05
44 UC-Irvine 41 59 48 47.16
45 St. John's 67 35 39 47.21
46 Florida 68 72 31 47.43
47 Oklahoma 34 44 58 48.86
48 Penn State-Dickinson 66 52 40 49.52
49 Villanova 43 65 53 51.34
50 Kentucky 88 95 27 54.14

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March 3, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

Lesson From The Tax Court:  After Loper-Bright, Hold The Mayo?

By Bryan Camp

Lessons From The Tax Court (2024)How much deference should courts give Treasury regulations?  Until 2011, courts answered that question differently from how they evaluated deference to regulations issued by other federal agencies.  In that year, however, the Supreme Court decided that Treasury regulations should be treated the same way as all federal regulations. Mayo Foundation v. United States, 562 U.S. 44 (2011).  That meant that Treasury regulations would be evaluated under the standard the Supreme Court had created in 1984 in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Nat'l Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837 (1984).

Last year the Supreme Court decided to change it’s general approach to how and when it would defer to regulations issued by federal agencies.  In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), the Court said it would no longer follow the approach it had adopted 40 years prior in Chevron.  [Snark: not that the Supreme Court has ever really followed Chevron.  For an excellent demonstration of how Chevron was honored more in the breach than in the execution, see Ann Graham, Searching For Chevron In Muddy Watters: The Roberts Court And Judicial Review Of Agency Regulations, 60 Admin. L. Rev. 229 (2008) (reviewing all cases in a single term).

So what is Loper-Bright’s impact on how courts should review Treasury regulations?  That’s the lesson we learn in Judge Weiler’s thoughtful opinion in Alan Hamel and Estate of Suzanne Hamel v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2025-19 (Feb. 15, 2025) (Judge Weiler).  There the taxpayers asked the Tax Court to reconsider a prior opinion where it had upheld a Treasury regulation under the Chevron standard.  In the course of rejecting the request, Judge Weiler teaches us how the Tax Court seems poised to interpret Loper-Bright as returning the law to it’s pre-Mayo status.  Tax exceptionalism alert!

Details below the fold.

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March 3, 2025 in Bryan Camp, New Cases, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Practice And Procedure, Tax Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (2)

NY Times: California Bar Exam Fiasco Enrages Test Takers And Clouds Their Futures; Chemerinsky Calls For Provisional Licensure

By Paul Caron

Following up on my previous posts:

New York Times, Problems With New California Bar Exam Enrage Test Takers and Cloud Their Futures:

California Bar (2021)Even under normal circumstances, the California bar exam is one final harrowing hurdle before aspiring lawyers can practice. But last week was worse than any other, as they were thrown into limbo by technical glitches, delays and what many said were bizarrely written questions on a revamped test that didn’t match anything in preparation.

The faulty rollout last week of the new licensing test, which was approved by the California Supreme Court in October and was touted by the state bar as a way to save money, has outraged test takers and the law school community at large, and prompted an investigation by California lawmakers and a lawsuit.

“You can talk to any attorney — because they have all been through the bar experience — and they will tell you how hard it is and how stressful it is to go through the bar exam,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “To have to then take it again because of the incompetence of the bar is inexcusable,” said Mr. Chemerinsky, who had raised concerns along with other law school deans about the new exam before it was approved.

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March 3, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

By Paul Caron

Weekend RoundupSaturday:

Sunday:

March 3, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekend Roundup | Permalink

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Douthat: Everyone Should Believe In God

By Paul Caron

The Free Press Op-Ed:  Everyone Should Believe in God, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025)):

Believe 2IIfIf there is not yet a true religious revival in the Western world, there is clearly a desire for one. The recent wave of secularization has reached its limit in the last few years, and in particularly de-Christianized countries like the United Kingdom, the rising generation appears more religious than its predecessors. Among the intelligentsia there have been high-profile conversions, as Peter Savodnik has written in these pages, and a larger sense of regret or anxiety over the decline of institutional faith. And there is a newfound fascination with supernaturalism, from the traditional to the New Age, Christian mysticism to telepathy.

But with the impulse toward religion there is also a new anxiety: What if people become religious for the wrong reasons?

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a longtime critic of religious fundamentalism, announced that she had become a Christian in late 2023, there was grumbling from both atheists and some believers that hers was a political conversion—because she expressed a desire to defend what she called a “civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition.” (The Washington Post’s Shadi Hamid wrote, for instance, that “fighting a civilizational war is never a good reason to convert to a religion.”)

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March 2, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

NY Times: One Nation, Under God

By Paul Caron

New York Times:  One Nation, Under God, by Lauren Jackson:

As religion in America declined, experts administered last rites.

Churches were approaching “their twilight hour” as attendance fell, The Brookings Institution wrote in 2011. In his 2023 book, “Losing Our Religion,” the evangelical preacher Russell Moore asked: “Can American Christianity survive?”

The answer appears to be yes. People have stopped leaving churches en masse, according to a new study released this morning by Pew Research. America’s secularization is on pause for now, likely because of the pandemic and the country’s sustained spirituality. Most Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they hold one or more spiritual beliefs that Pew asked about:

Pew NY Times 1

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March 2, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

Pew: Decline Of Christianity In The U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off

By Paul Caron

Pew Research, Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off (Executive Summary):

After many years of steady decline, the share of Americans who identify as Christians shows signs of leveling off – at least temporarily – at slightly above six-in-ten, according to a massive new Pew Research Center survey of 36,908 U.S. adults.

Pew

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March 2, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

This Law Professor’s Job Has Become A Legal Drama

By Paul Caron

Inside Higher Ed, This Law Professor’s Job Has Become a Legal Drama:

LSU LevyKen Levy of Louisiana State University told Trump-supporting students they need his “political commentary.” A series of judges has disagreed over whether he should be back in class. And Louisiana’s governor keeps attacking him on social media.

In a Jan. 14 lecture, Ken Levy, Holt B. Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at Louisiana State University, dropped f-bombs against then–president-elect Donald Trump and Louisiana governor Jeff Landry and told students who like Trump that they need his “political commentary.”

Some students found the apparent attempt at political humor funny, according to an audio recording of the class obtained by Inside Higher Ed from a student who supports Levy.

But at least one student in the administration of criminal justice class who subsequently complained, according to LSU, wasn’t amused—and neither were the university and the governor. An LSU spokesperson said the institution “took immediate action to remove Professor Levy from the classroom after complaints about the professor’s remarks.”

Levy got a lawyer and took immediate action himself, pulling LSU into court instead of waiting for the university to take further steps internally regarding his job.

In the month since that lecture, state district court judges have twice ruled that Levy should return to the classroom, only for a state appeals court to twice overrule that. The back-and-forth nature of the case has attracted attention in Louisiana and in law circles, including via headlines such as “The LSU Law School Professor Free Speech Hot Potato Saga Continues.”

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March 2, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

The Top Five New Tax Papers

By Paul Caron

This week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads is the same as last week's list, with some reshuffling of the order within the Top 5.

  1. SSRN Logo (2018)[361 Downloads]  The Role Of Unrealized Gains And Borrowing In The Taxation Of The Rich, by Edward Fox (Michigan; Google Scholar) & Zachary Liscow (Yale; Google Scholar)
  2. [313 Downloads]  The Legality of Charitable Remedial Discrimination, by Roger Colinvaux (Catholic University)
  3. [296 Downloads]  A Roadmap to NIL and Taxation, by Doron Narotzki (Akron; Google Scholar) & Yariv Brauner (Florida; Google Scholar)
  4. [266 Downloads]  Sustainable Tax Governance: A Shared Responsibility, by Hans Gribnau (Tilburg)
  5. [261 Downloads]  Tax Treaties Do Not Protect Overseas Americans, by Laura Snyder (Association of Americans Resident Overseas), Karen Alpert (FixTheTaxTreaty.org) & John Richardson (TaxResidentAbroad.com)

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

March 2, 2025 in Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Top 5 Downloads | Permalink

Saturday, March 1, 2025

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

By Paul Caron

Top Ten 2Legal Education: 

  1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
  2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage
  3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage
  4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
  5. State Bar of California, Feb. 25-26 California Bar Exam Is In Shambles: Free July Exams Offered To All 5,600 Registrants If They Bail Or Fail
  6. The Recorder, California Bar Exam Suffers Catastrophic Meltdown: ‘I’ve Never Had This Much Despair And Hopelessness’
  7. FIRE, Law Prof Files Anti-SLAPP Motion To Dismiss Dean’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Him
  8. ABA Journal, ABA Legal Ed Council Suspends Diversity Accreditation Standard In Wake Of Trump Executive Order And DOE Letter
  9. Arlington Now, Scalia Law School Removes DEI Pages, Prompting Student Petition
  10. Richard J. Pierce, Jr. (George Washington), Will The ABA Continue To Accredit 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. Tax Workshops: 
    1. Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington) at Columbia, Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to Generative A.I.
    2. Brian Galle (Georgetown) at Missouri, How to Tax the Rich: Options for 2025 and Beyond
    3. Omri Marian (UC-Irvine) at San Diego, Income Taxation and the Regulation of Supreme Court Justices' Conduct 
    4. Robin Morgan (Toronto) at Toronto, Retrospective Wealth Taxation with Dynamic Portfolio Adjustments
    5. James Repetti (Boston College) at IFA, International Tax Policy’s Harm to Manufacturing and National Interests
    6. Richard Rubin (Wall Street Journal) at Duke, Tax Legislation in 2025: Where We Are and Where We Are Headed 
  2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy In The Trump Administration
  3. Ian Ayres (Yale), Joseph Bankman (Stanford) & Daniel Hemel (NYU), The Law And Economics Of Guilt And Shame
  4. New York Times Op-Ed (Kimberly Clausing, UCLA), Trump Pushes Tariffs To Shift The Tax Burden From The Rich To The Poor And Middle Class
  5. Tax Attorney Recruiting Event (TARE), Good Luck: Tax LL.M. Students Interviewing Today For Tax Attorney Jobs
  6. Florida Tax Review, New Issue
  7. Blaine Saito (Ohio State), Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Saito Reviews Brooks's Stock Dividends, The Supreme Court, And The 1929 Crash
  8. U.S. Tax Court, Patrick Urda Elected Chief Judge
  9. New York Times Op-Ed (7 IRS Commissioners), Firing 6,700 IRS Workers In The Middle Of Tax Season Is A Huge Mistake
  10. ABA Tax Section, Mid-Year Meeting Kicks Off Today In Los Angeles

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 (Ross Douthat), The Best Argument Against Having Faith In God 
  2. The Free Press (Larry Sanger, Wikipedia Co-Founder), How A Skeptical Philosopher Becomes A Christian
  3. New York Times (Emma Goldberg), Seeking God, Or Peter Thiel, In Silicon Valley
  4. Wall Street Journal (Raymond J. de Souza), The Pope vs. JD Vance On Immigration
  5. Christianity Today (Ross Douthat), How I Lost My Faith In Atheism
  6. Cameron Fathauer (Schad Law), Saving The Subject: How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me

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. 

March 1, 2025 in About This Blog, Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekly Top 10 TaxProf Blog Posts | Permalink

The California Bar Exam Fiasco: Is Provisional Licensure The Appropriate Remedy?

By Paul Caron

Following up on Thursday's post, California Bar Exam Suffers Catastrophic Meltdown: ‘I’ve Never Had This Much Despair And Hopelessness’:  

California Bar (2021)ABA Journal, California Bar Hunts For Who Leaked Bar Questions, Applicants Sue Test Administrator:

The State Bar of California will engage forensic experts to identify those who posted content from its new exam online, a move that forced it to push back the planned makeup exam of the troubled test riddled with a host of issues with proctors, connectivity and submission problems, according to a Feb. 27 email.

Meanwhile, a group of examinees filed a class action complaint Feb. 27 against ProctorU Inc. alleging that the vendor “failed spectacularly” to administer the test through its Meazure Learning unit, in the Northern District of California. ...

Deans of the California law schools planned to meet the afternoon of Feb. 28 to discuss recommendations for remedies, says Darby Dickerson, the dean of the Southwestern Law School.

“It will certainly be more than a refund. I would hope the bar would consider potentially a provisional license” as was offered as an emergency measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dickerson says.

Los Angeles Times, ‘Utterly Botched’: Glitchy Rollout of New California Bar Exam Prompts Lawsuit and Calls For Official Review:

The new exam was promoted by the State Bar of California as a cost-cutting measure that would offer test takers the choice of remote testing. But the deans of many of California’s top law schools had flagged concerns to the State Bar and California Supreme Court for months in the run up to the exams.

“It is stunning incompetence from an entity that exists to measure competence,” Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, told the Times. “There’s no way to describe it other than than outrageous and inexcusable.” ...

Last year, as the State Bar of California faced a $22.2-million deficit, it decided to replace the test questions developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ Multistate Bar Examination, which does not allow remote testing. It announced a new $8.25-million five-year deal authorizing test prep company Kaplan Exam Services to create multiple-choice, essays and performance test questions.

The new exam, it projected, would save the bar up to $3.8 million a year.

The Recorder, Law School Deans, Key Lawmaker Urge California Supreme Court to Act on Bar Exam Mess:

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March 1, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Tax Prof Presentations At The Northeastern Junior Scholars Conference

By Paul Caron

Tax presentations at the two-day Northeastern Junior Scholars Conference (program): 

Northeastern Junior Scholars ConferenceAssaf Harpaz (Georgia; Google Scholar), Artificial Intelligence and the Taxpayer Entity: 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world and presents numerous challenges to legal and regulatory frameworks. The evolving, complex yet still ambiguous concept demands reconsidering longstanding doctrines that are at risk of obsoleteness. These tensions are highlighted in federal income taxation, which generally compartmentalizes taxpayers into individuals and business entities. Technological developments such as generative AI upend these conceptions given their capacity to create value and operate autonomously, interacting with the economy in ways that combine both human and non-human attributes.

Under current U.S. law, even the most advanced AI models are not directly subject to the income tax regime, as they are neither individuals nor separate business entities. AI is poised to dramatically reshape the tax base by altering both the sources of income (from humans to robots) and the type of that income (from labor to capital) that is subject to tax.

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March 1, 2025 in Conferences, Legal Education, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Friday, February 28, 2025

Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Speck Reviews Hatfield's Tax In Law Schools

By Sloan Speck

This week, Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) reviews a new work by Michael Hatfield (Washington; Google Scholar), Tax in Law Schools, 78 Tax Law. 71 (2024).

Sloan-speck

The 2025 law school application cycle promises the largest—and perhaps the deepest—pool of potential law students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This welcome news, however, has unclear implications for specialized fields in legal education, including tax law. In Tax in Law Schools, Michael Hatfield draws on a decade of data from flagship public law schools to describe and discuss recent trends in tax course enrollment against a broader backdrop of changes in legal education. Although this article predates the current application cycle, Hatfield’s novel and compelling empirical analysis sheds light on how faculty can leverage this year’s burgeoning student interest in law school to build tax knowledge across the profession. As Hatfield argues, the stakes are civic and systemic, as well as personal to the faculty and students with interests in the area of law, policy, and practice.

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February 28, 2025 in Scholarship, Sloan Speck, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Weekly SSRN Roundup | Permalink

NYU-UCLA Tax Policy Symposium: The Earned Income Tax Credit At Fifty

By Paul Caron

NYU hosts a joint Tax Policy Symposium with UCLA today on The Earned Income Tax Credit at Fifty (agenda): 

Image004NYU Law is pleased to host the 2025 NYU-UCLA Tax Policy Symposium, featuring a full day of panel discussions, along with a keynote address by Robert Greenstein, Visiting Fellow at The Brookings Institution and President Emeritus of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Panels, featuring a range of academics and policy makers, will evaluate the success of the Earned Income Tax Credit on distributional and efficiency grounds, while contemplating alternate approaches.

Panel 1: The First Fifty Years 

  • Michelle Drumbl (Washington & Lee)
  • Dylan Matthews (Vox)
  • Erica Williams (DC Fiscal Policy Institute)
  • Kirk Stark (UCLA) (moderator) 

Panel 2: The Short- and Long-Term Effects of the EITC

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February 28, 2025 in Conferences, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Conferences, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Weekly Legal Education Roundup

By Scott Fruehwald

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February 28, 2025 in Legal Education, Scott Fruehwald, Weekly Legal Ed Roundup | Permalink

Next Week’s Tax Workshops

By Paul Caron

Next Week's Tax Workshops - linkedinMonday, March 3: Miranda Fleischer (San Diego; Google Scholar) will present The Case for a Universal Child Allowance as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Michael Love.  

Tuesday, March 4: Wouter Leenders (Ph.D. Candidate, UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar) will present Taxing High Wages: Evidence from the Netherlands at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. If you would like to attend, please register. 

Wednesday, March 5: Shannon W. McCormack (University of Washington) will present America's Failure to Rescue Parents: A Narrative of Inequitable Tax "Reform", 76 U.C. L.J. ___ (2025), as part of the Missouri Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact David Gamage. 

Thursday, March 6: Steven A. Bank (UCLA) will present Tax Dodging and Its Evolution as part of the Duke Tax Policy Seminar. If you would like to attend, please contact Larry Zelenak.

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February 28, 2025 in Colloquia, Legal Education, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Tax Workshops | Permalink

Tax Policy In The Trump Administration

By Paul Caron

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February 28, 2025 in Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News, Tax Policy in the Trump Administration | Permalink

Good Luck: Georgetown And NYU Tax LL.M. Students Interviewing Today For Tax Attorney Jobs

By Paul Caron

Georgetown hosts the 24th Annual Taxation Interview Program (TIP) virtually today: 

Taxation interview programEach year, Georgetown University Law Center partners with New York University School of Law to sponsor the Taxation Interview Program, a job fair which enables private and public sector employers to interview some of the most promising Tax LL.M. students from the top graduate tax programs in the country on one day.

Since 2001, TIP has been the nation’s flagship program for the recruitment of tax students. The program continually attracts the top law firms, government agencies and major accounting firms from around the country. See the full list of past participating TIP employers.

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February 28, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News | Permalink

Houston Hosts Energy Tax Conference Today

By Paul Caron

Houston law centerThe University of Houston Law Center hosts the 7th Annual Denney L. Wright International Energy Tax Conference and 25th Annual Houston Business and Tax Law Journal Symposium today on International Energy Investment Challenges (in person or virtual):

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February 28, 2025 in Conferences, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Conferences, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Today's Tax Presentations: Rubin At Duke, Repetti At IFA

By Paul Caron

Richard Rubin (WSJ) presents Tax Legislation in 2025: Where We Are and Where We Are Headed at Duke today as part of its Tax Policy Seminar hosted by Larry Zelenak.

James Repetti (Boston College; Google Scholar) presents International Tax Policy’s Harm to Manufacturing and National Interests, 2023 Wisc. L. Rev. 1309 (reviewed by David Elkins (Netanya) here), as part of the International Tax Reform panel at today's IFA USA New England Region Annual Conference: 

James repettiTwo tax regulations that permit U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) to use foreign contract manufacturers and to disregard their wholly owned foreign subsidiaries have created significant tax incentives for MNEs to move manufacturing outside the U.S. These tax incentives have contributed to the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs and the closure of more than 91,000 plants since 1997.

The job losses increased racial and economic inequality and stressed our political system. But the losses arising from offshore manufacturing also extend to other areas. Offshore manufacturing increases U.S. exposure to supply chain disruptions, threatens U.S. national security, and decreases research and development efforts to improve production techniques. Also, as automated manufacturing increases, the use of offshore manufacturing hinders the ability of the U.S. to compete in that sector.

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February 27, 2025 in Colloquia, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Tax Workshops | Permalink

California Bar Exam Suffers Catastrophic Meltdown: ‘I’ve Never Had This Much Despair And Hopelessness’

By Paul Caron

The Recorder, Who Answers for Botched February California Bar Exam? So Far, Nobody:

California Bar (2021)As California's online bar exam was plagued with another day of system crashes, freezes and late starts, leaders of the state Supreme Court and the state bar on Wednesday declined to say whether anyone would be held accountable for the problems that prevented an unknown number of applicants from completing or, in some cases, even beginning the test.

A spokesperson for the high court declined to comment on reports, confirmed by the bar, that glitchy technology and dropped platform connections affected many of the approximately 5,000 people taking the test. ...

Law school deans had largely been publicly silent about the problems leading up to this week's exam. That appears to be changing.

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February 27, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

NY Times Op-Ed By 7 IRS Commissioners: Firing 6,700 IRS Workers In The Middle Of Tax Season Is A Huge Mistake

By Paul Caron

New York Times Op-Ed:  Trump Just Fired 6,700 I.R.S. Workers in the Middle of Tax Season. That’s a Huge Mistake., by IRS Commissioners Lawrence Gibbs (1986-1989), Fred T. Goldberg Jr. (1989-1992), Charles Rossotti (1997-2002), Mark Everson (2003=2007), John Koskinen (2013-17), Charles Rettig (2018-2022) & Daniel Werfel (2032-2025):

IRS Logo (2023)If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.

Yet the private sector leaders advising President Trump on ways to increase government efficiency are deploying this exact approach by targeting the Internal Revenue Service, which collects virtually all the receipts of the U.S. government — our nation’s accounts receivable division. Last week, the Trump administration started laying off about 6,700 I.R.S. employees, many if not most of whom are directly involved in collecting unpaid taxes.

Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed. Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the I.R.S.’s collection capacity. Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: “We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.”

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February 27, 2025 in IRS News, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News | Permalink

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment

By Paul Caron

Update: 

Following up on my previous posts: 

The current 2024-25 methodology is: 

Outcomes 10 months after graduation (weighted 33%):This measures the extent by which graduates obtain the most in-demand jobs – namely those that are long term, full time and requiring (or taking advantage of) bar passage. Once again, maximum credit was assigned for graduates with school-funded fellowships – as long as those fellowships were otherwise full-time, long-term jobs in which bar passage was required or the J.D. degree was an advantage. Maximum credit was also once again assigned to law school graduates pursuing additional graduate studies.

To improve measurement of this indicator – given the common year-to-year fluctuations associated with outcome measures and the small sizes of some graduating J.D. classes – this indicator was derived from the average of the 2021 and 2022 graduating class outcomes 10 months after graduation. Specifically, U.S. News took a nonweighted average by aggregating the score it previously computed from the 2021 graduating class with the newly calculated 2022 class score, then divided it by two. Previously, this indicator was based only on the most recent year.

For information purposes, U.S. News published a 10 months after graduation employment percentage outcome that equals the proportion of 2022 graduates in all the job types that U.S. News weighs 100% for the purpose of calculating a weighted average in the 10-month employment ranking indicator. However, the actual value used in the rankings is an index that also awards partial credit for other outcomes values, and is described below. As previously stated, U.S. News used data for two graduating classes in the calculations.

These partially weighted jobs that were some combination of particular factors, namely short term and part time, in many cases funded by the law school and/or not utilizing bar passage received less credit by varying amounts, determined by an allocation of some or all of these factors.

Law schools are required to report these highly differentiated outcome measures each year to the ABA. For a more detailed explanation, see Notes on Employment Rates below.

Below is a ranking of the unweighted average employment 10 months after graduation for classes of 2022 and 2023. For comparison, the average unweighted average employment 10 months after graduation for classes of 2021 and 2022 (and the ranking of that average) are included alongside.  As noted below, U.S. News does not reveal the weights it gives to the 45 different job types, employment statuses, and durations. 

Rank School 2025-2026 Employment 2024-2025 Employment
1 Texas A&M 99.71% 97.05% (9)
2 Virginia 99.19% 98.28% (3)
3 Penn 99.04% 98.65% (2)
4 Washington Univ. 98.90% 96.41% (11)
5 Duke 98.48% 98.74% (1)
6 SMU 98.20% 95.25% (17)
7 Wake Forest 98.20% 97.03% (10)
8 Northwestern 98.17% 97.78% (6)
9 North Carolina 98.15% 96.30% (13)
10 Chicago 97.91% 97.91% (5)
11 Columbia 97.51% 97.95% (4)
12 Michigan 97.48% 96.26% (14)
13 NYU 97.37% 97.66% (7)
14 Iowa 97.26% 95.11% (19)
15 UCLA 97.11% 96.04% (15)
16 Yale 97.06% 96.31% (12)
17 Minnesota 96.83% 95.19% (18)
18 George Mason 96.68% 93.25% (34)
19 Florida State 96.59% 92.18% (46)
20 Washington & Lee 96.52% 93.22% (35)
21 Boston Univ. 96.38% 92.23% (45)
22 Vanderbilt 96.19% 95.11% (20)
23 Georgia 96.10% 97.21% (8)
24 Notre Dame 95.91% 93.17% (37)
25 Georgetown 95.78% 94.70% (24)
26 Texas 95.77% 94.12% (28)
27 Kentucky 95.74% 94.67% (25)
28 Harvard 95.70% 94.09% (30)
29 Alabama 95.67% 92.64% (42)
30 Boston College 95.65% 93.36% (33)
31 Florida 95.43% 93.05% (40)
32 Stanford 95.43% 94.36% (27)
33 Cornell 95.31% 94.96% (22)
34 Wisconsin 95.14% 91.95% (47)
35 Baylor 94.78% 91.60% (50)
36 Utah 94.57% 94.12% (29)
37 UC-Berkeley 94.37% 95.05% (21)
38 George Washington 93.83% 90.13% (61)
39 St. John's 93.78% 91.93% (48)
40 Penn State-Dickinson 93.62% 89.31% (70)
41 Drexel 93.52% 92.38% (44)
42 Penn State-Univ. Park 93.50% 89.34% (68)
43 USC 93.38% 95.38% (16)
44 Fordham 93.35% 93.92% (31)
45 Wayne State 93.34% 93.17% (38)
46 Ohio State 93.23% 94.55% (26)
47 San Diego 93.22% 88.23% (80)
48 UC-Irvine 93.15% 87.96% (83)
49 Kansas 93.08% 94.93% (23)
50 Pepperdine 92.86% 91.36% (52)

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February 27, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

Good Luck: Tax LL.M. Students Interviewing Today For Tax Attorney Jobs

By Paul Caron

Tax Attorney Recuiting Event

Tax Attorney Recruiting Event:

The Tax Attorney Recruiting Event (TARE) is a one-day job fair that is held virtually every year in February. TARE is hosted by a consortium of four elite law schools, and enables employers to interview some of the top graduate tax students in the United States. The TARE consortium features students from the LLM in Taxation programs at Boston University School of Law, the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

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February 27, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News | Permalink

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Today's Tax Workshops: Galle At Missouri, Morgan At Toronto

By Paul Caron

Brian Galle (Georgetown; Google Scholar) presents How to Tax the Rich: Options for 2025 and Beyond at Missouri today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by David Gamage:

Brian-galleHow should we pay for the future? This monograph describes and compares major proposals to reform federal individual income and transfer (that is, estate and gift) taxes. The Biden administration and senior Senate Democrats have outlined plans for a “minimum income tax” on multi-millionaires in which very wealthy households (generally those worth over $100 million) would be taxed on the value of appreciated but unsold property. The administration’s proposal was dubbed the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, or BMIT. Yet some other Senators, and advocates outside government, have pointed to possible constitutional limits on that proposal, as well as offering critiques of its economic and political merits. ...

To briefly preview my findings, my central argument is that instead of any of these options, policy makers in search of revenue should adjust the capital gains tax so that its rate increases the longer the taxpayer holds an asset, which I call the fair share tax (FAST). For reasons I describe more below, the FAST in fact can be designed so that it is exactly economically equivalent to the other options, such as a BMIT, eliminating basis step-up at death, or deemed sales triggered by borrowing. But the FAST is much easier to implement, because it doesn’t suffer from the traditional challenges tax systems have struggled with when attempting to impose tax at times other than at sale. And there is little doubt that the FAST, which is just a choice of the tax rate, would be constitutional. 

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February 26, 2025 in Colloquia, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Tax Workshops | Permalink

Scalia Law School Removes DEI Pages, Prompting Student Petition

By Paul Caron

Following up on my previous post, Top Law Schools Are Dropping ‘Diversity’ From Their DEI Branding:  Arlington Now, GMU’s Scalia Law School Removes DEI Pages, Prompting Student Petition:

George Mason Scalia (2020)George Mason University’s law school has removed webpages related to diversity, equity and inclusion, sparking student criticism and casting doubt on the future of related programs.

Pages related to Antonin Scalia Law School’s DEI Task Force, DEI Advisory Board and overall approach to diversity have vanished following a Feb. 14 letter from the U.S. Department of Education taking aim at such programs.

In response to this move — which happened without a public explanation — some members of Scalia Law’s student body penned their own letter last week, calling on the school to be more transparent in its decisions and reaffirm its commitment to diversity. A related Change.org petition had earned 183 signatures as of this morning (Tuesday).

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February 26, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Law Prof Files Anti-SLAPP Motion To Dismiss Dean’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Him

By Paul Caron

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  FIRE, University of Hawai‘i Dean Sues Law Professor Who Criticized Diversity Event (Feb. 24, 2025):

Lawson (2025)The twist: The criticisms, from Professor Kenneth Lawson, Co-Director of the Hawai'i Innocence Project, were made 2 years ago. Why the lawsuit now? Could it be because Lawson went public last month with claims UH doctored his course materials?

When the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa planned a Black History Month event in February 2023 that lacked any black facilitators, law professor Kenneth Lawson publicly challenged a dean about it at a faculty meeting. Nearly two years later, and shortly after clashing with administrators over their decision to doctor one of his class presentations, Lawson suddenly must defend himself against a defamation lawsuit over his remarks — one filed by that same dean.

On Feb. 20, Lawson’s legal team filed an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss the dean’s lawsuit, in which she alleged that Lawson’s heated arguments with her concerning the Black History Month event, as well as Lawson’s call to boycott the event, were defamatory. Lawson’s legal team argues that the defamation suit is “an attempt to chill and silence Professor Lawson’s constitutionally protected speech.” And the fact that it came fast on the heels of a curriculum dispute raises further questions of retaliation. ...

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February 26, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage

By Paul Caron

Update: 

Following up on my previous posts: 

The current 2024-25 methodology is: 

Ultimate bar passage rate (7%): While passing the bar on the first try is optimal, passing eventually is critical. Underscoring this is the ABA's accreditation standard that at least 75% of a law school's test-taking graduates must pass a bar exam within two years of earning a diploma.

Like the previous two outcome measures, the ultimate bar passage rate indicator was newly calculated as a two-year, nonweighted average.

With that in mind, the ultimate bar passage ranking factor measures the average percentage of each law school's 2019 and 2020 graduates who sat for a bar exam and passed it within two years of graduation, including diploma privilege graduates.

Both the first-time bar passage and ultimate bar passage indicators were used to determine if a particular law school is offering students a rigorous program of legal education. The first-time bar passage indicator was assigned greater weight because of the greater granularity of its data and its wider variance of outcomes.

Below is a ranking of the unweighted average ultimate bar passage for 2020 and 2021 graduates. For comparison, the average unweighted ultimate bar passage for 2019 and 2020 graduates (and the ranking of that average) are included alongside. 

Rank School  2025-2026 Ultimate Bar Passage 2024-2025 Ultimate Bar Passage
1 Chicago 99.76% 99.75% (1)
2 BYU 99.51% 97.69% (25)
3 Wisconsin 99.47% 99.33% (6)
4 Stanford 99.41% 99.44% (4)
5 Duke 99.35% 99.54% (2)
6 Harvard 99.33% 99.15% (9)
7 NYU 99.25% 98.63% (14)
8 UC-Berkeley 99.23% 99.54% (2)
9 Virginia 99.21% 99.33% (5)
10 Georgia 99.17% 97.78% (23)
11 Marquette 99.11% 99.11% (10)
12 Yale 99.00% 99.00% (12)
13 Minnesota 98.79% 99.09% (11)
14 Penn 98.78% 98.17% (16)
15 Texas A&M 98.69% 97.94% (21)
16 Texas 98.57% 98.17% (18)
17 Boston Univ. 98.41% 98.13% (19)
18 Utah 98.26% 98.10% (20)
19 Michigan 98.21% 98.77% (13)
20 USC 98.11% 96.64% (37)
21 Northwestern 98.00% 97.90% (22)
22 Kansas 97.96% 95.83% (51)
23 University of Washington 97.96% 94.50% (70)
24 Vanderbilt 97.79% 96.85% (34)
25 Fordham 97.78% 97.02% (31)
26 UCLA 97.71% 98.55% (15)
27 William & Mary 97.69% 96.77% (35)
28 Baylor 97.68% 99.27% (7)
29 Boston College 97.64% 97.15% (30)
30 George Mason 97.47% 98.17% (17)
31 Montana 97.10% 96.36% (44)
32 Wake Forest 97.03% 96.23% (45)
33 Alabama 96.86% 99.21% (8)
34 Ohio State 96.72% 95.96% (48)
35 St. John's 96.67% 95.05% (61)
36 Liberty 96.62% 97.20% (29)
37 Indiana (Maurer) 96.59% 94.77% (66)
38 Loyola-L.A. 96.55% 95.55% (57)
39 Columbia 96.45% 95.90% (50)
40 Georgetown 96.37% 96.00% (47)
41 Washington Univ. 96.34% 97.76% (24)
42 Regent 96.26% 93.71% (82)
43 George Washington 96.11% 95.76% (54)
44 Oklahoma 96.08% 96.39% (42)
45 St. Louis 95.96% 94.89% (63)
46 Nebraska 95.94% 94.72% (68)
47 Florida Int'l 95.88% 97.42% (28)
48 Cornell 95.82% 97.68% (26)
49 Notre Dame 95.77% 96.40% (40)
50 Texas Tech 95.68% 93.86% (78)

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February 26, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

Ayres, Bankman & Hemel: The Law And Economics Of Guilt And Shame

By Paul Caron

Ian Ayres (Yale; Google Scholar), Joseph Bankman (Stanford) & Daniel J. Hemel (NYU; Google Scholar), The Law And Economics Of Guilt And Shame, 92 U. Chi. L. Rev. ___ (2025):

Chicago law reviewThe negative moral emotions of guilt and shame impose real social costs but also create opportunities for policymakers to engender compliance with legal rules in a cost-effective manner. We present a unified model of guilt and shame that demonstrates how legal policymakers can harness negative moral emotions to increase social welfare. The prospect of guilt and shame can deter individuals from violating moral norms and legal rules, thereby substituting for the expense of state enforcement. But when legal rules and law enforcement fail to induce total compliance, guilt and shame experienced by noncompliers can increase the law’s social costs. We identify specific circumstances in which rescinding a legal rule will improve social welfare because eliminating the rule reduces the moral costs of noncompliance with the law’s command. We also identify other instances in which moral costs strengthen the case for enacting legal rules and investing additional resources in enforcement because deterrence reduces the negative emotions experienced by noncompliers. We end by exploring the implications of our framework for legal policy across “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures,” for the debate over shaming sanctions, and for other moral emotions such as resentment and virtue. ...

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February 26, 2025 in Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Florida Tax Review Publishes New Issue

By Paul Caron

The Florida Tax Review has published Vol. 27, No. 2 (Spring 2024): 

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February 25, 2025 in Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Patrick Urda Elected Chief Judge Of U.S. Tax Court

By Paul Caron

U.S. Tax Court Press Release:

UrdaThe United States Tax Court announced today that Judge Patrick J. Urda has been elected Chief Judge to serve a two-year term beginning June 1, 2025.

Judge Urda was born in South Bend, Indiana. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. Before his appointment to the Court, he practiced law with McDermott Will & Emery and with Maciorowski, Sackmann & Ulrich. Judge Urda then served as a Law Clerk to Judge Daniel A. Manion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After leaving his clerkship, he worked as an appellate attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Tax Division for more than a decade. During his time at the Department, he also held several other positions including Counsel to the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Appellate and Review and details to the Criminal Division’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development Assistance and Training and the Office of Legal Policy. Judge Urda is a former adjunct professor of law at American University Washington College of Law.

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February 25, 2025 in Tax, Tax Daily, Tax News | Permalink

New Legal Ed Papers

By Paul Caron

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February 25, 2025 in Legal Ed Scholarship, Legal Education | Permalink

Will The ABA Continue To Accredit Law Schools?

By Paul Caron

Following up on my previous posts (links below):  Richard J. Pierce, Jr. (George Washington), Will the ABA Continue to Accredit Law Schools?, Penn Regulatory Review (Feb. 19, 2025):

Penn Regulatory ReviewOn February 14, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew N. Ferguson, announced that political appointees employed by the Commission can no longer be members of the American Bar Association (ABA) and that the Commission will no longer support any employee’s membership in the ABA. The ABA’s position on many major issues is inconsistent with the agenda of the Trump Administration.

At least part of the difference in the views of the ABA and the Trump Administration is attributable to the Trump Administration’s strong distaste for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. ABA Accreditation Standard 206 initially included many references to the duty of law schools to implement DEI programs. ...

The FTC action may be just the first step in a Trump Administration effort to strip the ABA of its power. Some of the other likely steps are easy to identify. The U.S. Department of Education supervises all post-secondary educational accreditation organizations. It is also required by law to publish an annual list of all nationally recognized accreditation organizations. The ABA may not appear on that list next year.

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February 25, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage

By Paul Caron

Update: 

Following up on my previous posts: 

The current 2024-25 methodology is: 

Bar passage rate for first-time test-takers (18%): For the third consecutive year, U.S. News used its treatment of bar passage rates to incorporate all graduates who took the bar for the first time, and not just those from the state with most test-takers. This de-emphasized the impact of geography on law schools' relative performance.

As was done with the 10 months after graduation indicator, this bar passage indicator was newly calculated as a two-year, nonweighted average pertaining to the 2021 and 2022 graduating classes.

Specifically, the bar passage rate indicator scored schools on their average 2021 and 2022 first-time test-takers' weighted bar passage rates among all jurisdictions, or states, then added or subtracted the average percentage point difference between those rates and the weighted state average among ABA accredited schools' first-time test-takers in the corresponding jurisdictions in 2021 and 2022. This meant schools that performed best on this ranking factor graduated students whose bar passage rates were both higher than most schools overall and higher compared with what was typical among graduates who took the bar in corresponding jurisdictions.

For example, if a fictional law school in upstate New York graduated 100 students who first took the bar exam – and 79 took the New York exam, 18 the Massachusetts exam and three the Vermont exam – the school's weighted average rate would use pass rate results that were weighted 79% for New York, 18% for Massachusetts and 3% for Vermont. This computation would then be compared with an index of these jurisdictions' average pass rates – also weighted 79-18-3. (For privacy, school profiles on usnews.com only display bar passage data for jurisdictions with at least 10 test-takers.) Both weighted averages included any graduates who passed the bar with diploma privilege. Diploma privilege is a method for J.D. graduates to be admitted to a state bar and allowed to practice law in that state without taking that state's actual bar examination. Diploma privilege is generally based on attending and graduating from a law school in that state with the diploma privilege.

Below is a ranking of the unweighted average first-time bar passage for calendar years 2022 and 2023. For comparison, the average unweighted first-time bar passage for the calendar years 2021 and 2022 (and the ranking of that average) are included alongside. 

Rank School 2025-2026 First-Time Bar Passage 2024-2025 First-Time Bar Passage
1 Harvard 115.22% 117.49% (1)
2 Michigan 115.15% 114.10% (3)
3 Stanford 114.70% 113.70% (5)
4 Virginia 113.49% 111.56% (8)
5 Yale 113.38% 114.37% (2)
6 Chicago 113.25% 114.02% (4)
7 Vanderbilt 111.68% 109.75% (14)
8 North Carolina 111.66% 106.75% (21)
9 Penn 110.87% 110.19% (13)
10 Duke 110.57% 112.66% (6)
11 NYU 110.22% 110.98% (9)
12 William & Mary 109.80% 110.19% (12)
13 Wisconsin 109.54% 104.74% (30)
14 UCLA 107.87% 110.69% (10)
15 Boston College 107.76% 105.36% (26)
16 Belmont 107.70% 103.91% (33)
17 Columbia 107.61% 107.46% (19)
18 Wake Forest 107.54% 107.82% (18)
19 Notre Dame 107.18% 107.22% (20)
20 UC-Berkeley 107.12% 112.03% (7)
21 Northwestern 107.12% 110.35% (11)
22 Texas 107.02% 107.95% (16)
23 Baylor 106.42% 104.19% (32)
24 Washington Univ. 105.76% 105.85% (23)
25 Texas A&M 105.18% 105.84% (24)
26 BYU 105.09% 106.73% (22)
27 Cornell 104.12% 100.77% (38)
28 Alabama 103.28% 100.99% (37)
29 Georgia 103.05% 105.18% (27)
30 Ohio State 102.89% 104.93% (29)
31 University of Washington 102.40% 100.67% (40)
32 Louisiana State 102.38% 91.90% (67)
33 Georgetown 102.28% 105.07% (28)
34 Oklahoma 102.05% 102.96% (35)
35 Minnesota 101.40% 107.94% (17)
36 Utah 101.14% 100.25% (42)
37 Florida Int'l 100.70% 99.90% (45)
38 Boston Univ. 100.25% 105.66% (25)
39 Regent 100.23% 92.17% (65)
40 Tennessee 98.85% 104.43% (31)
41 UC-Irvine 98.29% 98.07% (50)
42 Kansas 98.19% 102.24% (36)
43 Villanova 97.98% 94.94% (57)
44 Arizona State 97.86% 97.25% (51)
45 USC 97.81% 108.51% (15)
46 Penn State-Univ. Park 97.39% 99.30% (48)
47 Seton Hall 97.09% 103.65% (34)
48 Washington & Lee 96.99% 100.16% (43)
49 Emory 96.86% 99.97% (44)
50 Missouri-Columbia 96.56% 93.62% (61)

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February 25, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

New Tax Papers

By Paul Caron

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February 25, 2025 in Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

Monday, February 24, 2025

Today's Tax Workshops: Marian At San Diego, Bearer-Friend At Columbia

By Paul Caron

Omri Marian (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) presents Income Taxation and the Regulation of Supreme Court Justices' Conduct, 110 Cornell L. Rev. __ (2025), at San Diego today as part of its Tax Law Speaker Series hosted by Michelle Layser:  

Omri marianLast year, investigative journalists reported multiple instances where billionaires showered Supreme Court Justices with lavish gifts. Previously undisclosed luxury fishing trips, private jet travels, and yacht cruises ignited popular and scholarly debates about Congress’s role in regulating Justices’ conduct. This article explains how income taxation can, and should, be used to regulate judicial misconduct where rules of judicial conduct fail.

The article shows that in some instances income tax already serves as a backstop to rules of judicial conduct. Under current law, some of the “gifts” reported in recent press stories are likely taxable income to the Justices. If so, the Justices should have reported these amounts on their income tax returns and paid income tax on them. If the Justices indeed do so, many of the concerns raised in public and scholarly discourse on Justices’ conduct are mitigated. If the Justices did not report and pay tax on certain gifts, they should be audited, and be subject to the same consequences as any other taxpayer who fails to properly report income and pay taxes.

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February 24, 2025 in Colloquia, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Daily, Tax Scholarship, Tax Workshops | Permalink

Legal Ed News Roundup

By Paul Caron

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February 24, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Preview Of The 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions

By Paul Caron

Update: 

In the current 2024-25 methodology, law school admissions count 10% in the overall ranking:

Below are two admissions rankings. The first is a simple ranking using the above weights. The second uses Z-scores with the above weights to better approximate the U.S. News methodology.

  School Acceptance Rate Rank UGPA Rank LSAT Rank Weighted Ranks
1 Yale 1 2 1 1.40
2 Harvard 4 5 1 2.90
3 Washington Univ. 25 2 3 4.80
4 Chicago 9 9 3 6.00
5 Stanford 2 11 3 6.10
5 Virginia 13 2 8 6.10
7 Northwestern 17 5 8 7.70
8 Penn 3 10 8 8.30
9 Columbia 6 20 3 10.10
10 UCLA 19 5 15 11.40
11 NYU 20 15 8 12.00
12 Georgetown 27 11 12 13.10
13 Cornell 33 23 3 14.00
13 Texas A&M 11 1 25 14.00
15 USC 8 15 19 16.30
16 Georgia 14 15 19 16.90
17 Texas 18 23 12 17.00
18 Duke 12 23 15 17.90
19 George Mason 15 11 25 18.40
20 Michigan 7 32 12 19.50
21 Florida 23 20 19 19.80
22 BYU 42 11 25 21.10
23 Vanderbilt 24 23 19 21.10
24 Boston Univ. 28 28 15 21.50
25 UC-Berkeley 21 30 15 21.60
26 Alabama 37 5 36 23.70
27 Florida State 26 15 36 26.60
28 Notre Dame 34 35 19 26.90
29 Minnesota 71 28 19 27.80
30 Arizona State 31 20 36 29.10
31 North Carolina 16 35 29 30.10
32 Ohio State 49 23 33 30.60
33 George Washington 65 30 25 31.00
34 UC-Irvine 22 41 29 33.10
35 Boston College 10 46 29 33.90
36 Utah 35 32 36 34.30
37 Wake Forest 38 38 33 35.50
38 SMU 54 32 36 36.20
39 Indiana (Maurer) 92 15 44 37.20
40 Wisconsin 46 41 36 39.00
41 Fordham 32 56 29 40.10
42 Pepperdine 44 35 44 40.40
43 Villanova 30 41 44 41.40
44 Emory 95 41 36 43.90
45 Tennessee 36 40 51 45.10
46 Cardozo 82 46 44 48.60
47 Washington & Lee 58 67 33 49.10
48 Colorado 77 49 44 49.30
49 Wayne State 48 38 60 50.00
50 Illinois 117 54 36 51.30

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February 24, 2025 in Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

ABA Legal Ed Council Suspends Diversity Accreditation Standard In Wake Of Trump Executive Order And DOE Letter

By Paul Caron

ABA Journal, ABA Legal Ed Council Suspends Accreditation Standard Focused on Diversity:

ABA Legal Ed (2023)The council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has suspended enforcement of the accreditation standard originally titled “Diversity and Inclusion” until Aug. 31 in the wake of a Trump administration executive order mandating the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and demands by the U.S. Department of Education that academic institutions eliminate DEI polices or risk federal funding cuts.

At its quarterly meeting in San Antonio on Friday, the council voted to pause its work on the latest round of revisions to the contentious rule—known as Standard 206—while developing a new draft that could be presented to the ABA House of Delegates at the ABA Annual Meeting in August.

“The committee’s view is that with the executive orders and the law being in flux, it would be an extreme hardship for law schools if our standards were to require them to do certain things that may cause them to take more litigation risks and potentially violate the law,” said Daniel Thies, chair-elect of the council and co-chair of its Strategic Review Committee.

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February 24, 2025 in Legal Ed News, Legal Education | Permalink

Tax Notes’ Taxing Issues Webinar: Navigating Potential Partnership Changes Under TCJA 2.0

By TaxNotes

(Sponsored post) Tax Notes will present Navigating Potential Partnership Changes Under TCJA 2.0 on Wed., Feb. 26. The webinar is free, and CPE credits are available to attendees who meet the requirements.

Tax NotesLegislative efforts to reform the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may bring significant changes to partnership taxation. What proposed modifications to subchapter K are likely to gain traction? How might those changes affect taxpayers, advisers, and passthroughs? What revenue considerations are driving these discussions? And what challenges or opportunities could arise as Congress debates tax reform?

Panelists include Monisha Santamaria (KPMG); Steve Rosenthal, and Paul Schockett. The moderator is Tax Analysts’ President and CEO, Cara Griffith.

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February 24, 2025 in Sponsored Post, Tax Analysts | Permalink

Clausing: Trump Pushes Tariffs To Shift The Tax Burden From The Rich To The Poor And Middle Class

By Paul Caron

New York Times Op-Ed:  The Real Reason President Trump Pushes Tariffs, by Kimberly Clausing (UCLA; Google Scholar):

Clausing (2021)President Trump has relentlessly blamed foreign countries for much of what ails Americans. Trade imbalances, fentanyl overdoses and the economic struggles of working-class Americans are all laid at the feet of foreign governments.

According to that logic, tariffs are the ideal policy instrument for extracting concessions from foreign governments to remedy those harms while raising money for America’s Treasury. Of course, there is an inherent conflict between these two goals: If foreign governments make the requisite changes and Mr. Trump drops the tariffs, they will raise no revenue. And yet the president pushes ahead, seemingly unconcerned by warnings of the damage tariffs will cause; some observers dismiss the threats as mere bluster or a negotiating tactic.

A better way to think about tariffs is as a key tool to achieve the core of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda: He wants to shift the tax burden away from the well-off and toward the poor and middle class — while consolidating his power.

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February 24, 2025 in Tax, Tax News | Permalink

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

By Paul Caron

Weekend RoundupSaturday:

Sunday:

February 24, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education, Tax, Weekend Roundup | Permalink

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Douthat: How I Lost My Faith In Atheism

By Paul Caron

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  How I Lost My Faith in Atheism, by Ross Douthat (Author, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025):

Believe 2Late in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus confesses his crisis of Catholic faith to a close friend. The friend asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen responds, “but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

I spent my childhood experiencing some of the more intense, but not necessarily intellectually coherent, forms of American Protestantism—charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism, tongues speaking and revivalism. Then, with my family, I converted to Catholicism as a teenager, when I was just a bit younger than Dedalus’s age in James Joyce’s novel. I read the book soon after my conversion, and while lamenting the main character’s loss of faith, I had a convert’s sympathy for his formulation of the religious options: that the intellectually serious choice was Catholicism or atheism, the Church of Rome or nothing. 

Alongside Joyce, I had good intellectual company in this belief, from Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America envisioned an eventual religious “division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome”—to Herman Melville, who predicted that “Rome and the atheists” would “fight it out,” with “Protestantism being retained for the base of operations sly by Atheism.”

When you convert at a young age, it’s natural in midlife to think about how your worldview has changed since that conversion—especially when you’re sitting down to write a general case for faith, as I’ve done in my new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. That change has carried me well away from Stephen Dedalus’s young man’s formulation. I am still a believing Catholic, and I would still urge a Protestant friend to swim the Tiber. But I have a clearer sense of why one might reject the stark binary choice between the Catholic church or nonbelief, and why the religious future—as far as we can see it—will remain more complex than just “Rome and the atheists” battling things out.

In part, that reflects a greater understanding of critiques of Catholicism, and a stronger expectation of Protestantism’s resilience. But equally importantly, it reflects the fact that I’ve entirely lost what faith I once had in the plausibility and durability of atheism. ...

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February 23, 2025 in Book Club, Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

The Pope vs. JD Vance On Immigration

By Paul Caron

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: The Pope vs. JD Vance on Immigration, by Raymond J. de Souza (Priest, Kemptville, Ontario):

Dispatch FaithPope Francis directly addressed an argument made by JD Vance, a self-confessed devout Catholic who converted in 2019. Mr. Vance justified the administration’s immigration policy by appealing to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the ordo amoris, the proper “ordering of loves.” The vice president called it “common sense” that we love, protect and serve those closest to us—family, fellow citizens—before those more distant. Hence, America first on immigration and other matters.

Pope Francis wrote this week that the “true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” Jesus told that parable in direct response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” in relation to the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Not since 1984 has there been as high-profile a dispute about Catholic theology in relation to American public policy. That year, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro argued that her advocacy of legal abortion was compatible with the Catholic faith. New York Archbishop John O’Connor vigorously corrected her. Gov. Mario Cuomo then went to the University of Notre Dame to outline the intellectual framework of the “personally opposed” but publicly pro-choice position.

Mr. Vance is likely the most intellectually sophisticated Catholic in high elected office since Cuomo, and his exchange with the church could similarly shape Catholic political engagement for generations. That was already playing out before the papal letter. American Catholic bishops have been united on two public-policy priorities for decades: abortion and immigration. ...

Mario Cuomo lost the theological argument to O’Connor and St. John Paul II. But he won the political argument for pro-choice Catholics, including Democrats (Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi) and Republicans (Tom Ridge, Susan Collins) alike. Is Mr. Vance set to do the same on immigration?

Both issues aren’t equally important in Catholic teaching, but Francis and the consensus of American bishops hold that the rhetoric of the Trump administration—and the consideration of all illegal immigrants as ipso facto criminals—is contrary to their human dignity. The pontiff’s letter cites Pope Pius XII, who outlined the history of Catholic teaching on migration, dating to St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and the Holy Family itself. Mr. Vance’s theological challenge is thus considerable, even if the politics of the moment are on his side, as they were for Cuomo in 1984.

Dispatch Faith:  Why J.D. Vance Is Wrong About the Catholic Church’s Mission, by  Dan Hugger (Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty):

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February 23, 2025 in Faith, Legal Education | Permalink

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