Brain Leiter breaks the news that Illinois Institute of Technology has declared a “financial exigency” and has begun firing faculty. “Up to one-third of the faculty may be terminated, although in the law school, Chicago-Kent, it appears the number is lower (maybe one-fifth by some accounts). . . . If readers have more details, please email me. The main source of the budgetary crisis is the decline in the enrollment of international students, no doubt due to Trump…” Tough time for the new interim law dean.
Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
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Herzfeld: Clipping Treasury’s Rulemaking Wings
In Tax Notes, Mindy Herzfeld writes about two recent decisions from the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims in which the respective court each ruled against the government on the basis that Treasury exceeded its authority when it promulgated regulations implementing the 2017 tax overhaul informally known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. From the piece:
The Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims, in two decisions handed down in July — Siemens Medical Solutions USA Inc. v. Commissioner and Keysight Technologies Inc. v. United States— built on the foundations of a 2024 Tax Court decision, Varian Medical Systems Inc. v. Commissioner, to take down Treasury’s rulemaking authority another few notches. Both recent cases concern broadly expansive regulations issued in the aftermath of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In the two decisions, the Tax Court and claims court rap Treasury on the knuckles for its overbroad interpretation of its authority to promulgate regulations that are clearly inconsistent with the plain language of the statutes. The cases may have wide repercussions for administrative lawmaking and taxpayer behavior.
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Mother Jones: The IRS Is Imploding
In Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer writes about the current state of the IRS in “The IRS Is Imploding.” From the piece:
These aren’t just anecdotal one-offs. A June report to Congress from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent agency within the IRS, found that live humans answered 20 percent fewer calls during this year’s tax filing season and that hold times jumped anywhere from 81 to 161 percent, depending on the line called. Only 17 percent of the calls handled by the “voicebot” system were completed. Most callers got frustrated and either asked to be transferred to a live person or hung up.
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The nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights this year also conducted its own research on how bad the IRS call responsiveness has gotten. The group discovered that the government’s own measurements showed that wait times increased more than 70 percent in 2026, even though the agency received 50 percent fewer calls to its main 1040 help line than during the previous year. CTR testers then called various IRS phone numbers and found that nearly 40 percent of the calls were disconnected—mostly by the IRS.
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New Loan Limits and Responses
As student loan caps go into effect, we are seeing media coverage over the way some law schools are responding. A story yesterday on this issue from Bloomberg Law:
Students pursuing graduate or professional degrees previously were able to borrow up to the full cost of attendance through federal loans. Uncapped loans were eliminated by the GOP-led tax and spending bill and went into effect July 1. Prospective law students — some with bad credit, no credit, or no qualified co-signer — now must grapple with expensive private loans to finance part of their degrees, which could change their calculation about which school to attend.
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A handful of schools are taking action now, ensuring that students impacted by the borrowing cap will have options.
Christina Lee, Law Schools Step Up Aid to Cover Gaps as Loan Limits Take Effect, Bloomberg Law, July 28, 2026. For related discussion, see States Step Up as Federal Loan Caps Go Into Effect, The Feed, July 24, 2026; Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Student Loan Caps Harm Public Interest Bar — and Those They Serve, Bloomberg Law, July 28, 2026.
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Calderón Gómez & Kane: Pigou Goes Abroad
Luís Calderón Gómez (Cardozo) and Mitchell Kane (NYU) have posted a new piece on SSRN, forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review, titled, “Pigou Goes Abroad.” Here’s the abstract:
Pigouvian regulation is enjoying a renaissance. Scholars and policymakers increasingly hail Pigouvian instruments (e.g., a pollution tax on a polluting factory) as superior to command-and-control regulation (e.g., a zero-pollution mandate) in targeting a myriad of social problems. Yet the Pigouvian revival rests on a largely unexamined assumption: that these fiscal instruments can beconceived, designed, and implemented as purely domestic policies.
That assumption is wrong. Many of the most consequential problems that governments face today—carbon emissions, financial contagion, and global wealth concentration—are neither produced nor borne within national borders. And when harms and markets transcend jurisdictional boundaries, our conventional Pigouvian regulatory analysis breaks down. In many cases, the implemented domestic instrument may prove ineffective, unstable, or even counterproductive, inducing evasion, arbitrage, and political unraveling. Conversely, in some contexts well-designed domestic instruments might prove surprisingly robust in combatting essentially global harms.
This Article develops a novel framework for evaluating the effectiveness and scope of Pigouvian taxes on a cross-national scale, acknowledging the reality that some of our most pressing social problems are not domestic. We identify three factors that have often been ignored or confounded by the literature: (i) the location of the relevant market and harm, (ii) interjurisdictional competition and heterogeneity, and (iii) distributional considerations. Together, these neglected factors can explain whether a cross-national approach is warranted, whether a cross-national approach can be feasibly enacted, and frequent obstacles to the instrument’s effectiveness, alongside design features that could address such obstacles.
We apply our framework to current and proposed instruments on carbon emissions, financial transactions, soda consumption, and wealth concentration, and show why many of them are structurally prone to failure—and how they could be redesigned. We further extend our framework to two traditionally domestic regulatory instruments, recent U.S. environmental and immigration policies, and show how—even in this presumably domestic context—our framework enriches our understanding of these policies, robustly predicting regulatory failures and highlighting policy fixes. In doing so, the Article reframes Pigouvian taxation as an almost inescapably cross-border endeavor, with significant implications for tax design, regulatory instrument choice, and international regulatory coordination.
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Colorado: Hiring in Tax (and More!)
The University of Colorado Law School is hiring in tax this year, among other fields. (And their appointments committee is chaired by none other than Tax Prof Amanda Parsons!) Here are the basic details from their hiring announcement:
The University of Colorado Law School invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for one or more full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty positions to begin at the start of the 2027-2028 academic year.
We welcome applications from candidates in all subject areas and at all levels of seniority. We have particular needs in Tax Law, Labor and Employment Law, and Business Law.
For questions, please contact Professor Amanda Parsons, Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee, Amanda.Parsons@colorado.edu.
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Legal Education in Alaska
Coverage of law school partnerships with the University of Alaska so that Alaskan residents don’t need to leave the state to attend law school.
The University of Alaska Southeast is partnering with Minnesota-based Mitchell Hamline School of Law to allow Alaska students to get a law degree without needing to leave the state. Normally, students pursuing law move out of state, said UAS Chancellor Aparna Palmer on KTOO’s Juneau Afternoon.
“We don’t have a law school in Alaska, and so most people have to basically go out of Alaska, go to law school,” she said. “And then if they want to come and practice in Alaska, then they return to Alaska.”
The university already has a partnership with Willamette University that allows qualifying UAS students to enroll directly in the Oregon law school. The new partnership is the campus’ first that allows students to complete most of their coursework in Alaska.
University of Alaska Anchorage and Fairbanks both have their own partnerships with law schools as well.
Jamie Diep, New UAS partnerships Allow Students to Pursue Law Degrees in Juneau, KTOO, July 24, 2026.
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Commentary on Section 301 Tariffs
Tariffs are in the news again. From Politico, Oliver Ward, Megan Messerly, and Daniel Desrochers report:
The Trump administration on Thursday finalized new double-digit tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners as it seeks to reconstitute sweeping duties struck down by the Supreme Court in February.
The new duties, which range from 10 to 12.5 percent, follow a five-month investigation into trading partners’ efforts to root out products made with forced labor from their supply chains and are set to take effect just as a temporary global 10 percent tariff expires.
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The duties, imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, will go some way to rebuilding the tariff wall felled by February’s Supreme Court decision. In the wake of that ruling, President Donald Trump imposed a 10 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the same statute. But that law only authorizes tariffs for 150 days, and the current ones are set to expire Friday.
It took a full day after the announcmenet, but these tariffs have been challenged in the Court of International Trade by plaintiffs Burlap and Barrel, Inc. and Collective Horology, LLC, represented by the Liberty Justice Center. From the complaint:
- The Section 122 tariffs are limited by statute to 150 days. The Administration used that period to conduct the Section 301 investigations at issue here and then imposed the challenged Section 301 tariffs. The sequence and structure of those measures, as well as Administration statements, show that the Section 301 Action was designed to preserve substantially the same broad tariff regime that this Court and the Supreme Court have held Congress did not authorize under IEEPA and Section 122.
- The Section 301 Action exceeds the authority Congress granted in Section 301. Section 301 is a targeted, country-specific and practice-specific remedial authority. It permits the Trade Representative to act only upon a determination that a particular act, policy, or practice of a foreign country is unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce, . . . and any responsive action must be directed to that act, policy, or practice . . . . It is not a freestanding authorization to tax substantially all imports from substantially all trading partners at rates selected to replicate the invalidated IEEPA tariff regime rather than to eliminate identified foreign practices.
- The Section 301 Action is also arbitrary and capricious: USTR failed to provide a reasoned, record-based explanation for its determinations or for its selection of near-uniform duties across 60 economies with materially different enforcement records and trade profiles.
- And if Section 301 were construed to authorize duties of this scope across substantially all imports from substantially all trading partners, at rates selected in advance and without a sufficient connection to the statutory determination and remedial purpose, that construction would constitute an unconstitutional delegation of Congress’s core Article I tariff power.
- The Court should therefore set aside and enjoin the Section 301 Action.
Here’s Peter Harrell (Georgetown) in The Volokh Conspiracy on why the tariffs fail as a matter of law:
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Washington State Bar Exam Cancellation
Many law graduates sat for bar exams this week, with almost all jurisdictions having their exams yesterday and today. Yesterday there were connectivity and technical issues in Missouri and Washington (and some reports of a delayed start in Maryland). NBCE, Statement on the July 2026 NextGen Bar Exam Administration, July 28, 2026; see also Ryan Shiner, Internet Issues Affect Bar Exam Start Times in Missouri, ABC17News, July 28, 2026. The technical issues were so serious in Washington that late in the afternoon the Washington State Bar Exam was cancelled.
From the Washington State Bar Association’s announcement:
The Washington State Bar Association was unable to begin day one of the July 2026 bar exam today for applicants testing at the Yakima Convention & Event Center due to a technology issue. The venue, Yakima Convention & Event Center, has released its own statement addressing the cause of today’s disruption. We refer specific technical questions directly to the venue.
We do not have sufficient confidence that the technology issue has been resolved to safely resume the exam tomorrow, July 29, and have made the decision not to continue. We sincerely apologize to the candidates who worked so hard to prepare, and we deeply regret that we could not deliver a successful exam experience today.
Washington State Bar Association, July Bar Exam Cancelled, July 28, 2026. For other coverage, see Isaiah Poritz et al., Washington State Bar Cancels July Exam Over Wi-Fi Problems, Bloomberg Law, July 28, 2026; WA Bar Exam Canceled Due to Tech Issue; 645 Law Students in Limbo, The Seattle Times, July 28, 2026.
More detail can be found in posts on Reddit. See, e.g., Reddit (“As you’ve heard by now if you’re on this subreddit, the Washington Bar Exam did not go through as planned. Instead, around 700 increasingly tired and upset examinees got to sit and be yanked around by connectivity issues and uncertainty for around five hours…..”). Other bar exam related stories were posted earlier in the day. See e.g., Harrison Barnes, The Hardest and Easiest Bar Exams in 2026: A State-by-State Difficulty Ranking, Law Crossing, July 28, 2026; Kathryn Rubio, The Bar Exam Is Here, Which Means Something Is About To Go Horribly Wrong, Above the Law, July 28, 2026; JD Advising, No Matter What Your Bar Exam Results Are, Here’s What to Do Next, JD Advising, July 28, 2026.
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Boyko on Lawyer Training
Anastasia Boyko (formerly Yale Law, formerly Utah Law), at Law.com (July 23): “The Future of Lawyering: Lawyer Training“:
Once I came full circle to law school administration, I saw the root cause of lawyer training and development dysfunction. We have not created the right container for development for years. Limited psychological safety. Faculty more focused on scholarship than teaching. A sink or swim approach to success. Trial by fire. Suffering as valor. Only the strong survive (even if you weren’t given the tools to succeed). And now AI is flashing a bright light on those messy and sticky broken parts of what we do as lawyers training other lawyers. The answer is we must restructure how we provide legal services and restructure how lawyers learn.
We took an oath to the profession, but many of us have deprioritized it. Legal AI providers have partnered with law schools and law firms for training new lawyers on the tools, but if the training apparatus was already broken how much learning and development do we expect to take place? We can’t leapfrog over decades of structural decay in lawyer training by pressing the AI easy button.
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