TaxProf Blog

Thursday, June 3, 2004

Jeffrey Sherman (Chicago-Kent) has published A Tax Teachers Tries Law and (Dramatic) Literature, 37 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 255 (2004). Here is part of the Introduction:

Teachers of Law and Literature tend to overlook the wealth of suitable material lodged within the world of dramatic literature. A comprehensive survey of Law and Literature courses taught at American and Canadian law schools revealed that of the thirty-four most commonly-assigned works, only eight were plays. And of those eight, only one was written after the year 1620. My purpose in writing this article is not simply to provide an account of one teacher’s experience, but also, by means of that account, to encourage other teachers of Law and Literature to include more dramas– especially modern dramas–in their course materials. In addition, I hope to reassure “practical” teachers like me, who may fear that the Law and Literature movement has strayed too far from the law school’s core mission, that literature can stimulate students to think rigorously about the law.

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

One of the perennially interesting areas in the basic tax course is the sometimes inane distinction between stock traders and stock investors. Taxpayers and the IRS, of course, argue different sides of the coin, depending on whether there is a gain (investor status results in a lower capital gains tax rate) or a loss (investor status restircts deductibility to $3,000/year in excess of capital gains). The Tax Court yesterday weighed in with Chen v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2004-133, holding that Mr. Chen’s trading activity was not “regular, frequent and continuous,” even though he made 323 stock trades (278 in a 2-month period) in the tax year in question. Mr. Chen thus could deduct only $3,000 of his $85,000 loss in the year before the court. Of course, as Roth & Company note, he will be able to fully deduct the loss by 2027!

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

Malcom Campbell has an interesting piece on the benefits of teaching with open-access materials, Open Access: A PLoS for Education. Here is part of the conclusion:

Teaching is a lot like raising children. Like parents, teachers provide learning opportunities in part by modeling the behavior we want our students to learn. By choosing the most current literature as testing material, my students realize that I read the literature to stay current in my field and that there are always new opportunities to learn, analyze, and design experiments, etc. By my choosing open-access papers …, my students benefit from free access to published research results. Free access to research literature enhances student learning and helps produce the next generation of graduate students, who are then better trained. Open-access publishing provides the right mix of benefits for educators and students alike.

Stuart Levine, an adjunct professor at the University of Baltimore, has some interesting thoughts on the application of this approach in teaching future business and tax lawyers:

[T]he article deals with undergraduate education of prospective scientists, but somehow I believe that the ideas floated in the article have relevance to legal education as well, particularly the training of business lawyers (that term being broadly construed to include tax lawyers).

I have long been concerned that I am not doing a particularly good job of preparing my students to learn how to grasp the contours of a business problem. Now a large part of the difficulty is my own lack of ability which, I fear, cannot be remedied. However the issue is also derived from an inability to show students the “legal” issue in the larger economic context that we work in every day.

Part of the problem is that business lawyers generally work behind closed doors. We don’t publish “case notes” detailing the transactions that we have completed. In fact, the accelerating movement to resolving disputes via arbitration and mediation while beneficial in certain respects is actually detrimental in others. By way of example, over time there will be a decline in the written case law discussing business disputes and the law pertinent to them.

For more on the Public Library of Science (PLoS), see here.