Tax Law and Policy

Former Federal Reserve Bank member Daniel Tarullo says the Fed has “fallen behind the curve” in raising interest rates to help tame rising inflation and “needs to play some catch-up.”

Harvard Law Professor Christine Desan says the Biden administration is harnessing fiscal and monetary policy to bolster the economy, but should move faster to address climate change, crypto markets, public banking.

Would a tax on billionaires be constitutional? How would it work in practice? And would it work at all? Harvard Law School Professor Thomas J. Brennan says the answers are complicated.

Keith Fogg, clinical professor at Harvard Law School, and his students in the Federal Tax Clinic, answered questions about some common issues taxpayers are facing this pandemic year, helping low-income taxpayers, and President Biden’s proposed tax code changes.

Articles by Harvard Law Professor Guhan Subramanian, Visiting Professor Michal Barzuza and several HLS alumni were named the Top  Corporate and Securities Articles of 2020.

Last year, Harvard Law Professor Howell Jackson and students in his FinTech class worked with a national nonprofit to help the United Parcel Service create an emergency savings program for 90,000 of its nonunion workers.

A brilliant intellect and devoted, compassionate teacher, Harvard Law School Lecturer on Law David Cope taught at the school for more than 20 years.

Professor Jesse Fried ’92, a leading expert in executive compensation and venture capital, helps make sense of what happened with the GameStop surge on Wall Street and points to the events’ potential long-term implications for the practice of short-selling.

Harvard Law Today spoke Monday with tax experts Keith Fogg and Thomas Brennan about the New York Times' report on President Donald J. Trump’s taxes.

On the 200th anniversary of McCulloch v. Maryland, HLS Professor Mark Tushnet reflects on the 1819 case that paved the way for the modern administrative state and established the supremacy of federal over state law.

1L January Experiential Term courses focus on skills-building, collaboration and self-reflection

A single person cannot change a social norm; it requires a movement from people who disapprove of the norm, writes Sunstein. He explores how those movements, ranging from the fight for LGBTQ rights to white nationalism, take shape and effect change.

Harvard Law School Professor Robert H. Sitkoff has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, a handbook, slated for release today, that features important contributions from Sitkoff and from several other HLS scholars to the growing field of fiduciary law throughout its 48 chapters.

On April 5, Harvard Law School's Legal Services Center celebrated its 40th Anniversary of training more than 4,000 attorneys and law students and providing pro bono civil legal services to thousands of Greater Boston’s most vulnerable residents.

The first woman to serve as the director of the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Linda Chatman Thomsen ’79 led the Enron investigation and expanded enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. She is now a partner in Davis Polk’s litigation department.

Harvard Law Professor Hal S. Scott was in his element, thundering up and down the aisles of a classroom in Wasserstein Hall and challenging each of his 70 Capital Markets Regulation students to match his enthusiasm and curiosity. After 43 years on the HLS faculty, Scott taught his final class at the school before retiring last spring. What is the best process, he asked, for ensuring that regulations for the financial system achieve their intended effect?

Yuko Miyazaki LL.M. ’84 sets a historic precedent as a female justice on Japan’s Supreme Court

Statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that, as of the end of 2018, Harvard Law School faculty members have continued to feature prominently on SSRN’s list of the 100 most-cited law professors.

Harvard’s recent two-day conference, “Money as a Democratic Medium,” challenged its participants to re-examine the history of money in America, and to redefine its future.

The Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute awarded its 2018 investor research prize to a study by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, that examines the resources and decisions of index fund managers.

A student delegation from the Harvard Association for Law and Business (HALB) visited business, legal, and government leaders in London and Brussels, Belgium, in late August, as part of HALB’s second-annual International Trek.

The Harvard Law School Library hosted a series of book talks by HLS authors, with topics including Authoritarianism in America, the Supreme Court of India, and Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. As part of this ongoing series, faculty authors from various disciplines shared their research and discussed their recently published books with a panel of colleagues and the Harvard Law community.

During his nearly 10 years on the Harvard Law faculty, Holger Spamann S.J.D. ’09 has always enjoyed teaching corporate finance, but he’s also found it challenging. Some students have worked as traders at hedge funds or in private equity and others have been newly minted English majors who haven’t thought much about business concepts. The solution he has been exploring this year is a corporate finance course divided into four different modules, any of which students can opt out of depending on their knowledge level.

Caitlin Long ’94 left Wyoming for Harvard Law School and the career on Wall Street that followed, but she’s never forgotten her home state or its only university.

The Harvard Association for Law and Business (HALB) hosted Bill Ackman, founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management, to discuss his views on the current state of activist investing, his experience managing a multibillion dollar fund, and the impact of shareholder activism on corporate governance.

Kicking of the Harvard Association for Law & Business' seventh annual symposium on Feb. 26, a panel of top-level executives in the financial world explored the possibilities of crossing over from a legal to a financial career.

Prof. David Wilkins, vice dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession and faculty director of Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession (CLP), recently sat down to discuss CLP's project on Globalization Lawyers and Emerging Economies (GLEE) and what lies ahead for the innovative program.

In December, Amy Feinberg ’18 became the second Federal Tax Clinic student to argue an appeal in a federal circuit court since the Clinic opened at Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in 2015.

Last month, the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School held its 20th annual U.S.-Japan symposium, along with a special anniversary gala to celebrate the milestone and look ahead to the future of the program as PIFS director Hal S. Scott transitions to a new role as emeritus professor at Harvard.

Robert H. Sitkoff, the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, chaired the drafting committee that finalized the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), which the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) approved July 19, 2017.

On January 3, 2018, the world will change, according to Professor Howell Jackson. That is the day that the second iteration of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive — a set of European Union financial regulations that emerged in the wake of 2008, known colloquially as MiFID II — will go into effect.

Tenacious legal research and petition-filing by Harvard Law School students working in the Tax Clinic of the Legal Services Center at HLS helps low-income clients fight for their legal rights – rights that are meaningless if clients lack access to a lawyer to stand up for them.

Niamh Moloney LL.M. ’93, professor of Financial Markets Law and incoming Head of the Law Department (2018-2019) at the London School of Economics, spoke at Harvard Law School on Sept. 27 on the complex question of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union and its implications for the U.K.’s financial services industry.

Harvard Law School Professor Einer Elhauge ’86 will receive the prestigious Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship from the American Anititrust Institute at their annual conference on June 21.

Keith Fogg, an expert in tax law and procedure and director of Harvard Law School’s Federal Tax Clinic at the Legal Services Center, has been named Clinical Professor of Law at HLS.

The concept of speech is typically defined as the communication of thoughts in spoken words. Yet the authors note that First Amendment protection of speech is far broader, covering nonrepresentational art, instrumental music, and even nonsense—individual topics that Tushnet, Chen, and Blocher focus on (in that order) in the book.

In a lecture marking his appointment as the Stanley S. Surrey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Tom Brennan ’01 delivered a talk titled “Focus and Perspective in Taxation," which addressed the issue of defining economic ownership and also the issue of uncertainty in future tax rates.