Author: Shu-Yi Oei

I teach at Boston College Law School.

Tax Panels at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting

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.

Continue reading “Tax Panels at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting” →

A Series of Series? Tax, Regulation, and Faculty Workshops at Boston College Law School

I do love a good faculty workshop. Reading and spiritedly discussing the work of other academics always fills me with energy and inspiration for my own projects. Plus, it’s great to be able to spend time with new and old friends and find out what’s been baking in their brains.

Here at BC Law, I’m fortunate to be involved in two exciting workshop series: the BC Tax Policy Workshop and the BC Regulation and Markets Workshop. Both kicked off this week: On Tuesday, we hosted Professor Jens Dammann from the University of Texas at Austin and heard about his paper, “Deference to Delaware Corporate Law Precedents and Shareholder Wealth: An Empirical Analysis.” Today, we welcomed Professor Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern Law; Executive Director, American Bar Foundation) and had a lively discussion of his book project, “The VAT Laggard: A Comparative History of U.S. Resistance to the VAT.” Tomorrow, BC Law will have its first Faculty Colloquium of the semester. Professor Guy-Uriel Charles (Duke Law; visiting at Harvard Law) will present “The American Promise: Rethinking Voting Rights Law and Policy for a Divided America.”

You can never have too many workshops!

Below are the dates and speakers for the remainder of the semester. If you’re a Boston-area law professor and are interested in attending or would like to be on our workshop email list, just let me know.

Tax Policy Workshop (Fall 2018):

Thursday September 13, 2018
Ajay Mehotra (Northwestern, and American Bar Foundation):
The VAT Laggard: A Comparative History of US Resistance to the VAT
(co-sponsored with BC Legal History Workshop)

Tuesday November 6, 2018
Andrew Hayashi (UVA): title TBD

Tuesday Nov. 13, 2018
Cliff Fleming (BYU): title TBD

Tuesday November 27, 2018
Emily Satterthwaite (University of Toronto): title TBD
(co-sponsored with BC Regulation and Markets Workshop)

Continue reading “A Series of Series? Tax, Regulation, and Faculty Workshops at Boston College Law School” →

New Paper on Tax Legislative Process and Statutory Drafting

Shu-Yi Oei

For those readers in search of some light summer reading, Leigh Osofsky (UNC Law) and I have been working on a paper on statutory drafting, entitled “Constituencies and Control in Statutory Drafting: Interviews with Government Tax Counsels.” We finally got around to posting it on SSRN, here.

In the paper, we report findings from interviews we conducted with government tax counsels who have participated in the tax legislative process, in which we asked questions about various aspects of drafting and creating tax legislation. In addition to reporting our findings, we also discuss the implications of our research for statutory interpretation, tax system design, and the legislative process.

For readers interested in legislation, tax drafting, statutory interpretation, tax shelters, and the political process, the paper is probably worth a look. Feel free to contact either of us with comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call for Papers: New Voices in Tax Policy and Public Finance (2019 AALS Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA)

The AALS Tax Section committee is pleased to announce the following Call for Papers:

CALL FOR PAPERS
AALS SECTION ON TAXATION WORKS-IN-PROGRESS SESSION
2019 ANNUAL MEETING, JANUARY 2-6, 2019, NEW ORLEANS, LA
NEW VOICES IN TAX POLICY AND PUBLIC FINANCE
(co-sponsored by the Section on Nonprofit and Philanthropy Law and Section on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation)

The AALS Section on Taxation is pleased to announce the following Call for Papers. Selected papers will be presented at a works-in-progress session at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA from January 2-6, 2019. The works-in-progress session is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 5.

Eligibility: Scholars teaching at AALS member schools or non-member fee-paid schools with seven or fewer years of full-time teaching experience as of the submission deadline are eligible to submit papers. For co-authored papers, both authors must satisfy the eligibility criteria.

Due Date: 5 pm, Wednesday, August 8, 2018.

Form and Content of submission: We welcome drafts of academic articles in the areas of taxation, tax policy, public finance, and related fields. We will consider drafts that have not yet been submitted for publication consideration as well as drafts that have been submitted for publication consideration or that have secured publication offers. However, drafts may not have been published at the time of the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting (January 2019). We welcome legal scholarship across a wide variety of methodological approaches, including empirical, doctrinal, socio-legal, critical, comparative, economic, and other approaches.

Submission method: Papers should be submitted electronically as Microsoft Word documents to the following email address: tax.section.cfp@gmail.com by 5 pm on Wednesday, August 8, 2018. The subject line should read “AALS Tax Section CFP Submission.” By submitting a paper for consideration, you agree to attend the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting Works-in-Progress Session should your paper be selected for presentation.

Submission review: Papers will be selected after review by the AALS Tax Section Committee and representatives from co-sponsoring committees. Authors whose papers are selected for presentation will be notified by Thursday, September 28, 2018.

Additional information: Call-for-Papers presenters will be responsible for paying their own AALS registration fee, hotel, and travel expenses. Inquiries about the Call for Papers should be submitted to: AALS Tax Section Chair, Professor Shu-Yi Oei, Boston College Law School, oeis@bc.edu.

Congratulations to Surly Blogger Sam Brunson!

As announced on Taxprof Blog today, Surly blogger Sam Brunson has been named the Georgia Reithal Professor of Law at Loyola University of Chicago School of Law. Sam’s work focuses on how tax law affects various groups of taxpayers, with a particular focus on investors and families. He also write on tax administration. Sam also has a book, entitled God and the IRS: Accommodating Religious Practice in United States Tax Law,  forthcoming at Cambridge University Press.

Congratulations, Sam!

More on Section 199A and Worker Classification (**Threaded Tweet Alert!)

Shu-Yi Oei

Last Friday, Diane and I posted a new paper called “Is New Code Section 199A Really Going to Turn Us All into Independent Contractors?” on SSRN. This was something that started as a blog post but then grew too long and so became a short paper. We plan to develop the ideas in it more robustly in future work.

On Saturday, I made one of those goofy academic tweet threads summarizing the paper, and then it occurred to me that I really liked my goofy tweet thread! Therefore, I’ve taken the liberty of posting the tweets here for the marginal reader who is just interested enough in the topic to read the tweets but possibly not interested enough to read the actual paper.

Diane and I look forward to continuing conversation on this.

Potential Effects of Tax Reform on Work (Guest Posts @ On Labor Blog)

Shu-Yi Oei

Diane Ring and I were invited to write a guest post for the On Labor blog, to explain the potential effects of tax reform on work arrangements for a labor law audience. There was some interest in tax reform among labor law experts in light of the New York Times article that ran on December 9, titled “Tax Plans May Give Your Co-Worker a Better Deal Than You.”

We wrote a pair of posts, describing the potential effects of tax reform on work arrangements (including decisions to form a passthrough or to classify oneself as an independent contractor).

Something that struck us in our attempt to translate the policy issues for a non-tax legal audience was the sheer complexity of some of the new provisions in the new proposed provisions and the difficulty of discussing them with integrity–maintaining nuance, not oversimplifying or being hyperbolic, but still being understandable. As others have noted, the creation of the proposed tax legislation and the subsequent commentary on it have both happened very quickly. Our attempt to explain clearly the proposed legislative provisions to a non-tax legal audience and to discuss the policy issues at stake really highlighted for us the complexity of these proposed laws, the policy pitfalls, and the perils of operating at high speed.

In any case, here are the posts:

Work-Related Distortions in the Tax Reform Bills: Understanding the New Proposed Provisions (Part 1 of 2)

…The goal of this two-part blog post is to summarize for a labor law audience how the proposed tax legislation creates these outcomes and to highlight the important policy issues that observers and commentators might be concerned about. This Part 1 focuses on the statutory provisions, and Part 2 will discuss the key policy conversations that are taking place….

Work-Related Distortions in the Proposed Tax Bills: Understanding the Policy Conversations (Part 2 of 2)

This post follows up on our prior post, which focused on the complex provisions of the proposed Senate tax bill. This post discusses some of the key concerns that have been expressed about the new tax bill. (Again, we focus here on the Senate version of the proposed legislation. The specifics of the analysis may change once we get the Conference version, though the broader policy and design questions are likely to persist.)

 

Cary Martin Shelby (DePaul) Presents “Closing the Hedge Fund Loophole: The SEC as the Primary Regulator of Systemic Risk” at Boston College Law School

Professor Cary Martin Shelby (DePaul) is presenting “Closing the Hedge Fund Loophole: The SEC as the Primary Regulator of Systemic Risk” at BC Law School’s Regulation and Markets Workshop today.  The abstract:

The 2008 financial crisis sparked a flurry of regulatory activity and enforcement in an attempt to reign in activity by banks, but other institutions have also been identified as potentially threatening to the stability of the financial markets. In particular, several empirical studies have revealed that systemic risk can be created and transmitted by hedge funds. In response to the risk created by hedge funds, Congress granted the Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”) authority under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 to designate hedge funds as Systemically Important Financial Institutions (“SIFIs”). Such a designation would automatically result in stringent capital constraints and limitations on liquidity risk on these non-bank institutions. Yet in over six years since FSOC has been granted this authority, it has failed to identify even one hedge fund as a SIFI. In the face of massive resistance and deregulatory initiatives introduced under the Trump administration, it is highly unlikely to do so in the near future. The inability of FSOC to regulate systemically harmful funds is particularly troubling because several post-financial crisis studies have revealed that systemic risk can still be created and transmitted by hedge funds. Given FSOC’s inability to close this hedge fund loophole, this Article argues that Congress should explore appointing the SEC as the primary regulator of hedge funds because: (1) hedge funds can still pose a systemic threat to the economy; (2) the transparency framework inherent in the federal securities laws can supply a more effective means for mitigating systemic risk than the prudential framework currently mandated for SIFIs; and (3) appointing the SEC in this regard would reduce the fragmentation of the current regulatory structure which has been extended and complicated by the creation of FSOC. Although the federal securities laws are typically used to promote investor protection, this Article posits that enhancing transparency to hedge fund counterparties and investors can decrease systemic risk by empowering such market participants to better protect themselves against risk. Enhancing protection in this manner could in-turn weed out systemically harmful funds from the marketplace, without imposing the severe capital constraints that would be mandated under FSOC’s model.

If you’re an academic in the Boston area and would like to join us, please send me an email.

 

Some Initial Thoughts on the Paradise Papers Leak

Shu-Yi Oei

Another data leak broke on Sunday, November 5, while I was on a plane home from Bergen, Norway. Coincidentally, Diane Ring and I were in Bergen presenting our Leak-Driven Law paper at a tax conference organized by Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Norwegian Centre for Taxation, and Notre Dame University.

This new “Paradise Papers” leak involves a set of 13.4 million records from 1950 to 2016.

From the ICIJ’s website:

“The new files come from two offshore services firms as well as from 19 corporate registries maintained by governments in jurisdictions that serve as waystations in the global shadow economy. The leaks were obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a network of more than 380 journalists in 67 countries.”

The two offshore services firms in question are the offshore law firm Appleby and Asiaciti Trust, an offshore specialist headquartered in Singapore. Over 7 million of the records came from Appleby and affiliates.

Diane and I argued in Leak-Driven Law that (1) the high-salience and shocking nature of tax and other leaks and (2) the interventions of the press and other actors in processing, framing, and generating publicity about these leaks are important features that can affect how legal responses and reactions occur in the aftermath of a leak. We’ll be keeping track of how events unfold in the aftermath of this latest leak and how it fits or doesn’t fit with the observations in our paper:

Some initial notes and reactions:

This was at Least in Part a Cyber Hack.

Most of the news coverage I’m seeing is focused on the content on the leak, but it’s worth noting that at least with respect to Appleby, this new leak was in part a result of a cyberattack on Appleby that happened last year. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this was a data theft by an insider (e.g., employee) turned whistleblower. In its response to the leak, Appleby defended itself and noted the challenges of cyber-crime for individuals and businesses.

The Appleby Hack Occurred in 2016.

Continue reading “Some Initial Thoughts on the Paradise Papers Leak” →

Some Tax Reform Links and Tweets over at #BLPB

Ann Lipton at Business Law Profs Blog has assembled a nice collection of links to news commentary and tweets about the House tax bill.

Many of the links Ann has assembled look at the industry and deal-specific impacts of the tax bill…For example, potential effects on LBOs, sports stadium financing, future of stock options, higher education, and homebuilders.  A nice complement to the more ubiquitous analyses of revenue effects, scoring, and distributional estimates we’re seeing on the tax prof/economists side. This information about who is likely to feel what effects gives us some insights into how the politics/political economy of this tax reform is likely to unfold going forward. Well worth a click.

Rory Van Loo Presents “Making Innovation More Competitive: The Case of FinTech” at Boston College Law School

Shu Yi Oei

Boston College Law School’s Regulation and Markets workshop series continues today. Professor Rory Van Loo (BU Law) will present “Making Innovation More Competitive: The Case of FinTech.”

Abstract:

This Article examines recent financial technology (“fintech”) developments to diagnose the federal regulatory architecture surrounding innovation. Startups offer artificially intelligent financial assistants, touchless payments, and other potentially game-changing products for individuals. Yet unlike more lightly regulated industries such as retail goods, in consumer finance barriers to entry have insulated the largest businesses from competition. Regulatory insulation helps explain why too big to fail banks have become bigger, U.S. innovation has lagged that of foreign countries, and consumers pay higher prices.

Taking an institutional lens to this problem reveals an overlooked shortcoming in financial regulation: The organizational design of the administrative agencies responsible for enforcing competition. The current framework was built in the wake of financial instability and consumer protection crises, and its organizational design reflects those priorities. Competition enforcement for consumer finance is spread across five entities, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, each of which focuses on other industries or missions. In particular, agencies whose primary goal is to prevent banks from failing have insufficient incentive to ensure those same banks face competition. As a result, no regulator is optimally structured either to develop licenses suitable for startups or to address banks’ anticompetitive conduct.

The stakes of getting innovation competition right are increasing. Effective competition enforcement could enable new entrants to reduce the size of the largest banks—providing a partial market solution to taxpayer bailouts and to a major economic stability threat. It would also force U.S. banks to prepare for an increasingly borderless financial world in which virtual currencies bypass regulators. Inept competition enforcement could bring opposite results. As Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have shown, technology firms tend to capture higher market shares than those in other industries, often well over 60 percent. If a large bank were to attain similar shares, it could destabilize the financial system. Reallocating competition authority to a motivated financial agency would better position regulators to safeguard the future of finance.

If you’re an academic in the Boston area, please feel free to join us. You can send me email for more information.

Saule Omarova (Cornell) presents “Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority” At Boston College Law School

Shu Yi Oei

UPDATE 9/19/17: I blogged more about Omarova & Hockett’s National Investment Authority suggestion over on Taxprof Blog. You can read the post here.

Today, Boston College Law School welcomes Professor Saule Omarova (Cornell) as the first presenter in our inaugural Regulation and Markets Workshop Series. The paper (with Robert Hockett, also of Cornell) is entitled “Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority.” It’s available on SSRN.

Here’s the abstract:

The American Presidential election of 2016 was won under the rhetorical banner of returning America to its past productive glory. Any such undertaking presents an extraordinary challenge, demanding a correspondingly extraordinary institutional response. This Article proposes precisely such a response. It designs and advocates a new public instrumentality – a National Investment Authority (“NIA”) – charged with the critical task of devising and implementing a comprehensive long-term development strategy for the United States.

Patterned in part after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in part after modern sovereign wealth funds, and in part after private equity and venture capital firms, the NIA is an inherently hybrid, public-private entity that combines the unique strengths of public instrumentalities – their vast scale, lengthy investment horizons, and explicit backing by the public’s full faith and credit – with the micro-informational advantages of private market actors. By creatively adapting familiar tools of financial and legal engineering, the NIA overcomes obstacles that ordinarily impede or discourage private investment in critically necessary and even transformative public infrastructure goods. By channeling presently speculative private capital back into the real-economy, moreover, the NIA plays an important role in enhancing the resilience and stability of the U.S. and global financial systems.

The Article makes original contributions not only to contemporary policy debates over how to revive America’s productive prowess and bring its financial system back into the service of the real economy, but also to current theoretical understandings of “public goods” and how to provide them. It offers a more complete and coherent account of such goods as solutions to collective action problems that pervade decentralized markets, hence as goods that can be supplied only through exercises of collective agency. The NIA proposal advanced in the Article operationalizes this theoretical insight by elaborating a specific institutional form that such collective agency can take.

The paper is really interesting and I have many swirling thoughts. I’ll say more after the workshop.

 

Something Old, Something New: Two Workshop Series @ Boston College Law School this Fall

Shu Yi Oei

I’m happy to announce that we have a couple of workshop series happening at BC Law School this academic year. I’m really quite excited about these. Because what’s life without a workshop?

Tax Policy Workshops & Roundtable…

Boston College Law School has run a Tax Policy Workshop Series since 2007. This fall, we continue in that tradition, with speakers Daniel Hemel (Chicago), Ruth Mason (UVA), Zachary Liscow (Yale), and Lily Batchelder (NYU) presenting papers.

BC Law and Tulane Law are also hosting a joint BC-Tulane Tax Roundtable on March 23, 2018. More info about that coming soon.

…and a New Regulation and Markets Workshop Series!

In addition, here’s something a bit fun: Some BC Law colleagues and I have started a new workshop series, focusing on Regulation, Markets, and Business. This multidisciplinary workshop series focuses on the study of regulatory approaches to markets and business. It investigates how such economic regulation should be designed in order to balance the interests of various constituencies. It also explores how traditional approaches to regulation compare, contrast, and intersect with emerging methodologies.

We’ll feature presentations by invited legal scholars of their works-in-progress. The hope is to create opportunities for scholars working on issues of economic regulation to discuss and present their research in a forum of academics working in related intellectual spaces. The workshop is offered to Boston College JD and LLM students as a 1-credit seminar.

Here’s the 2017-18 slate:

FALL 2017

September 12, 2017 – Saule Omarova (Cornell): “Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority”

September 26, 2017 – Rory Van Loo (Boston University): “Consumer Law as Tax Alternative”

Tuesday, October 17, 2017 – William Birdthistle (Chicago-Kent):  “Free Funds: Retirement Saving as Public Infrastructure”

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 – Cary Martin Shelby (DePaul): “The Role of Competition in the Regulation of Investment Funds”

Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 12:15 pm – Lily Batchelder (NYU), co-sponsored with Tax Policy Workshop: “The Shaky Case for a Business Cash-Flow Tax”

Continue reading “Something Old, Something New: Two Workshop Series @ Boston College Law School this Fall” →

So about that Robot Tax…

Shu-Yi Oei

I came across a couple of news stories recently about how South Korea is introducing the world’s first robot tax. But based on the press reports, it sounds like the so-called robot tax is actually just a reduction of the tax deductions available to businesses that invest in productivity-boosting automation. The news sources themselves concede that this “robot tax” not exactly a tax on robots but rather a tax benefit reduction for automation investment.

Talk of a “robot tax” has landed at the forefront of tax news since Bill Gates mentioned it in a Quartz interview back in February of 2017. But of course, scholarship about robots (not to mention robots themselves) has been around for quite a bit longer. There’s even a “We-Robot” robotics law and policy conference that’s been going on since 2012, which I keep meaning to crash, but then there’s always something else going on.

A lot of what seems to be driving the tax conversation is the fear that robots are taking over jobs, though there’s some uncertainty about the extent to which robots are to blame.

Personally, I’ve been having a hard time squaring the newly ascendant tax conversation about the robot tax with the broader legal scholarship on robots. In some of the news and other commentary discussing Robotaxation, my reaction has been something to the effect of “I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.” Turns out, there is something of an existing conversation about what constitutes a robot in the first place—see, for example, Richards and Smart (2013) for a nice discussion of some of the definitional issues. See also this “What is a Robot?” piece in The Atlantic. In defining “robot,” it might matter how a robot moves in the physical world, what kind of quasi-independent agency it seems to exercise (autonomous vs. semi-autonomous), how humans interact with it, and even what sorts of emotions it triggers in us mere humans. We might understand some automated machines to be robots but others to just be automated equipment. And these distinctions make sense, from the viewpoint of areas like tort law, privacy law, the law of principals and agents, and the more general regulation of robots (and of artificial intelligence as a subcategory of robots).

But in some of the tax discussions about robots that I’ve seen on the interwebs, it’s quite clear that the authors don’t necessarily mean Robot when they say Robot. Continue reading “So about that Robot Tax…” →

Villanova Seeks to Hire Assistant/Associate/Full Professor of Law and Federal Tax Clinic Director

And here’s another hiring announcement:

Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law seeks an outstanding lawyer-educator to direct and teach its nationally regarded Federal Tax Clinic. The Clinic represents low-income taxpayers in controversies with the IRS. The Director oversees students working in teams on examinations, administrative appeals, collection matters, and cases before the United States Tax Court, Federal District Courts and Appeals, as well as on comments projects relating to guidance issued by the IRS or Treasury.

The Director will be either a full-time continuing non-tenure track (governed by ABA Standard 405 ( c ) ), tenure-track, or tenured member of the faculty, depending on the qualifications and aspirations of the successful candidate.

…

Minimum Qualifications:

• A Juris Doctor degree is required.
• Pennsylvania bar membership (or an ability to waive into the Pennsylvania bar) is required.
• Outstanding clinical teaching ability is required.
• Expertise in federal tax law is required.
• Outstanding scholarly potential is required for candidates seeking a tenure-track position. A demonstrated record of outstanding scholarship is required for candidates seeking a tenured position.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Five years of legal experience is strongly preferred, as is experience working on behalf of low-income taxpayers.
• Prior clinical teaching experience is advantageous, but not essential.

…