Today's Law, Society, and Taxation panels at the 2025 Law & Society Association Annual Meeting in Chicago:

Taxation and the Constitution

The crisis in democracy has its consequences inside the world of tax just as it does outside of tax law. The papers on this panel consider how the destabilization of democracy in all its forms and the consequences of those changes will affect the existence of tax law. Are there ways to resist these democratic challenges, or to operate within the tax law as a tool of resistance to the new world of democratic instability?

• Joseph Clifton Fleming, Jr (BYU; Google Scholar) (chair/discussant) 
• Neil Buchanan (Florida, visiting Toronto; Google Scholar), Distributive Justice in a Post-Democratic World
• Diane Kemker (Southern; Google Scholar), Forbidden Pleasures and the Tax Code
• James Puckett (Penn State), Tax Administration: Delegation, Guidance, and the Limits of Skepticism
• Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar), The Realization Rule as a Legal Standard, 16 Colum. J. Tax L. 1 (2024) (reviewed by David Elkins (Netanya) here)

The Social and Economic Impact of Taxation

To what extent is the tax code intended to provide a level of equity and stability for all members of the society funded by that tax system? And to what extent does it achieve any such goals? The papers on this panel explore the complementary questions of what tax law does to curb accumulation of wealth and what it does to support those who suffer from financial instability unsupported by social offers of assistance. Further, the papers each explore particular ways in which the tax law can advantage or disadvantage certain categories of taxpayers or whole parts of society.

• James Puckett (Penn State) (chair/discussant)
• Tessa Davis (South Carolina), The Gift of Debt
• Steven Dean (Boston University; Google Scholar), Fear of a Black Planet: Africa’s Decolonisation and the Transformation of the International Tax Regime
• Bobby L. Dexter (Chapman), Saving the Future: The Pressing Need for the Giant Education Leap
• Lauren Shores Pelikan (Missouri-Columbia), Tax Reform to Solve the Childcare Crisis in Two Parts: Affordability and Availability

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