University of Cincinnati college to become Donald P. Klekamp College of Law
The University of Cincinnati College of Law has been renamed the Donald P. Klekamp College of Law, following a $43.2 million commitment from the Klekamp family—the largest gift in the College’s history.
Made in honor of Donald Klekamp, JD ’57, the gift will be invested to strengthen four areas: student scholarships, experiential learning, student success initiatives, and the Corporate Law Center.
Dean Haider Ala Hamoudi said the following about the gift: added, “This gift does not simply add resources—it transforms what is possible. It enables us to compete for top students, deepen our commitment to student success, and elevate our Corporate Law Center into a nationally prominent program.”
Congrats to Dean Hamoudi and the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp Collgee of Law!
Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
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With $42.3 Million Gift, University of Cincinnati College of Law Renamed Donald P. Klekamp College of Law
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SSRN Review & Roundup: Speck Reviews Mann and Roberts’s The Long and Winding Road
This week, Sloan Speck (Colorado, Google Scholar) reviews a new work by Roberta F. Mann (Oregon, SSRN) & Tracey M. Roberts (Samford, Google Scholar), The Long and Winding Road: The Inflation Reduction Act’s Energy and Environmental Tax Credits, 78 Nat’l Tax J. 223 (2025) (download here).
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 introduced a generational suite of energy and environmental tax credits. Then, in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled back many of these credits, most notably for consumers, in an explicitly partisan rebuke of the IRA’s ambitious climate change goals. In this context, it’s worth revisiting Roberta Mann and Tracey Roberts’s recent National Tax Journal article, The Long and Winding Road: The Inflation Reduction Act’s Energy and Environmental Tax Credits, which details the history and political economy of these types of tax benefits to show both continuity and change in the IRA’s pathbreaking package.
From the perspective of Mann and Roberts’s insightful article, the OBBBA may illustrate yet another kink in the United States’ uneven path toward—and often-ambivalent relationship with—environmental stewardship. Published before the OBBBA, Mann and Roberts’s article treats the IRA’s tax credits not as a self-contained policy program, but as an episode in a longer story about the American state, the political economy of energy, and the tax system’s peculiar capacity to do public work indirectly. The OBBBA simply is the next chapter in this tale. More crucially, however, Mann and Roberts give a foundation for understanding the OBBBA as a predictable reversion to the policy mean—as a legislative move that preserves important parts of the IRA’s legacy while reinscribing the fiscal caution, entrenched interests, and political constraints that have characterized U.S. environmental policy since the 1970s.
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Book of the Week
Boston University Professor of Law, Aziza Ahmed, brings us this fascinating story of how the feminist movement played a key role in changing the shape of the fight against AIDS. She teases out complex interrelationships between social and scientific knowledge that illustrate how misconceptions can be overcome through sustained resistance. You can find the book here.
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WSJ: The High-Tax Wealth Flight Continues
Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board, The High-Tax Wealth Flight Continues (March 27, 2026),
As Democrats across the country seek to raise income taxes, the IRS on Friday released new data on state income migration that is a reality check on their ambitions. Even after the pandemic, high-tax states continue to lose tens of billions of dollars in taxable income to low-tax states.
The latest IRS data includes the adjusted gross income (AGI) of tax filers who moved between and within states between 2022 and 2023. Not surprisingly, overall migration ebbed from record highs in 2020 and 2021 during the Covid lockdowns. A mortgage lock-in effect and rising interest rates also resulted in fewer people moving.
Yet states with the highest taxes continue to lose the most income to other states. California lost on net $11.9 billion, mostly to Texas, Nevada and Arizona. Other big losers include New York ($9.9 billion), Illinois ($6 billion), Massachusetts ($4 billion), New Jersey ($2.6 billion), Maryland ($1.8 billion) and Minnesota ($1.5 billion)….
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Big Gift Brightens Graduation of Indiana University Maurer School of Law Class of 2026
Big news from Indiana University Maurer School of Law:
“Each of the 154 JD students in the Indiana University Maurer School of Law Class of 2026 who are graduating this May will receive a $10,000 gift from anonymous donors, the school announced today—an unprecedented investment in the next generation of legal professionals.
In total, the gifts amount to nearly $1.6 million, providing both meaningful financial support and a strong vote of confidence as students prepare to enter the legal profession.”
Congratulations to IU Law Dean Christiana Ochoa! What a graduation gift.
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Navigating the New Health Law Landscape
Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law holds its annual health law conference today, April 3. Event schedule can be found here. Dr. Rachel Pearson, MD, PhD., author of No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine will deliver the keynote address at 9 a.m.
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Trencs: The End of the Penny: Navigating Rounding Rules and Audit Risks
Samantha K. Trencs, The End of the Penny: Navigating Rounding Rules and Audit Risks (Tax Notes, April 3, 2026)
Your total is $10.02 at a retail checkout, but as you reach into your pocket, the cashier stops you: There is no need for those 2 cents. This scenario, once the subject of debate and hypothetical guidance, became reality on November 12, 2025, when the U.S. Mint ceased production of the penny.
Producing the penny no longer made economic “cents.” By 2025 the federal government was spending approximately 3.7 cents to manufacture 1 cent of value. When Congress removed the rounding provisions from the Common Cents Act (H.R. 3074), declining to adopt a national rounding standard, the result was not uniformity, but a patchwork of state rules and guidance.
This new retail environment may demand a forensic approach to compliance. Misalignment between point-of-sale (POS) logic and evolving state guidance can result in unintentional under-remittance, overcollection, and significant audit and litigation exposure….
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Ivy Walls, Empty Halls
UT Austin Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, David DeMatthews offers a telling account in the Chronicle of Higher Ed of how contemporary conditions (zoom technology; long commutes; family obligations; and pressure to be visible around the country if not the world) have led to fewer faculty members on campus to share informal interactions with each other and with students. I hear complaints about this from law school colleagues all the time. We should all be working on ways to nourish on-campus life. Read story here
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Nam Presents “Justice in Tax Enforcement” Today At Duke
Jeesoo Nam (USC) presents Justice in Tax Enforcement at Duke today, as part of its Tax Policy Seminar hosted by Larry Zelenak:
The IRS has limited resources with which to pursue enforcement actions against people who have underpaid on their taxes. Given such limitations, the agency can only pursue a small subset of underpayers. How should the agency decide who to pursue?
This Article argues that the answer to this question depends on a fundamental issue of justice. Is the decrease in well-being that underpayers experience when tax laws are enforced against them good or bad from the standpoint of justice? When taxpayers underpay, they are illegally keeping money that they should have paid to the government to instead spend on themselves. When the government enforces the law, it deprives such underpayers of the use of their illegally gotten gains. Surprisingly, theories split on whether this deprivation is intrinsically good or bad. On a desert-based theory of justice, when people underpay on their taxes, they take for themselves more than they deserve. Thus, depriving underpayers of illegally appropriated cash is good from the standpoint of justice. It brings those underpayers back to the level of well-being they deserve. On a welfarist theory of justice, such deprivation is bad because all deprivation is bad, even deprivation of illegally gotten gains. This Article teases out the implications of these competing perspectives for the question of how the IRS should choose who it targets in its enforcement actions.
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Bird-Pollan Presents “The State and Local Tax Deduction Cap and Its (Unintended?) Sexist Consequences ” Today At Georgia
Jennifer Bird-Pollan (Wayne State) presents The State and Local Tax Deduction Cap and Its (Unintended?) Sexist Consequences at Georgia today, as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Assaf Harpaz:
If two individuals earning similar amounts marry and file jointly, they will owe more in total tax than if they had remained unmarried and filed singly. The income of the second earner spouse is taxed at a higher marginal rate than it would be if that taxpayer were single, making work less financially rewarding. As a result, the consequences of marriage penalties fall disproportionately on women, and the tax system reduces the financial incentive for second earners to work outside the home. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced a per-return cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes, which further compounds this issue by requiring married couples to share a single deduction cap, while unmarried individuals can each claim the full amount. This creates a new and more straightforward marriage penalty that particularly burdens second earners. Despite this, the policy was enacted without meaningful discussion of its consequences, and ignoring these effects risks reinforcing outdated and harmful gender norms. Ultimately, imposing the cap on a per-return basis rather than a per-taxpayer basis further discourages women from participating in the workforce.
For more information on the Tax Policy Colloquium, please contact Assaf Harpaz.
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