Following up on my previous post, Davis Polk Axes Tax Associate Who Published Op-Eds Criticizing Trump: ‘Was He Heroic, Naive Or Full Of Himself?’: Harvard Crimson Op-Ed: Harvard Taught Me to Speak Out. Big Law Fired Me When I Did., by Ryan W. Powers (J.D. 2023, Harvard):
Last month, I was fired from my corporate law job. My offense? An article on the Trump administration’s threats to democracy.
I went to Harvard Law School, where I was taught to think critically and interrogate systems of power. Like the majority of my classmates, I got a job at a big law firm.
But it turns out that the lessons I learned at HLS were never meant to follow me there.
In May, I wrote publicly about the threats to free speech and civil liberties if the federal government and Palantir struck a deal to surveil American citizens. Two weeks later, the New York Times reported they had.
I was warned that speaking out might cost me my job — but I kept writing. Then I was fired.
The incident is an example of a deeper collision — between the values universities purport to instill and the incentives inherent in the careers they most visibly promote. …
Harvard instills a belief in reasoned discourse, principled advocacy, and the duty to serve the public good. That is a noble pursuit — and one worth preserving. But alongside it, there should be preparation for the difficulty of practicing those ideals. Students should be equipped not only with the tools of analysis, but with the frameworks to navigate what happens when those tools come into conflict with the systems they were trained to enter.
Moreover, speaking out should not be treated as a deviation from professional success, but as part of its fullest expression. If we are serious about training leaders in law and public life, we must reckon with the question: What does it mean to teach ethical conviction if we fail to protect those who act on it?
I didn’t end up in conflict with Harvard’s values — I ended up in conflict with a system where those values were never meant to survive. If the institution is serious about its mission, it must ensure that public-purpose work is not just possible, but supported and respected. And it must stand behind students not only when they succeed within the system, but also when they dare to question it.
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On its path to sufficiently offsetting its major cut to the corporate income tax rate in 2017, Congress turned to a surprising source for funds: the alimony support payments of recently divorced families. Alimony’s inclusion/deduction regime in §§ 71 and 215 of the Code allowed divorcing couples to reach mutually beneficial divorce agreements for over half a century until it was unceremoniously repealed by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 with a striking lack of satisfying legislative justifications. This Note suggests that in evaluating the impact of the repeal, Congress and others have failed to consider an important piece in the puzzle: the marriage bonus. The marriage bonus, which rewards some couples with better results for filing jointly rather than separately, scaled proportionally with the pre- TCJA alimony subsidy and resulted in most couples receiving inferior tax treatment by choosing to divorce. Now, after the repeal of the subsidy, couples have an even worse result when they choose to separate.
Legal education across many parts of the world is increasingly transnationalized. Transnationalized legal education is a metamorphosis propelled by a combination of factors, some endogenous to the law school and legal community, some exogenous to them. This review essay finds that globalization and reform of legal education are often part of a broader change within a state. Any reform of legal education is often chaotic, as it deals with human actors, not with value-free formulas. The engineers of reform of legal education have not been a single or cohesive force, but more often groups of reformers have coalesced with others to engender changes.
This Article presents the results of a novel empirical study measuring the impact of state income tax rates on professional athletic performance. While prior scholarship established that state tax burdens influence where athletes choose to play and the financial dynamics of team rosters, this groundbreaking study provides a significant advancement in the field by demonstrating a statistically significant relationship between state tax rates and athletic performance. The implications of this groundbreaking result are far reaching, applying to the cognitive anchoring heuristic, recent changes to state and local tax (SALT tax) deductions, and even racial bias. Furthermore, this result is relevant in corporate America where the rise of remote work has increased the ability of workers to relocate to more tax-friendly states.
The American Bar Association’s issuance of Standard 303(b)(3) represents a pivotal shift compelling law schools to adapt their approach to the evolving needs of law students, lawyers, and the profession. The Standard serves as an invitation to reevaluate the relationship between the primary curriculum and student support frameworks.
Support for immigration into the United States and for advancing the ways that people can gain legal status in the United States is often undermined by the misconception that immigrants do not “contribute” to the economy. However, the reality is that undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes every year in the United States. In fact, “the best evidence suggests that at least fifty percent of undocumented immigrant households currently file income tax returns using Individual Tax Identification Numbers (“ITINs”), and many who do not file income tax returns still have taxes deducted from their paychecks.” Currently, there are roughly 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) estimates that as of 2010, about 3.1 million unauthorized5 immigrants were paying Social Security taxes. Thus, while undocumented immigrants cannot vote on any state, local, or federal tax laws, more than half of undocumented immigrants in the United States go out of their way to file annual federal and state income tax returns. 
On May 8 the College of Cardinals elevated the American-born Robert Francis Prevost to be the newest Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, whereupon he chose the regnal name Leo XIV. Many commentators have noted the Pope’s tax challenges as a U.S. citizen subject to U.S. federal income taxation on worldwide income. Tax practitioners have also considered analogous situations in history and tradition: Prince Albert II, the son of American actress Grace Kelly, renounced his U.S. citizenship before he became the Prince of Monaco in 2005; Thai King Rama IX was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts; American teenager Mia Thermopolis became a princess and heir to the Kingdom of Genovia; American journalist Amber Moore married into the royal family and became a queen of the Kingdom of Aldovia; and American actress Meghan Markle married into a cadet branch of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor based in London.
