For examples, see Abigail Adcox, Few Big Law Firms Join More Than 800 in Amicus Brief for EO-Hit Firms, Law.com, April 3, 2026 (noting that “at least seven Am Law 200 firms signed the over 800-firm amicus in support of Perkins, Wilmer, Susman and Jenner in the D.C. Circuit appeals case”); Dorothy Atkins, ABA, Ex-Judges And Many More Back BigLaw In EO Appeal, Law360, April 3, 2026 (noting that “numerous bar associations, 239 former judges, 21 states, lawmakers and dozens of other amici curiae have thrown their weight behind BigLaw firms”); Legal Organizations Re-File Amicus Brief in Support of Targeted Law Firms, ACLU, April 3, 2026 (noting “a cross-partisan coalition of public interest groups filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to strike down the illegal executive orders targeting four specific law firms”); Kathryn Rubio, In-House Counsel Come Out In Support Of Biglaw Firms Fighting The Trump Administration, Above The Law, April 3, 2026 (noting that General Counsels United, a nationwide non-partisan collective of more than 800 general counsels, filed an amicus brief filed in support of the Biglaw firms targeted by the executive orders); Leading Democracy Scholars and Experts Warn Politicized Targeting of Law Firms Threatens Rule of Law, States United Democracy Center, April 3, 2026 (“warning that government retaliation against lawyers for the clients they represent is a symptom of a weakening democracy and a threat to the rule of law”); ABA Amicus Brief Supports Law Firms Targeted by Executive Orders, ABA, April 2, 2026 (opposing government efforts to punish lawyers for representing disfavored clients or causes); Abigail Adcox, US Democratic Lawmakers, European Bar Associations, File Amicus Briefs in Support of Law Firms in EO Appeal, Law.com, April 2, 2026 (noting that “the European amici included the German Bar Association, Warsaw Bar Association, Paris Bar, Law Society of England and Wales, Finnish Bar Association, Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe,” and “warning of history’s ‘stark lessons,’ citing Nazi Germany as a country where dismantling the independent bar was an early step in subordinating the legal system to the regime.”).

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More aspiring young lawyers are asking for—and getting—extra time to finish the bar exam, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

***

The development follows one already coursing through high schools and colleges: More students have diagnoses for disabilities like ADHD and receive extra time for classwork or the SAT. Now, as this generation enters the workforce, the phenomenon has reached professional licensing exams—and law firms are adapting, launching programs to support young associates with diagnoses.

Douglas Belkin, The Number of Law-School Grads Getting Extra Time for the Bar Exam Is Surging, Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2026.

The post Bar Exam Accommodations appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations. But as a cautionary tale, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect.

“Recently we had 10 cases from 10 different courts on a single day,” says Damien Charlotin, a researcher at the business school HEC Paris who keeps a worldwide tally of instances of courts sanctioning people for using erroneous information generated by AI.

The numbers started taking off last year, and Charlotin says the rate is still increasing. He counts a total of more than 1,200 to date, of which about 800 are from U.S. courts. Penalties are also on the rise, he says. A federal court may have set a record last month with an order for a lawyer in Oregon to pay $109,700 in sanctions and costs for filing AI-generated errors.

Martin Kaste, Penalties Stack Up as AI Spreads Through the Legal System, NPR.org, April 3, 2026.

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The post 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Peer Reputation Rankings (And Overall Rankings) appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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College sports are changing. Historically the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) exercised a strong arm to prohibit college athletes from receiving any form of compensation. Today, a power shift is occurring across the entire college sports arena. Gone are the days of college athlete earnings prohibitions; the NCAA is losing strength and influence, while the athletes themselves are taking to the courtroom to break down century-long restraints on trade. Since 2021, name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation has become the new norm, revenue-sharing between institutions and their athletes is coming, conferences are expanding to further capitalize on increased broadcast revenue, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals set the stage for college athletes to one day be deemed employees of their institutions under select labor laws.

Amidst this rapidly evolving billion-dollar industry, questions have emerged about the potential tax consequences resulting from such changes. Historically, the greater college sports arena largely enjoyed significant shielding from the bounds of taxation. However, as college sports enters a new era that is inherently different and distinct from the NCAA’s archaic ideology of pure amateurism, tax questions relating to the classification of college athletes as employees versus independent contractors, differing earnings models tied to revenue-sharing versus NIL opportunities, and the financial impact of college athletic conference expansion are surfacing. The purpose of this Article is to take a deep dive into the impending tax considerations that could impact the future of college sports.

The post Holden and Kisska-Schulze: The Taxable Future of College Sports appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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For at least half a century, the text of the Sixteenth Amendment—“Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived”—has been treated by courts, lawmakers, and scholars as giving Congress broad authority to define and tax income, perhaps without any limitation. Recently, however, some members of the Supreme Court started to revive a seedling planted in the 1920s but left for dead: that the “realization rule” should be elevated to the status of a constitutional limit to Congress’s power to determine what is income. With this, we seem to be entering a new era in constitutional tax jurisprudence, focused on the meaning of income and limits to Congress’s power to tax it.

This Article places realization in broader context, based on a novel investigation of the intellectual and functional roots of U.S. federal income taxation, with a particular focus on the temporality of income. We find commonality between time-conscious income tax theory developed by leading economists in the preratification era (some now largely forgotten), and functional concerns percolating around the same time that we uncover in financial accounting practices and tax administrative guidance. Temporal issues are central: measuring income across time periods is a dynamic and complex undertaking, and theorists and practitioners alike recognized realization as one of many possible, partial resolutions. The history we uncover here dispels the notion, advanced recently by some scholars and Supreme Court Justices, that when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified there was a common understanding of income that rested solely on realization. It suggests instead that there was not a single meaning of “incomes” as limited to realized gains, but rather that income had different meanings in different contexts.

The post Wallace and Wells: The Past and Future of Taxing “Incomes” appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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I read TaxProf Blog only intermittently; I learned about the new research via a LinkedIn post from my very own law school, the University of Pittsburgh, touting it this way: “A new study highlighted in The Washington Post reinforces what Pitt Law already knows: a JD remains one of the most valuable graduate degrees, offering strong return on investment and long-term career impact.”

I read that statement as mostly marketing hype, not to be taken at face value. That is easy for me to say and much less likely to be true, of course, for many recent college graduates who are prospective law students. Pitt, like many law schools, is in the middle of trying to persuade accepted students to put deposits down and commit preliminarily to enroll next Fall. I have nothing to do with those efforts; I read about them in social media just as anyone might.

My own school’s recruiting tactics to the side, the statement prompts questions that I pose to readers of TaxProf Blog:

There is more, below the jump.

For JD graduates, and even taking into account both the reputational status of individual law schools, and the cost of student attendance, what is the probability that the historical income patterns claimed in the new study are likely to hold for the next couple of decades, and what data support that judgment? What is the probability that they will not, and – likewise = what are the data? What is the support for the claim that a student enrolling in law school today is likely to participate in a pattern of comparatively productive financial returns from, say, 2029 to 2049?

Even if, contrary to the usual securities law disclaimer, past performance is indeed a predictor of future results and that the future pattern roughly mimics the pattern observed for the last 20 or 30 years, it has been well and widely documented that the period covered by the study (beginning in the early 1990s) featured enormous growth in lawyer incomes at the Big Law end of the market for lawyers and stagnation otherwise – the bimodal distribution that every dean, law professor, and admissions professional is now familiar with, or should be.

The post Does the JD Pay Off Financially? appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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What is the value of something that cannot legally be sold?  This question lies at the heart of a growing tension between federal tax policy and Indigenous rights.  Although federal law prohibits the sale of eagle feathers, the IRS recently sought to collect a $29.2 million estate tax assessment on artwork incorporating a bald eagle—even while acknowledging the beneficiary could not legally sell the artwork to satisfy the tax liability.  Though the parties ultimately settled, this case exposes a dangerous precedent demanding a comprehensive response.

This Article argues that Indigenous cultural property should be exempt from federal and state taxation and subject only to regulation imposed by Native communities themselves.  Imposing a “tribal only” regulatory scheme for cultural property is both consistent with the underlying purposes of tax law and the federal government’s broad commitment to support tribal self-government and protect tribal sovereignty.

We build our normative claim upon two centuries of precedent and practice.  Drawing upon the underlying purposes of tax law, tribal law, and federal Indian law, this Article constructs a robust defense for Indigenous cultural property’s exclusion from federal regulation.  Our argument rests on two foundational premises.  First, inherent tribal sovereignty reserves to tribal governments the authority to govern the cultural and internal values of their communities.  Second, federal tax law has no overriding interest in interfering with the inheritance of cultural property between tribal members or in collecting revenue on property that cannot legally be sold.  From these premises, a natural consequence emerges: non-tribal regulation of this patrimony should be broadly prohibited.

The implications are profound.  If adopted, our proposal would free tribal members from the burdens associated with transferring cultural property under non-tribal law and would ensure Native Nations that the property forming the basis of their identity is free from federal and state encumbrance.

The post Christensen & Appleby: Taxing Indigenous Cultural Property appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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He also has some choice words for LSAT score inflation at the high score bands.

For those with LinkedIn accounts, the full post is here.

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The Utah legislature attempted to avoid at least some of the more blatant infirmities embodied in the Maryland approach, although the Utah statute is still susceptible to challenge. Most importantly, Utah avoids drawing a “digital” distinction in the plain language of the statute and instead use the term “targeted advertising,” which some Utah legislators believe will insulate the tax from Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) challenges. The statute, however, may implicitly draw a digital distinction by using “impressions” as a requirement for the tax imposition. It is fairly obvious that almost all traditional advertising will fall outside the tax requirements, while almost all digital advertising will fall within its scope. But there are conceivable examples of traditional advertising that seemingly would (likely inadvertently) be subject to tax, such as direct mailings that contain a hyperlink or QR code printed on the material. How that impacts the ITFA analysis remains to be seen.

The Utah tax uses the number of “impressions” for its apportionment formula, which seems potentially more accurate (but more more administratively burdensome) than Maryland’s “device” apportionment approach. Utah has also skipped Maryland’s “pass-through prohibition” that the 4th Circuit held to violate the First Amendment.

Also of note, the Utah tax applies only to “business entities” that derive at least 50% of their gross revenues from “targeted advertising.” This requirement actually remedies a substantial shortcoming in the Maryland approach, where large multinational companies may be subject to the digital advertising tax because of their non-advertising gross revenues even though they engage in (comparatively) nominal advertising activities. But it also seemingly pulls many large tech companies out of the tax imposition. Many of the largest tech companies derive the majority of their gross revenues from cloud computing or device sales, for example, even if they also have billions of digital advertising gross revenues (like Maryland, Utah fails to adopt a “combined” or “consolidated” return approach, which complicates this analysis and may result in lower tax rates even if a subsidiary is ultimately subject to the tax). Whether this result was intentional or not also remains to be seen.

Additional Commentary:

• More States Proposing Social Media Taxes and Digital Ad Taxes
• Andrew Appleby (Tennessee), Subnational Digital Services Taxation, 81 Md. L. Rev. 1 (2021)
• Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) & Darien Shanske (UC-Davis), State Digital Services Taxes: A Good and Permissible Idea (Despite What You Might Have Heard), 98 Notre Dame L. Rev. 741 (2022)
• Walter Hellerstein (Georgia) & Andrew D. Appleby, The Internet Tax Freedom Act at 25, 107 Tax Notes State 7 (2023)

The post Big Tech Legal Fight Looming After Utah Enacts Targeted Ad Tax appeared first on TaxProf Blog.

     

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