Today's Law, Society, and Taxation panels at the 2025 Law & Society Association Annual Meeting in Chicago:

Local Governments and Tax Benefits

 As state governments think about imposing tax within their own borders they are faced with the additional challenges of balancing their state-level taxes with the U.S. federal tax. This same balance also arises in other contexts, such as the balance between national and EU tax law. The papers in this panel explore what this balancing process looks like in various contexts, and attempts to address some of the significant challenges that can arise as a result.

• Assaf Harpaz (Georgia; Google Scholar) (chair/discussant)
• Heather Field (UC Law-SF; Google Scholar), Selling Tax Benefits
• Borbala Kolozs, Taxation and Animals
• Richard Winchester (Brooklyn), A Tax Policing Paradox
• Alex Zhang (Emory; Google Scholar), Fiscal Autonomy in Subnational Taxation

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

This will be an Author Meets Reader session on Andrew Kahrl's book The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Kahrl's book tells the long history of racial discrimination and inequity in local tax systems and African Americans' struggle for tax justice in America. It re-examines the entire sweep of African American and American history since 1865 through a fiscal lens, showing how local tax administration and enforcement became (and remains) a powerful force of inequality in housing, education, public health, and wealth in America and a key arena of struggle. Kahrl's book makes interventions into several areas of scholarship of particular interest to legal scholars. This panel brings together top scholars in those fields to assess Kahrl's book.

• Andrew Kahrl (Virginia) (author)
• Robert Manduca (Michigan; Google Scholar)
• Thomas Mitchell (Boston College; Google Scholar) 
• Beryl Satter (Rutgers; Google Scholar)

Technology, Data, and Tax Law

Just like all other areas of law, the tax law faces new and different challenges in contemplating how best to respond to the worlds of artificial intelligence, crypto-currencies, and other technologies. The papers in this panel investigate these challenges and others and propose solutions that solve some of the most intractable elements of the problems. At the same time, additional potentially as yet unconsidered difficulties are also identified.

• Emily Cauble (Wisconsin; Google Scholar) (chair/discussant)
• Joshua Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Chapter 10: The Future of Agency Communications (with Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar))
• Mirit Eyal (Alabama; Google Scholar), Tax Levers For A Safer AI Future (with Yonathan A. Arbel (Alabama; Google Scholar))
• Amanda Parsons (Colorado; Google Scholar), Digitalization, Inequality, and the New Political Economy of Wealth and Capital Income Taxes
• Limor Riza (Carmel Academic Center), Proposal For A Subsidy Law – The Solution For “Probably None Of Us Will Have A Job”

Political Economy and Tax Theory

At the heart of many discussions of tax policy is a question of whether the tax law achieves the right end, for all people affected by it, and how best to design the tax to achieve the desired ends. The papers in this session tackle these essential, and difficult, questions from a variety of angles, contemplating theories of tax and tax policy design. While each paper contemplates a different aspect of tax system design, the papers in this session are concerned with asking about both the theoretical justifications and the effects of particular tax decisions.

• Elaine Wilson (West Virginia; Google Scholar) (chair/discussant)
• Jennifer Bird-Pollan (Wayne State; Google Scholar), The State and Local Tax Deduction Cap and the Marriage Penalty
• Luis Calderon Gomez (Cardozo; Google Scholar), Charity's Limits
• Rory Gillis (Western University; Google Scholar), Distributive Purposes in Tax Case Law
• Christine Speidel (Villanova; Google Scholar), Building a Trauma Informed Tax System

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