Tax Law

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Essay
Volume 93.2
When Should the Legal System Help Redistribute Income?
Jacob Goldin
Richard M. Lipton Professor of Tax Law, The University of Chicago Law School and Research Professor, American Bar Foundation.

For helpful comments, we are grateful to Kiran Chawla, Lee Fennell, Louis Kaplow, Adi Leibovitch, Richard McAdams, David Weisbach, workshop participants at the University of Chicago, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. We thank Hannah Lu and Safia Sayed for excellent research assistance.

Zachary Liscow
Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

For helpful comments, we are grateful to Kiran Chawla, Lee Fennell, Louis Kaplow, Adi Leibovitch, Richard McAdams, David Weisbach, workshop participants at the University of Chicago, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. We thank Hannah Lu and Safia Sayed for excellent research assistance.

Should legal rules be designed exclusively based on efficiency considerations, or should they also attempt to promote an equitable distribution of social resources? The answer traditionally associated with scholarship in law and economics is that they should focus only on efficiency. Even for a society that cares about achieving an equitable distribution of resources by income, the argument goes, it is generally better to adopt legal rules based exclusively on efficiency considerations while relying on the income tax and transfer system to promote distributional goals. However, even proponents of the claim that social welfare is best promoted through the adoption of efficient legal rules agree that there are certain conditions under which it does not apply. This Essay considers when legal rules should be efficient and when they should not. It focuses on conditions that can cause the socially optimal legal rule to diverge from the efficient legal rule—i.e., the legal rule that would be optimal absent distributional considerations. Its goal is to translate these arguments to settings where the question of interest relates to the design of a legal rule rather than, say, the design of a commodity tax. In particular, it seeks to clarify the types of arguments that can support the adoption of inefficient legal rules when income taxation is available as a policy tool.

Law and Economics Tax Law
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Essay
Tax Law and Flexible Formalizations
Sarah B. Lawsky
Howard Friedman '64 JD Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Thanks to Joshua Blank, Erin Delaney, Michelle Falkoff, and Denis Merigoux for helpful conversations and for comments on earlier drafts.

Changing technologies render tax law’s intricacy legible in new ways. Advances in large language models, natural language processing, and programming languages designed for the domain of tax law make formalizations, or “representation[s] of [ ] legislation in symbols[ ] using logical connectives,” of tax law that capture much of its substance and structure both possible and realistic. These new formalizations can be used for many different purposes—what one might call flexible formalizations. Flexible formalizations will make law subject to computational analysis, including creating automated explanations of the analysis and testing statutes for consistency and unintended outcomes. This Essay builds upon existing work in computational law and digitalizing legislation.

Machine Learning Tax Technology
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Article
87.3
The Architecture of a Basic Income
Miranda Perry Fleischer
Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law, mirandafleischer@ sandiego.edu.

The Douglas Clark and Ruth Ann McNeese Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Law School provided financial support for this project. For helpful comments, the authors thank Leslie Book, David Gamage, Eric Hemel, Kevin Kennedy, Benjamin Leff, Elisabeth Mayer, Susan Morse, Anna Stapleton, André Washington, Matt Zwolinski, Lawrence Zelenak, participants at the Brigham Young University Law School Tax Policy Colloquium, the Duke University School of Law Tax Policy Colloquium, the 2018 National Tax Association Annual Meeting, and editors of The University of Chicago Law Review.

Daniel Hemel
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School, dhemel@ uchicago.edu.

The notion of a universal basic income, or UBI, has captivated academics, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and ordinary citizens in recent years. Across the globe, countries ranging from Brazil to Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Kenya, Uganda, and Canada are conducting or have recently concluded pilot studies of a UBI.

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