Diane Lourdes Dick (Iowa), Creative Tax Writing At Iowa:
This year, I invited students in both of my Spring 2025 tax courses at the University of Iowa College of Law to participate in a new (and entirely optional!) creative writing competition.
The prompt was simple—but strange:
Imagine a world where cash no longer necessarily has a basis equal to face.
Students could respond in any narrative form—short story, poem, or something in between—and were explicitly permitted to use generative AI to assist with brainstorming, drafting, and editing. The result was a wildly creative and pedagogically rich experiment in how tax law can come alive through storytelling.
Submissions were evaluated on three criteria: tax substantive knowledge (40%), creative writing (40%), and overall quality (20%).
The stories that came in were unexpected, clever, and deeply insightful. From bureaucratic alien overlords conducting galactic audits to an emotionally weighted currency system powered by sentiment analysis, students combined sophisticated tax thinking with speculative fiction in truly imaginative ways. Many of them used generative AI tools not as shortcuts, but as collaborative creative partners, helping them shape plots, iterate dialogue, or simulate world-building in response to complex tax hypotheticals.
Rather than selecting a single winner, I recognized students across five themed categories:
- Best World-Building & Tax Policy Integration
- Best Use of Satire & Galactic Scope
- Most Inventive Concept & Dystopian Critique
- Most Haunting Conceptual Metaphor
- Most Poetic & Thought-Provoking
The stories were collected and distributed to both classes in a digital booklet.
This project was not only fun to read, but it also opened up a meaningful space for tax students to explore doctrinal concepts like basis and realization through narrative imagination. It also showcased the creative and responsible use of generative AI in legal education—a topic that is growing in importance as we rethink how lawyers of the future will think, write, and solve problems.
I’m planning to make this an annual event for students at University of Iowa College of Law. If you're curious about launching your own version of a tax fiction challenge—or just want to read about the “Deprived Dollar,” alien audit bots, and Senti-Counters that calculate emotional tax basis—I’d love to connect!
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