By: Shu-Yi Oei
The Association of American Law Schools will be holding the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA from January 2-6, 2019. This year, I’m the chair of the AALS Tax Section. Your section officers (Heather Field, Erin Scharff, Kathleen Thomas, Larry Zelenak, Shu-Yi Oei) are pleased to bring you four tax-related panels at the Annual Meeting. Two are Tax Section main programs, and two are programs we are cosponsoring with other sections. Details below.
We’re also organizing a dinner for Taxprofs (and friends) on Saturday, January 5. If you’re on the distribution list, you should have received an email about that and how to RSVP. If you’d like more details, please email me.
We hope to see many of you at the Annual Meeting!
Tax Section Main Program: The 2017 Tax Changes, One Year Later (co-sponsored with Legislation & Law of the Political Process, and Trusts and Estates)
Saturday, January 5, 2019, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm
Moderator:
Shu-Yi Oei, Boston College Law School
Speakers:
Karen C. Burke, University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law
Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Leigh Osofsky, University of North Carolina School of Law
Daniel N. Shaviro, New York University School of Law
Program Description: Congress passed H.R. 1, a major piece of tax legislation, at the end of 2017. The new law made important changes to the individual, business, and cross-border business taxation. This panel will discuss the changes and the issues and questions that have arisen with respect to the new legislation over the past year. Panelists will address several topics, including international tax reform, choice-of-entity, the new qualified business income deduction (§ 199A), federal-state dynamics, budgetary and distributional impacts, the state of regulatory guidance, technical corrections and interpretive issues, and the possibility of follow-on legislation.
Business meeting at program conclusion.
New Voices in Tax Policy and Public Finance (cosponsored with Nonprofit and Philanthropy Law and Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation)
Saturday, January 5, 2019, 3:30-5:15 pm
Paper Presenters:
Ariel Jurow Kleiman (University of San Diego School of Law), Tax Limits and Public Control
Natalya Shnitser (Boston College Law School), Are Two Employers Better Than One? An Empirical Assessment of Multiple Employer Retirement Plans
Gladriel Shobe (BYU J. Reuben Clark Law School), Economic Segregation, Tax Reform, and the Local Tax Deduction
Commenters:
Heather Field (UC Hastings College of the Law)
David Gamage (Maurer School of Law, Indiana University at Bloomington)
Andy Grewal (University of Iowa College of Law)
Leo Martinez (UC Hastings College of the Law)
Peter Wiedenbeck (Washington University in St. Louis School of Law)
Program Description:
This program showcases works-in-progress by scholars with seven or fewer years of teaching experience doing research in tax policy, public finance, and related fields. These works-in-progress were selected from a call for papers. Commentators working in related areas will provide feedback on these papers. Abstracts of the papers to be presented will be available at the session. For the full papers, please email the panel moderator.
COSPONSORED PROGRAMS:
Business Trusts: Facilitating Market Transactions and Building Bridges Between Legal Systems (Trusts and Estates Section)
Saturday, January 5, 2019, 8:30-10:15 am
In addition to facilitating gratuitous transfers, trusts play a major role in commercial transactions. These “business trusts” are the preferred form of organization for mutual funds (which hold more than $16 trillion) and are commonly used in asset securitization (an industry worth in excess of $1 trillion), employee pension and retirement accounts (which hold more than $24 trillion), and real estate investment trusts (which comprise over thirty firms on the S&P 500). Until recently, however, there has been little scholarly interest in business trusts, perhaps because they fall in a curricular gap between trusts and estates (where the primary focus is gratuitous transfers) and business associations (where the primary focus is the corporation and partnership). Building off of recent scholarship, this panel will begin to address this gap in the literature by presenting cutting-edge scholarship on business trusts of all types
Business meeting at program conclusion.
Symposium: Who Pays? Fines, Fees, Bail, and The Costs of Courts
Friday, January 4, 2019, 9 am -12:15 pm)
This symposium, co-sponsored by the Sections on Civil Procedure, Tax, Bankruptcy, and Criminal Justice, examines how courts are financed and the growing reliance on user fees, whether for filing or defending civil cases; charges imposed on criminal defendants such as “registration fees” for “free” lawyers; the imposition of both civil and criminal “fines”; and the use of money bail. We explore whether and how constitutional democracies can meet their obligations to make justice accessible, both to participants and to the public, in light of the numbers seeking help from courts, high arrest and detention rates, declining government budgets, and shifting ideologies about the utility and desirability of accessible courts. These topics have prompted the creation of national and state task forces; litigation (including challenges to detention of individuals eligible for release but lacking funds to secure bail bonds, and the automatic losses of drivers’ licenses for nonpayment of fines); and a mix of economic, political, and legal analyses probing the effects of “court debt.”
For those interested in reading cases and commentary in advance, a 2018 volume, Who Pays? Fines, Fees, Bail, and The Costs of Courts, is available at https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/center/liman/document/liman_colloquium_book_04.20.18.pdf. Many other articles are available and, in advance of the symposium, we plan to provide a bibliography with additional readings.
An edited set of essays will be published after the symposium in the North Carolina Law Review.
Civil Procedure business meeting will be held at program conclusion.
The Surly Subgroup 