TaxProf Blog

Field: A Tax Professor's Guide To Formative Assessment

Heather M. Field (UC-Hastings), A Tax Professor's Guide to Formative Assessment, 22 Fla. Tax Rev. ___ (2019):

The ABA Standards now require formative assessment to be integrated into law school courses, and there is extensive literature, both in legal education and education more generally, about the goals and methods for formative assessment. This Article makes the key insights of that literature accessible and actionable for professors teaching tax courses. This crash course on formative assessment is intended to enable tax professors to integrate formative assessment into their classrooms effectively and efficiently without having to become legal pedagogy scholars in addition to being tax law scholars. The formative assessment techniques discussed herein range from those that require relatively little time and effort to those that may be particularly impactful but that require additional time and work. This Article also discusses strategies for reducing the burden of even the work-intensive approaches.

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Clint Wallace Wins South Carolina Classroom Teacher Of The Year Award

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What This Law Professor Learned by Becoming a Student Again

Larry Cunningham (St. John’s), What This Professor Learned by Becoming a Student Again:

For the past year, I have been a student again.  Once I finish a final paper (hopefully tomorrow), I will be receiving a Graduate Certificate in Assessment and Institutional Research from Sam Houston State University.

I enrolled in the program at “Sam” (as students call it) because I wanted to receive formal instruction in assessment, institutional research, data management, statistics, and, more generally, higher education.  These were areas where I was mainly self-taught, and I thought the online program at Sam Houston would give me beneficial skills and knowledge.  The program has certainly not disappointed.  The courses were excellent, the professors knowledgeable, and the technology flawless.  I paid for the program out-of-pocket, and it was worth every penny.  It has made me better at programmatic assessment and institutional research. (I also turned one of my research papers into an article, which just came out this week [Building a Culture of Assessment in Law Schools, 69 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 395 (2018)].)

But the program had another benefit: It has made me a better teacher.

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Jeffrey Kwall Named 2019 Professor Of The Year At Loyola-Chicago

Jeffrey Kwall named 2019 Professor of the Year:

The Student Bar Association (SBA) at Loyola University Chicago School of Law has named Jeffrey L. Kwall, Kathleen and Bernard Beazley Professor of Law, the school’s 2019 Professor of the Year. Each year at Loyola, graduating law students honor one member of the full-time law faculty for excellence in teaching, mentoring, and advising. Kwall was also voted Professor of the Year by the Class of 2016.

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Winners Of The 18th Annual Law Student Tax Challenge

ABA Tax Section, 18th Annual Law Student Tax Challenge Winners:

J.D. Division

1st Place:
Jordan Fruchter and Thomas Boland
Albany Law School
Coach: Danshera Cords

2nd Place:
Emily Eash and Eliana Hoeppner
Western New England University

3rd Place:
Luis Garcia and Janette Duran
University of New Mexico Law School

Best Written Submission:
Luis Garcia and Janette Duran
University of New Mexico Law School

Semi-Finalists:
Scott Lee and Brittany Johnson
Georgetown University

Daniel Rowe and Mark Goshgarian
Loyola Law School

Kaitlyn Cornett and Thomas Koelbl
University of Memphis

LL.M. Division

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Lederman Wins Indiana University Research/Teaching Award

Lederman to Receive Sonneborn Award:

Leandra Lederman, William W. Oliver Professor of Tax Law and director of the Law School's tax program, is the recipient of Indiana University's 2019 Tracy M. Sonneborn Award. The award honors faculty for accomplishments in the areas of teaching and research. Named for the late eminent scientist Professor Tracy M. Sonneborn, the award is given to an exemplary researcher who is also well known as an exemplary teacher. Lederman will deliver the annual Sonneborn Lecture this fall. She is currently on a sabbatical leave as a Fulbright Scholar in Luxembourg.

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Winners Of The 2019 National Tax Moot Court Competition

Florida Bar, 2019 National Tax Moot Court Competition Winners:

Winner: Liberty [right]
William Baker, John Riordan, Jonathan Shbeeb
Coach: Tim Todd

1st Runner-Up: Stetson 
Deanna Cipriano, Romina Drazhi, Mark Joseph
Coach: Katie Everlove-Stone

2nd Runner-Up: Baltimore
Brenton Conrad, Dara Polokoff
Coach: Fred Brown

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2019 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition

The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship and American College of Tax Counsel are sponsoring the 2019 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition:

Named for the late Tax Court Judge Theodore Tannenwald, Jr., and designed to perpetuate his dedication to legal scholarship of the highest quality, the Tannenwald Writing Competition is open to all full- or part-time law school students, undergraduate or graduate. Papers on any federal or state tax-related topic may be submitted in accordance with the Competition Rules.

Prizes:

• 1st Place:  $5,000
• 2nd Place: $2,500
• 3rd Place:  $1,500

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2018 IFA International Tax Student Writing Award; Call For Entrants In 2019 Competition

The winner of the International Fiscal Association's 2018 International Tax Student Writing Competition is Ivan Ozawa Ozai (McGill), Tax Competition and the Ethics of Burden Sharing, 42 Fordham Int'l J. 61 (2018). 
Faculty Sponsor:  Allison Christians

2020 IFA International Tax Student Writing Competition:
Subject: Any topic relating to U.S. taxation of income from international activities, including taxation under U.S. tax treaties.
Open to: All students during the 2018-19 academic year (including independent study and summer 2018 school courses) pursuing a graduate degree (J.D., L.L.M., S.J.D., M.S.T., MTA, Masters of Taxation, or similar program). Any appropriate papers written in fall 2018 or spring and summer 2019.
Publication: The winning author will be entitled to publish his/her article in the Tax Management International Journal, which is produced by Bloomberg BNA.
Submission Deadline:  September 30, 2019.
Prize:  $2,000 cash, plus expenses-paid invitation to the IFA USA Branch Annual Meeting in Boston on Feb 27-28, 2010.

Here are the recent winners:

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Should You Allow Laptops In Class? Here’s What The Latest Study Adds To That Debate

Chronicle of Higher Education, Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate:

Point: Laptops are a menace, undermining how students take notes in class and distracting not only those using them but also their neighbors.

Counterpoint: Laptops are a lifeline, allowing students with disabilities to participate fully in class.

Plenty of professors have strong opinions about whether laptops belong in the classroom. They also pride themselves on holding opinions based on research. So a new paper investigating the difference between taking notes longhand or on a laptop was bound to attract attention. But that doesn’t mean it offers a definitive answer.

The paper, How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), was published this week in Educational Psychology Review. As the title suggests, the authors tried to replicate a well known study that found that students who took notes by hand fared better on conceptual test questions than did those who typed notes on a laptop [The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-Taking]. Students who took notes on a laptop wrote more, and were more likely to write what a lecturer said verbatim, according to the original study. Perhaps, the authors of that study wrote, students taking notes on laptops did so “indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content,” did not form a deep understanding of the material, and therefore did worse on the items that demanded such understanding.

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The Great Disappearing Teaching Load: From 3-3, To 3-2, To 2-2, To 2-1; 1-1 Is The Next Maginot Line

Chronicle of Higher Education, The Great Disappearing Teaching Load: How Few Courses Are Too Few?:

Yale has gone 2-1," a faculty member in political science told me, in the tone he presumably used in the classroom when discussing the perils of nuclear proliferation.

It became a refrain. During my 10 years as dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame, the question of teaching schedules — a phrase I unsuccessfully tried to substitute for "teaching loads" — hovered in the periphery of my day-to-day life. Sometimes it occupied center stage. At times I wondered if the question — "Could I have a course off for that?" — would be chiseled on my tombstone.

It’s a "first-world problem," as the kids say, and I hasten to acknowledge that deans or department chairs struggling with collapsing budgets, or faculty members routinely teaching four courses per semester, may want to proceed to the next article in The Chronicle Review.

For the rest of you, a question: How many courses per semester should a faculty member at a major research university teach?

The question is rarely asked — because it’s in no one’s interest to ask it. Not presidents, since in public institutions they, unlike faculty members, have to answer questions from more or less curious and informed state legislators about how professors use their time. Not provosts, deans, and department chairs, struggling to sustain the Maginot Line of standard teaching schedules while also competing to hire faculty members. Not graduate students, whose courses are typically taught by tenure-line faculty members anyway. And not professors, eager to conduct more research, certainly, but also craving the flexibility of a schedule not burdened by the day-to-day rhythm of class meeting times.

It’s actually in the interest only of innocent undergraduates, who don’t realize that the tenure-line faculty members supported by their tuition dollars may be teaching a decreasing number of courses. And although they don’t know it, it’s in the long-term interest of faculty members themselves. ...

John Boyer’s absorbing recent history of the University of Chicago is one of the few places where the topic is discussed. (Not coincidentally, Boyer is a longtime dean.) I suspect that the pattern he outlines there is typical: Tenure-line faculty members taught six courses per year (that is, two per quarter) through the 1960s, then five, and now, at most, four. Over time, teaching schedules, like salaries, began to vary a good deal by department or program.

Dame’s pattern was similar: Faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts moved from 3-3 on a semester system in the 1970s to 3-2 and then 2-2 in the late 1980s. When I started as dean, in 2008, tenure-line faculty members in science and engineering taught 1-1, with the expectation that they would be running funded labs; those in business taught 3-0. The "0" came about when the business school identified a semester without teaching, remarkably, as the uniform policy at the top business schools. Humanities, social-science, and arts faculty members taught two courses per semester.

The first strike came in economics. "We need to go 2-1," the chair politely explained, "because otherwise we can’t hire anyone." He was right, and so we did, with the proviso that teaching would be more than 2-1 for faculty members without strong research programs. Economics at Notre Dame had a spectacular decade, zipping up the rankings. Now I’m warned, somberly, that "some faculty at Duke are 1-1." ...

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Morrow: TCJA — Teaching A Tax Code Just Adopted

Rebecca Morrow (Wake Forest), TCJA: Teaching a Code Just Adopted, 8 Wake Forest L. Rev. Online 57 (2018):

The spring 2018 semester at many law schools started approximately three weeks after the Tax Cuts Jobs Act (TCJA) passed. This essay reflects on the experience of teaching tax law in a semester when all textbooks and statutory supplements were outdated and tax scholars scrambled to make sense of the new law while simultaneously teaching it to our students. It concludes, paradoxically, that teaching the TCJA so soon after it passed offered some huge advantages from a pedagogical perspective: it proved to students that they must rely primarily on the statute, rather than secondary sources, and must develop strong statutory interpretation skills to understand tax; highlighted the importance of the first rule of statutory interpretation, to “keep reading”; and increased the already high marketability of tax law expertise.

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2018 Tax Prof Teachers Of The Year

Tax Profs recognized at the AALS annual meeting in New Orleans as Teachers of the Year:

• Anne Alstott (Yale)
• Lilian Faulhaber Georgetown)
• Mary Ferrari (Quinnipiac)
• Bruce McGovern (South Texas)
• Stephanie Hunter McMahon (Cincinnati)
• Rebecca Morrow (Wake Forest)
• Adam Thimmesch (Nebraska)
• Stephanie Willbanks (Vermont)

2018 Law School Teachers Of The Year

It was great to see four of my colleagues (Trey Childress, Steve Schultz, Victoria Schwartz, and Peter Wendel) recognized at the AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans as 2018 Teachers of the Year:

Helicopter Law Professors Are Hurting Their Students

Emily Grant (Washburn), Helicopter Professors, 53 Gonz. L. Rev. 1 (2018):

Helicopter professors, like their parenting counterparts, hover over students, guiding them precisely, and swooping in to rescue them from any hint of failure or challenge. Just as helicopter parenting can be harmful to children, helicopter professoring poses similar threats to students, not the least of which is creating disengaged students dependent on professors for all aspects of their learning and development.

The instinct to be a helicopter professor is understandable in light of several social and cultural circumstances of today’s legal education. First, law students today are largely Millennials who were helicoptered parented and educated in a system that often focused solely on test results. Second, law professors are at times overly focused are garnering positive student evaluation scores, which may be easier to do with a little extra spoon feeding. Professors too may themselves be helicopter parents in their non-work hours, a behavioral pattern that too easily can infiltrate the classroom. Finally, law schools today are seeing a rise in students that have a consumerist attitude and in some cases lower academic credentials; those types of students expect and perhaps need additional assistance. But satisfying that need, combined with the focus on quantifying assessment practices and on improving teaching techniques, may easily cross the line into helicopter behavior.

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2018 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition Winners

The Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship has announced the winners of the 2018 tax writing competition:

First Prize ($5,000):
Colin T. Halpin (Washburn), A Step in the Right Direction: The Effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Need for Further Reform
Faculty Sponsor:  Lori McMillan

Second Prize ($2,000):
Betting on an Uncertain Future: The Tax Consequences of Large Third-Party Litigation Financing
Faculty Sponsor:  Gregg Polsky

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From Podcasts To Treasure Hunts: Using Technology To Promote Student Engagement

Marcia L. McCormick (Saint Louis), From Podcasts to Treasure Hunts—Using Technology to Promote Student Engagement, 58 St. Louis U. L.J. 127 (2013):

Three influential calls for reform in legal education, the MacCrate Report, the Carnegie Report, and most recently the Stuckey Report, have all recommended that professors use teaching methods to provide greater opportunities for students to practice problem solving skills and receive feedback on their performance. Being a lawyer is much more than memorizing rules; students need to be able to understand the big picture and use the details to problem solve. This article details how to use audio and written podcast summaries to help students see the big picture in a subject and how each smaller topic fits together into that bigger picture. On the detail side, quizzes and “Treasure Hunts” get students to read statutes apply them to different problem situations.

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FBA Tax Law Student Writing Competition

The Federal Bar Association Section on Taxation invites J.D. and LL.M. students to participate in the  2019 Donald C. Alexander Tax Law Writing Competition (flier):

The Federal Bar Association Section on Taxation sponsors an annual writing competition and invites law students to participate. The Section on Taxation has named this annual competition—the Donald C. Alexander Tax Law Writing Competition—in honor of former IRS Commissioner Don Alexander, who passed away in 2009. Throughout his career, Mr. Alexander was both a widely admired role model and an advocate for writing skills and style in tax law.

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Dorothy Brown Receives Emory University Teaching Excellence Award

Emory Law Professor Dorothy Brown Receives Teaching Excellence Award:

Dorothy Brown has been selected to receive the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, given through the Georgia Independent College Association (GICA). The award recognizes outstanding faculty members who demonstrate strong academic skills in the classroom and provide leadership and support in the other areas of campus life.

Dorothy Brown is a nationally recognized scholar in tax policy, race, and class and has published extensively on the racial implications of federal tax policy. She is highly sought for her expertise in workplace inclusion issues, a respected speaker in the legal community, and a regularly engaged expert by media including CNN, National Public Radio, The New York Times, National Law Journal, The Washington Post and Forbes. She is currently working on a book entitled The Whiteness of Wealth.

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