Great new development at NYU Law School

 As is detailed here, NYU Law School has just established a new Tax Law Center. My colleagues Lily Batchelder and David Kamin spearheaded its creation, and Chye-Ching Huang is its Executive Director. 

As is more fully detailed here, the Tax Law Center will “seek[] to protect and strengthen the nation’s tax system through rigorous, high-impact legal work in the public interest. Its work includes offering technical input on tax legislation, submitting comments on tax regulations, and intervening in tax litigation, with the goals of protecting and improving the integrity of the tax system, saving and raising revenues, and advancing equity.

“The Center seeks to ensure that there is also a public interest voice—informed by deep tax technical expertise—that has input into the technical legal decisions that shape the tax system.”

There is nothing out there today that does anything like this. E.g., the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, which adds immense value to public understanding and debate, is engaged in a completely different enterprise.

The problems that the Tax Law Center can help to address have been well-known, as well as chronic, for more than 60 years. Stanley Surrey wrote about them in an ahead-of-its-time Harvard Law Review article from 1957 (!). As he noted about tax legislation in particular – but it is also true with respect to the tax regulatory process and tax litigation – there is rarely a public interest voice that could counterbalance private companies pushing their own interests.

At times, tax academics have made ad hoc efforts to fill the gap and address the imbalance. During the 2017 act’s highly truncated legislative process, Kamin directed the writing and publication of the “Tax Games I and II” articles, pointing out a lot of the problems, that were so widely downloaded at the time. A number of us have also participated in writing and signing amicus briefs in federal tax cases where there was a risk of really bad and poorly informed outcomes. But the Tax Law Center moves towards institutionalizing the creation of an independent, expert voice that can reduce the information imbalances and faulty, biased analyses that can so contribute to bad outcomes.

 NYU may also do well here by doing good. Creating the Tax Law Center strengthens and expands our tax law community and enterprise, while also bringing opportunities here that are not so available elsewhere.