TaxProf Blog

Thursday, June 17, 2004

I am presenting Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning today at San Diego. Here is the abstract of the paper, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education:

Law schools (and indeed all of higher education) have witnessed an explosive growth in the use of technology in the classroom. Many law professors now deploy a wide array of technological bells and whistles, including PowerPoint slides, web-based course platforms, in-class Internet access, and the like. Students, in turn, increasingly come to class armed with laptop computers to harvest the fruits of the classroom experience. Yet in recent years there has been somewhat of a backlash, with various law professors arguing that this technology is interfering with, rather than improving, pedagogy in the classroom. According to the critics, this technology increases student passivity and thus interferes with the active learning that should be the hallmark of a law school classroom. In addition, the critics complain that laptops provide too much competition for the students’ attention, enticing them to play computer games or DVDs and, with in-class Internet access, to read and send email (or instant messages), shop on-line, or check out the latest political, financial, or sports news. This Article opens a new chapter in this debate, explaining how law professors can use both old and new technologies to increase student engagement in the classroom.

We first lay out the pedagogical case for creating an active learning environment in the law school classroom and then examine the critics’ charge that technology impedes these goals. The Article offers a competing vision of how technology can be harnessed to increase active student learning and, in the process, empower students to resist their laptop’s siren song. In particular, we describe how in our tax and labor law courses we combine both old (substituting word processing text for PowerPoint slides) and new (using handheld wireless transmitters) technologies to inject more active learning into the classroom.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Charlene Luke (Florida State) presents The Investor Control Doctrine: Constraining the Abuse of Variable Insurance Products today at Florida State. Here is the abstract:

The investor control doctrine was developed by the IRS in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is a specialized “substance-over-form” theory applicable only to variable insurance products. The doctrine contains both a more ambiguous, “facts and circumstances” test and a bright line rule. Violation of either test will cause an insurance contractholder to be deemed the owner of the assets underlying the variable product and so lose the tax preference on inside buildup. The “facts and circumstances” test is basically an application of assignment-of-income cases—such as Helvering v. Clifford—to the variable insurance context. The bright line rule prohibits variable contract accounts from directly investing in publicly available investments. Last year, Treasury invoked this doctrine to curb the practice of wrapping publicly available hedge funds inside variable insurance contracts. However, it seems likely that taxpayers will simply turn to indirect ways of investing in such hedge funds, such as through the establishment of clone funds. The paper will explore the development of the investor control doctrine and discuss possible reasons why it failed to constrain the recent direct investment in public hedge funds and why—even in its most recent incarnation—it will likely fail to stop the use of close substitutes. The paper will also look at ways in which the doctrine could be improved and whether the doctrine’s development could be used to evaluate the likely success of attempts to tax other financial products.