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.

From a study period already “lean in law students” (85), Hatfield concludes that, while course offerings in taxation at U.S. law schools remained robust from 2012 through 2022 (and the number of full-time tax faculty held steady), disproportionate declines in tax course enrollments, especially in institutions’ introductory tax courses, portend “less familiarity with tax law” among members of the legal profession going forward (110). In addition, Hatfield finds enrollment in introductory tax courses negatively correlated with law schools’ total number of upper-level course offerings and positively correlated with law schools’ proportion of male students. Finally, when a law school’s local jurisdiction eliminates taxation as a bar exam topic, tax course enrollment also declines. Coupled with the United States’ ongoing personnel crisis in accounting professions and the potential for imminent and significant legal change in tax law, these enrollment trends point to a potential deficit in capacities among nonspecialist professionals—and possible supply shortages among tax specialists compared to demand among clients. The likely outcome is lower-quality tax advice to those with fewer resource

One question that emerges from Hatfield’s deft presentation is whether his comprehensive dataset captures a period of representative or idiosyncratic change. Hatfield’s data begin in the wake of the Great Recession, extend through three very different presidential administrations, and end in the waning COVID-19 pandemic. These years encompassed substantial swings in everything from economic policy to public opinion, and one might reasonably wait for a less turbulent period to adjust law schools’ institutional rudders. Indeed, the relatively static number of tax faculty at Hatfield’s subject schools might reflect exactly this kind of reticence. On the other hand, Hatfield’s principal prescriptions for faculty-motivated change—to actively recruit students with potential, to talk more about job outcomes and satisfaction, and to implement curricular innovations—probably should be undertaken regardless of legal education’s broader direction. Alternatively, if perpetual turbulence is the new normal, then one might press for holistic and comprehensive change, perhaps immediately. If tax and other specialty fields are the canaries, then we collectively should give more attention to the coal mine.

More broadly, Hatfield’s article implicates the market’s role in law school curriculum. Anecdotally, demand for tax professionals in law and accounting has increased to something of a fever pitch since the Great Recession. And yet, Hatfield traces at most a modest increase in tax-committed law students since 2012. More research is warranted on whether this disjuncture reflects a broader failure in the market for expertise, and whether intervention is needed to rebalance the types of professionals produced by law schools. Compared to earlier decades, there seems to be more ambiguity about whether institutions of higher education are market makers or market takers with respect to the curricular packages they offer to students. Given the heady implications of higher education for the U.S. polity, these issues are crucial for many of the societal reasons that Hatfield’s work engages.

Finally, Hatfield identifies enrollment in partnership tax courses as a proxy for commitment to practice in the field of tax law (96). I suspect that many tax faculty would find this proxy both robust and intuitive: a low-cost mechanism to gauge student interest and specialization. Although partnership tax isn’t an endpoint in tax pedagogy, there’s something special about the course that gives it statistical power. I’m curious whether other law school courses serve a similar role in other fields. Setting aside the higher-impact, bigger-picture aspects of Hatfield’s empirical analysis, a catalogue of these “barometer courses” might allow for more effective measurement of students’ engagement with specialization in law school. Given the challenge of presenting descriptive statistics on curriculum to faculty and other stakeholders, Hatfield’s development of these proxies may advance communication about legal education in meaningful ways.

Overall, Tax in Law Schools is an important contribution to scholarship on legal education and the teaching of tax law. Teachers of tax should attend to Hatfield’s prescriptions for increasing enrollment in tax courses. Moreover, law school faculty, as well as leaders across higher education, may find Hatfield’s article meaningful as they steer professional schools through the current moment and beyond.