Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
The Tax Lawyer has published Vol. 78, No. 2 (Winter 2025):
Following up on my previous post, Former Students Sue Columbia, Say They Were Misled By Misreporting Of Data That Inflated Its U.S. News Ranking: New York Times, Columbia Will Pay $9 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over U.S. News Ranking:
Columbia University has agreed to pay $9 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by students who claimed they had been overcharged for their educations as a result of incorrect data that they said the school had provided to U.S. News & World Report to artificially inflate its national ranking.
The lawsuit stemmed from a 2022 scandal over how Columbia earned a No. 2 spot in the magazine’s annual “Best Colleges” rankings that year, acing a process that is a powerful driver of prestige and applications for American universities. Believing there were flaws in the data underpinning the university’s score, a Columbia mathematician investigated and published a blog post asserting that several key figures were “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”
The discrepancies caused Columbia to drop to No. 18 in the rankings. The next year, Columbia opted out of the rankings all together.
The proposed settlement, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, did not require Columbia to formally admit wrongdoing. But the university said in a statement on Tuesday that it “deeply regrets deficiencies in prior reporting.”
Northwestern Law News, Professor Ajay Mehrotra Receives Prestigious Research Honors to Advance New Book Project:
Ajay K. Mehrotra, the Stanford Clinton Sr. and Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Research Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Affiliated Professor of History also at Northwestern University, has been selected as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He also received a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, which will enable him to travel to archives for research purposes. These distinguished honors will significantly support work on his current book project, currently titled “American Outlier: Economic Inequality and the U.S. Historical Resistance to National Consumption Taxes.” …
“I am deeply honored to receive these awards, which will enhance my research and allow me to explore the complexities of economic inequality within the historical development of American tax law and fiscal policy,” Mehrotra says. “I look forward to delving into these topics more deeply both individually through the American Philosophical Society’s travel-to-archives grant, and collectively via the Russell Sage Visiting Scholars program.”
ABA Journal, NextGen UBE 'Blueprint' Welcome, But More Info on New Bar Exams Needed, Sources Say:
The National Conference of Bar Examiners’ “blueprint” for the NextGen UBE offers welcome info about how the new test will be different than the current Uniform Bar Exam, legal academics say. But they also say that critical pieces of information, such as a broader variety of sample questions and specific study materials, are still missing—and can’t come soon enough for law schools and bar candidates.
“[The] 2026 bar-takers deserved to have this information in 2023,” Marsha Griggs, an associate professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and immediate past president of the Association of Academic Support Educators, wrote to the ABA Journal.
The NCBE began planning in 2018 for the new exam, which emphasizes skills new lawyers need over memorization, and its first administration is scheduled for July 2026. At press time, 41 jurisdictions have committed to the test that will cover eight areas of doctrine and evaluate seven foundational lawyering skills. The Uniform Bar Examination and its components—the Multistate Essay Examination, the Multistate Performance Test and the Multistate Bar Examination—will sunset in 2028. …
Sources contacted by the ABA Journal applaud the NCBE’s steady and thoughtful efforts to launch a new exam.
New York Times, Ford Foundation’s New Leader Says She’ll Work to Protect Democracy:
Heather K. Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, will become the president of the Ford Foundation later this year, the group said Tuesday.
Ms. Gerken, who was seen last year as a contender for the Yale presidency, will take over one of the country’s wealthiest and most influential philanthropies at a time of especially fraught debate about social justice and inequality, two of the foundation’s touchstones.
In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Gerken said she was looking forward to working at the foundation “to protect democracy and the rule of law and further our mission to create a more just and fair world for everyone.”
New York Times, Trump and Republicans Mislead on Tax Cuts in Policy Bill:
The president and his Senate allies have cited inaccurate claims about their tax and policy bill.
As President Trump sought to pass his tax and domestic policy bill, he and his allies have insisted that the legislation would be a boon for seniors and the middle class.
The Senate narrowly passed its version on Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tiebreaking vote. Now, both chambers of Congress will reconcile differences between their versions.
Still, some of their most repeated talking points — a warning about vast tax increases if the bill did not pass, a purported elimination of taxes on Social Security and boasts about a record tax cut for average Americans — are not accurate.
Here’s a fact-check.
Bloomberg Tax, IRS Heads of Large Business Unit, Tax Pro Oversight Put on Leave:
Two highly placed IRS leaders were put on administrative leave Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Holly Paz, the commissioner of Large Business and International Division, and Elizabeth Kastenberg, acting director of the Office of Professional Responsibility, were put on leave while the IRS investigates their conduct against Republicans, the source said, adding that the leave doesn’t mean they are fired. It hasn’t been decided who will replace them, the source said.
Bloomberg Law, IRS Leadership Shakeup Adds to Turmoil Among Slashed Workforce:
The IRS has more holes in its senior leadership team and questions around morale of the remaining compliance workforce as two officials were put on administrative leave.
Longtime IRS staffers Holly Paz and Elizabeth Kastenberg are being investigated for their alleged conduct against Republicans, a person familiar with the situation said. The absences will likely worry workers already roiled by deep staff cuts and buyouts and hinder the functions of the compliance divisions just as new IRS Commissioner Billy Long takes over, tax professionals said. …
The IRS is losing about a quarter of its 100,000-person staff because of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government. Over half of the IRS senior leadership has left this year.
Losing two experienced officials will make it even harder for the IRS to administer and enforce the tax code, especially because of the recently passed GOP tax law, said Caroline Ciraolo, former acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department Tax Division who is now a partner with Kostelanetz LLP and founder of its Washington office.
“The continuing departure of experienced and dedicated leaders within the IRS is having a substantial, adverse impact on the agency and nationwide tax administration,” Ciraolo said in an email. “The abrupt and inexplicable removal of Holly Paz and Elizabeth Kastenberg, two seasoned and highly respected tax professionals, will only exacerbate this crisis.”
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Samuel D. Brunson (Loyola-Chicago; Google Scholar), Pay Taxes and Get Deported: Undocumented Immigrants and Tax Privacy,
The IRS has more information about more Americans than any other agency in the United States. Historically, other administrative agencies have targeted that IRS data to pursue their mandates or, at times, to pursue their enemies. In the wake of a number of scandals and perceived scandals, Congress enacted laws to protect the privacy of taxpayer information and limit the ability of the President and of executive agencies to access and use that information.
Over the subsequent fifty years, that congressionally-mandated confidentiality largely held. But over the course of 2025, it began to unravel. In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has signaled its desire to use taxpayer information to find and deport undocumented immigrants. The IRS has demonstrated a willingness to comply. Whether or not their agreement withstands judicial review, the fact that the two agencies have entered into this agreement could have a significant negative impact on undocumented immigrants’ willingness to file returns and pay taxes. To protect undocumented immigrants’ tax privacy–and to underscore the government’s commitment to protecting the privacy of tax return information in general–I propose two changes to tax filing. First, I propose that the government make individual taxpayer identification numbers indistinguishable from social security numbers. Second, I propose that the government establish registered agent-style offices for lower-income taxpayers that will allow them to file tax returns without using their home addresses.
These two changes to the tax law will provide a level of taxpayer confidentiality more in line with Congress’s intent. It will allow undocumented taxpayers to file and pay taxes without fear of deportation. And it will allow the IRS to focus on its revenue-related mission.
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Sam Williams (Idaho), Authorship by Omission: How Editorial Choices in Casebooks Shape the Apprehension and Meaning of Law, 58 Ind. L. Rev. 335 (2024):
The unique internal workings of the legal mind are a point of pride for the profession. But do those internal machinations reflect, and possibly reinforce, biases that ought to be examined, if not challenged? Expanding on recent work on the subject, this article makes the case that the casebook, the primary means of legal instruction, offers insights into the biases of the legal mind. Using some concepts adapted from other disciplines, the article analyzes coverage of the same case in seven textbooks to demonstrate how even the smallest changes can dramatically change the reader’s understanding of what the law is.
Conclusion An author or editor injects their own bias into a work as soon as they make an editorial decision about that work. The existence of bias in a text or classroom is unavoidable, and not inherently negative. However, it is insufficient to acknowledge that bias exists and leave it unexplored. There is bias within the legal profession, and legal academia in particular, that can be detrimental to practice and education in an increasingly polarized and information-skeptical environment. Taking the time to explore and understand the reader’s own biases will help keep the legal community connected to the public it nominally serves and educates.
Even if the utilitarian arguments for examining bias or my interpretations of editorial decisions here are unconvincing, exploring the bias found in our work has rewards of its own. When readers engage with a casebook as a literary work with meaning informed by its author’s identity, or examine a book for bias, they engage with that book as a work of art. Art does not strictly belong to the artist, and it can be daunting to realize how vastly different what the author says is from what the author means. However, that same unknowability also means that there is always something new for authors to discover about themselves and the world. By acknowledging the smallness of their own worldview, the author gives themselves the space that they need to grow.
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Following up on my previous post, Valuing Social Data [124 Colum. L. Rev. 993 (2024)]: Amanda Parsons (Colorado; Google Scholar), Taxing Social Data:
Data about people, or social data, powers the digital economy. Social data allows companies to predict and modify human behavior, producing economic value for themselves and wealth for their investors. Tax law systematically undertaxes this now-crucial form of economic value creation. This undertaxation exacerbates inequality and prevents governments from raising much-needed revenue.
This Article makes two key contributions. First, it develops the first link between tax law scholarship and scholarship on informational capitalism to offer a descriptive account of how companies leverage social data to create economic value and how that value escapes taxation.
It reveals how tax law’s focus on taxing monetary income and its preferential treatment of capital is at odds with digital companies’ distinctive business models, which privilege growth and accrual of social data over short-term profits. This Article thus identifies a fundamental incongruence between tax law’s structure and digital business models that allows Big Tech companies like Amazon to escape taxation. It is a failure that corporate income tax reforms-the prevailing but insufficient subject of most current tax law debates-alone cannot solve.
Instead, and second, this Article offers a comprehensive three-part approach to reform: (1) capital tax reforms to capture social data value creation that manifests as growth in company market value, (2) data taxes to capture the intrinsic economic value of social data at the company level, and (3) corporate income tax reforms to account for how digital companies turn social data into corporate money.
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https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2025/07/parsons-taxing-social-data.html
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