Larry Zelenak

Although I think I spend a reasonable amount of time in the basic income tax class teaching students stuff they might actually find useful in practice, I also spend considerable time on stuff I think of as civics.  The civics category includes things like the policy arguments for and against the current income tax treatment of marriage, of charitable contributions, of retirement savings, and so on.  It also includes the arguments for and against the choice of an income base rather than a consumption base, and the arguments for and against progressive marginal rates.  These are things of which every voter should have some basic knowledge, and I teach them to attorneys-in-the-making because they happen to be my captive audience.  I don’t feel any need to apologize for doing so, and from conversations with colleagues at a number of different law schools my approach seems to be very much in the mainstream.  What’s odd, though, is that for tax topics that clearly fall outside of the scope of the basic income tax class, their coverage in the law school curriculum depends almost entirely on their significance to practicing attorneys, and little or not at all on their importance as civics.  So every law school offers a course on estate and gift taxation despite its minimal revenue significance, and hardly any law school offers a course on Social Security taxation despite its huge revenue significance.  The question is whether we can justify this seeming inconsistency.  To be consistent, do we need to either stop teaching income tax civics in the basic class, or start offering civics-oriented courses on Social Security?