Structuring a Tax Workshop Series

Structuring a Tax Workshop Series

TaxProf Blog 2008

Neil Buchanan’s comments: This series of posts describing different law schools' tax policy workshops has been extremely valuable. A number of similarities across schools have emerged; yet it is also interesting to see how many seemingly small decisions must be made in structuring a workshop. Paul Caron has asked me to distill some "best practices" from what we've read here and from my own experiences presenting papers at workshops. This is an especially pertinent inquiry for me, because it is quite possible that we will be starting a tax policy workshop at GW as early as Fall 2009.

Like many readers of TaxProf, I have been an avid participant in the tax policy workshop series around the country. I have presented works-in-progress at Loyola-L.A., Michigan, NYU (twice), and Toronto; and I have attended workshops at Columbia and NYU regularly. When I was in my final semester of the JD program at Michigan in Spring 2002, the tax faculty there (Reuven Avi-Yonah, Jim Hines, and Kyle Logue) inaugurated Michigan's tax policy workshop. Being enrolled in that workshop was such a positive experience for me that it convinced me to focus my future scholarship entirely on tax policy. It is a very positive development that ever more law schools are creating these workshops, both for the benefit of tax scholars and for students who might be inspired to become tax scholars.

The most important point that I would make about tax policy workshops is that they are almost impossible to mess up! The basic formula is simple and reliable: scholar with work in progress + interested students + interested scholars = positive intellectual experience for everyone. The organizers of each workshop must make many decisions about how to structure the workshop, but having participated in and observed as many workshops as I have, I can state with great confidence that the most important aspect of a workshop is that it simply exist. Being involved in a tax policy workshop might not change everyone's life the way it -- quite literally -- changed mine, but I wouldn't bet against it.

There appear to be four basic variations on the structure of a workshop: (1) Invite a scholar each week of the semester to present a paper in a 2-hour session, (2) Spend the first few meetings of a semester introducing students to the tax policy literature, with the remaining weeks of the semester following Model #1, (3) Invite a scholar every other week of the semester to present a paper in a 2-hour session, with the intervening weeks devoted to having students read foundational readings in the area of tax policy in which the subsequent invited scholar's paper is situated, or (4) Meet with students for 2 hours each week to prepare for the scholar's visit, then meet in a workshop format for an additional 2 hours each week. Model #4, of course, turns the workshop into a 4-credit hour class, whereas the other three models are based on 2 credit-hours; so a big part of that decision would depend on the resources that a law school is willing to commit to a workshop as well as the number of students who might enroll in such a credit-heavy course. For what it is worth, I am drawn to Model #3, the every-other-week approach, for reasons that I'll explain below.

The underlying issue here is how to deal with the uneasy fit between the fundamental nature of law school as a place to train practicing lawyers and the increasing desire among law schools to become, for lack of a better term, more scholarly institutions. The work-in-progress model copied by most law school workshops, after all, is the graduate student seminars in Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and the humanities. There, students enrolled in the seminars have at least a full year of theory classes under their belts and are enrolled in specialized field courses in the subject matter of the seminar. The students in a Labor Economics workshop, for example, will have already taken full-year course sequences in (at least) micro- and macroeconomic theory and econometrics. They will also be enrolled in a two-semester advanced Labor Economics sequence. By contrast, JD students enrolled in a tax policy workshop can be reasonably expected to have taken the core 1L sequence and the basic Federal Income Taxation course. Even though each piece of legal scholarship is expected (appropriately, in my opinion) to include much more background than is common in other fields to situate a reader in the literature, the realities of law school mean that our students will come to a workshop with a great deal of enthusiasm and talent but with precious little specialized knowledge about the papers that they will be expected to read and critique. (Given that tax policy scholarship is so wonderfully broad, the students have even less hope of being well-versed in any significant range of the underlying debates.) Bringing students into a debate in this context thus involves a significant commitment on the part of the workshop's convenor(s) to ongoing remediation (or, perhaps more descriptively, "speed learning"). While each set of students is different, and each convenor will have her own preferences, it seems to me that it is best to err toward more teaching of the scholarly background rather than less. This will ultimately benefit the presenters as well as the students, of course.

One of the most difficult aspects of moderating the workshop itself, in my opinion, involves not allowing the session to be dominated by "insider talk" among the established scholars. There's an old joke, the premise of which is that the inmates in a prison know the same jokes to the point where each joke has been assigned a number; and telling a joke has devolved into simply yelling out its number. I often feel that tax policy workshops can go one step beyond that apocryphal prison yard: not only do the older inmates know all the jokes by number, but we sometimes know which joke someone is going to invoke and cut them off before the number is even uttered, saying, "I was thinking of that one, too." It is absolutely essential, I believe, for our workshops to involve full sentences being spoken in non-coded form. I am convinced that this does not risk dumbing the discussion down for the students, because on those occasions when a brave soul has asked for the coded language to be translated, it has almost invariably turned out that many of the professors in the room were on the wrong track. In fact, it is not uncommon for the two code-speakers to have misunderstood each other.

The variations among law schools in how to induce student participation (number and length of papers, requirements to ask questions during the session, etc.) all appear to me to be reasonable variations on a theme. None seems obviously superior, and each requires active efforts by the convenor(s) to make sure that the methods chosen result in the desired results: quality feedback to the visiting scholar, intellectual engagement for the students, and a vibrant discussion for everyone in the seminar room. I did, however, note one very specific innovation that I plan to steal from Northwestern: designating a student in each session to take notes on the session and forward those notes to the visiting scholar.

Finally, I should emphasize that one of the great values of holding tax policy workshops in law schools is that we embrace an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Bringing together scholars, convenors, and commentators with different scholarly backgrounds (within law as well as in related fields) is our greatest strength. We do ourselves and our students a great favor by being mindful not to allow our discussions to be dominated by the methodologies or assumptions of any single field of study. It is very heartening to see the interdisciplinary approach to tax policy scholarship flowering across the country. I hope that the trend of encouraging this through tax policy workshops at more and more law schools continues.

Structuring a Tax Workshop Series:

The Boston College Law School Tax Policy Workshop Series involves guest speakers presenting their papers to faculty from BC and other Boston area schools, BC alumni who are tax practitioners or government policymakers, and students who have a strong interest in tax.

Papers for each workshop are emailed to participants at least one week in advance. We limit the number of attendees to 20 and seat everyone around one large table in order to maintain an informal and relaxed atmosphere. After lunch is served, the presenter speaks for about one half hour followed by discussion and questions for another hour.

This was our first year running the workshop. We had had a great time, learned a lot, and enjoyed the company of wonderful guest speakers. Even our non-tax faculty have commented how much they have enjoyed the workshops!

We've just started a tax policy colloquium at Columbia, so our experience is limited to one year. Both students and faculty participate. To give students some basic understanding of what's about to come, we spend the first two classes lecturing on key tax policy concepts. We also assign a fair bit of "Taxing Ourselves" by Slemrod & Bakija (now in 4th edition). After that, it's a different presenter every week, with students writing short response papers and getting a final grade based on these papers and on their participation in the discussion. It took a considerable effort to convince students to ask questions, but we managed to succeed after two or three sessions. We kept separate queues for students and professors, and alternated between the two queues. This way students were certain to ask their questions, but could also listen how the discussion unfolded among academics. We thought about arranging papers thematically, but it was just too hard given the presenters' timing preferences. We also didn't give systematic feedback to the students, but responded to informal inquiries about the quality of their response papers and in-class questions. I would say that our format is really a faculty workshop with student participation. As long as students understand what they are signing up for (we made sure they did), they end up pretty satisfied with the experience.

Established in 2006, the University of Connecticut Tax Lecture Series is not a formal course. Instead, throughout the year, we have invited three to four tax faculty members from other schools, aiming for two lectures in the fall and two in the spring. Lectures are open to the whole law school community, and student participation has been fairly active, in part because the tax faculty strongly encourages our students to attend, and the paper is available at least a week in advance of the lecture. I also ask the students in my classes who will attend the lectures to write out questions in advance of the lecture, which I think has contributed to the high quality of the discussion. Additionally, when a lecture touches on other areas of law, I usually contact the relevant faculty member. So, for example, when Michael Tumpel of Johannes Kepler University in Linz talked about indirect taxation in the European Union, I contacted my colleague Willajeanne McLean, who teaches EU law. She asked her students to attend the lecture, which produced an informed audience. Since the lecture series is not a formal course, the students do not have the benefit of the kind of advanced discussion that takes place at NYU or Indiana.

Paul asked me to kick off a discussion about tax workshop series in which students participate; Indiana-Bloomington recently considered and adopted a proposal for a Tax Policy Colloquium, which we will launch next spring. Like colloquia at other schools, it will be structured as a class for students in which faculty will also participate. I proposed the colloquium partly because Indiana-Bloomington recently adopted a strategic plan that highlights the importance of scholarship and has among its goals (1) the inclusion of students in our intellectual community by bringing faculty scholarship into the classroom, and (2) the development of forums for intensive intellectual exchange within the faculty. My colleague Ajay Mehrotra plans to run the colloquium in alternate years. It will be open to our full faculty, and we will also invite our adjunct tax faculty, tax faculty from the Kelley School of Business, and faculty in other schools on campus who are interested in tax policy issues.

Indiana does not have a tax LL.M. program, so the colloquium will be structured with that in mind. Students will be required to write a short reaction paper in response to each paper that is presented in the colloquium, and, as is customary, those reaction papers will be shared with the presenters. Income Tax will be a prerequisite, and we are planning to experiment with an invitation/permission-of-the-instructor format, in order to recruit students with the interest and commitment necessary to make the colloquium a success. We also concluded that it would be best to have speakers only in alternate weeks so that we can first discuss the speaker’s paper as a class, to help prepare the students for the discussion with the speaker.

Perhaps the trickiest issue about a course like this is to balance pedagogical needs with the needs of presenters. With respect to the pedagogical component, I plan to encourage students to ask their questions first and faculty to hold their questions until students have had a chance to participate. In addition, I intend to try, as much as possible, to select papers that will be accessible to the students. For example, many individual federal income tax topics would be a natural fit, particularly for early in the semester. Ajay and I have also discussed assigning background reading to familiarize the students with the relevant literature. With respect to the presenters, for their experience to be a really good one, I think faculty participation is essential. Before proposing the colloquium, I ascertained that Ajay; Bill Popkin; and our Assistant Dean for Research, Archana Sridhar, who is a tax specialist, would all be interested in participating on a regular basis, and at least a few other faculty would be interested in attending periodically. To involve as many interested faculty as possible, we will try to select some papers that fit within their areas of interest, such as business tax papers that will interest Kelley School faculty, so long as the topics will be reasonably accessible to the students.

I have no doubt that this will be a learning process, but it is one that my colleagues and the students I have talked to are excited about. I look forward to hearing from others and learning from their experiences.

Loyola-L.A.: We all suggest Colloquium speakers, participate in the weekly Colloquium discussions, host the visiting speakers, and organize a faculty dinner for each speaker. Other Loyola faculty (tax and nontax, full-time and adjunct) and professors from other Southern California schools also attend the Colloquium. The Colloquium is open to Tax LLM students and JD students who have completed Income Tax I, but enrollment is limited. Interested students must submit an application (cover letter, resume, and transcript) to Katie and Ted. (Last fall, we selected a dozen students for the Colloquium.)

We invite a diverse group of tax scholars to present Colloquium papers. Also, we try to select an interesting cross-section of paper topics. (Some of the papers are quite complex, but we believe the students are capable and will learn from the challenge.) We also arrange for a formal Commentator for each presentation. Our Commentators typically come from Southern California (law schools or RAND), but we sometimes invite Commentators from outside Southern California.

At the start of the term, Katie and Ted give the students a 100-page Tax Policy primer (with article excerpts and material we drafted) to introduce terms and concepts. We also provide an overview of this introductory material in the first two Colloquium class meetings. In addition, we give the students a list of questions to consider as they read the Colloquium papers: (1) what problem is the author addressing? (2) what is the thesis of the paper? (3) which normative approaches or tools is the author using (implicitly or explicitly) to address the problem? (4) how does the author conceptualize the role of the IRC? (5) is the author’s proposal an ideal proposal or a real proposal? and (6) is the proposal politically viable?

After two weeks of course introduction, Colloquium speakers present papers in the weekly class meetings. (Our approach is to have a paper presentation each week, not every other week; we do not discuss the papers with our students before the presentations.) The students read all of the draft papers and submit three written questions to Katie and Ted before each presentation. The format for each Colloquium presentation is like a faculty workshop, but with a longer Q & A period; the Colloquium speaker presents the paper for about a half hour; the Commentator responds for 10-15 minutes; the discussion takes up the rest of the two-hour class session. The Colloquium students ask questions, comment on the papers, and participate fully in the discussions. Several of the fall 2007 Colloquium speakers remarked that the student comments were quite thoughtful and interesting.