Bob Jones University and the Rule of Law

The Rule of Law is what keeps tax exemption from being a political weapon. Bob Jones University shows the Rule of law in action: clear public policy, cross-branch consensus, balanced against constitutional rights, and enforced through transparent procedures and court review. The case is influential because it lays the foundations for analyzing The Public Policy Doctrine, a key element when courts review tax exempt revocation cases. The revocation of tax-exempt status is law-driven, not headline-driven; the Bob Jones University v. United States case set an important precedent by creating a narrow and cautious framework that the IRS must follow to revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status

Institutionalized Ostracism

Belonging is a fundamental need, like food or water. Hundreds of social psychology studies find that people who are ostracized (excluded, rejected, or ignored) experience severe pain and suffering. Ostracism threatens basic needs, triggers the same neurocognitive processing system as physical pain, and impairs functioning. Furthermore, ostracized people may cope in ways that beget “deviant” labeling and further ostracism. Belonging and ostracism are prevalent themes in social psychology research, but these constructs have received relatively little attention in law. This Article begins to explore the implications of this research for law. I make three contributions: First, I name and describe the phenomenon of “institutionalized ostracism”: When government institutions ostracize people in ways that threaten their sense of belonging. This institutionalized ostracism is mostly lawful under current anti-discrimination law. Second, I draw from social psychology literature to explain why institutionalized ostracism is so harmful—in some ways comparable to physical violence. Third, I identify and critique several ways in which current jurisprudence supports and facilitates institutionalized ostracism. In discussing these, I make some preliminary suggestions as to how our jurisprudence ought to attend to the harm of ostracism

Smoking Guns in the Rearview Mirror: Defending Washington\u27s Firearm Regulations with Historical Analogues

Mass shootings and gun violence are inescapable facts of American life. America is the only developed country where mass shootings occur almost daily. Despite the widespread sentiment of hopelessness surrounding this problem, state and local governments have been enacting various gun restriction laws. However, in a series of recent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court established an originalist standard for evaluating Second Amendment claims that poses significant challenges to the constitutionality of state and local gun laws. To survive constitutional muster, gun laws today must share common regulatory purpose and mechanism with historical analogues from the period between the founding and the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption. This Comment analyzes three gun restriction measures recently enacted by Washington State—the large capacity magazine restriction, the assault weapons restriction, and the public nuisance liability statute. This Comment argues that historical firearm regulations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide sufficient analogues to the Washington statutes and establish their constitutionality. In addition to providing doctrinal support to the Washington laws, the historical firearm regulations expose the fundamental inconsistency in the originalist Second Amendment jurisprudence: not all gun laws were created equal. Some were enacted with invidious racist and colonialist intent to disempower Indigenous and African American communities. This Comment concludes that the Court compromised the ideological integrity and logical foundation for gun regulations in this nation by incentivizing states to model their laws on historical laws and selectively relying on some parts of history while ignoring others

Tax in Law Schools

At the 2023 Association of American Law Schools Tax Section meeting, professors discussed their impressions of a decline in the number of JD students studying tax. Their impressions were consistent with declines that have been documented in similar fields. Between 2011 and 2021, U.S. accounting programs saw an 18% drop in students, while new CPA candidates declined 39% from 2010 to 2022. In the United Kingdom, the number of law schools that teach tax has diminished by 43% since 2002. This Article examines tax education in 40 U.S. law schools, focusing on course offerings and enrollment trends from 2012 to 2022. There is good news. All 40 U.S. schools studied offered an introductory Federal Tax course, with 35 offering at least one advanced course and 20 offering two or more. The number of law professors who teach tax has remained steady in recent years. Enrollment in advanced tax courses remained stable, with steady percentages of students enrolled in Partnership Tax, Corporation Tax, and Business Entities Tax. But there is bad news. Enrollment in advanced tax courses has declined due to shrinking student populations, with mean enrollments dropping in Corporation Tax and Business Entities Tax. Percentage-wise, Federal Tax enrollment fell significantly, from 24% of second and third-year JD students to 18%, with mean enrollments dropping from 89 to 56 students. This decline risks diminishing general familiarity with tax law and jeopardizing future advanced course offerings

How does a court determine the tax-exempt purposes of an organization?

To determine the tax-exempt purposes of an organization, courts and tax authorities primarily examine whether the organization is both organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes, as required under 26 U.S.C § 501. This involves a two-part test: the organizational test and the operational test. The organizational test assesses whether the organization\u27s foundational documents, such as its charter or articles of incorporation, limit its purposes to one or more exempt purposes and do not authorize substantial non-exempt activities

The Objective Observer: The Washington State Supreme Court\u27s Remedial Aspirations and Experience on the Ground

The Washington State Supreme Court has adopted an “objective observer rule” for addressing whether race impacted jury selection and extended this rule to evaluating all aspects of Washington courts, including jury trials. The objective observer rule allows courts to evaluate whether decisions in those courtrooms could be viewed as the result of racial bias, even where there is no evidence of specific racial animus and in the absence of racial slurs. The rule, which covers a form of disparate impact, has now existed for over half a decade. This Article outlines the Washington State Supreme Court’s development of the objective observer view in a trio of cases and evaluates every decision citing these cases between 2018 and 2024. While it is plain that the objective observer rule has impacted litigation, there is zero evidence that Washington courts have been adversely impacted or that litigants have been undermined in their zealous advocacy by the application of the objective observer test to things like attorney questioning of witnesses or closing arguments. Instead, this Article argues, in view of the gargantuan task that it is to remedy and redress racial bias and its impacts, the objective observer test is a modest step forward to achieving those goals