When individuals have questions about federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they increasingly seek help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and federal government agencies have not focused on the...

Legislative drafting mistakes can upset statutory schemes. The Affordable Care Act was nearly undone by such mistakes. The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is rife with them. Traditional legal scholarship has examined whether courts should help resolve Congress's mistakes. But courts have remained...

When consumers have questions about companies' services and products, whether medical insurance, airline tickets or home appliances, they almost always encounter automated agents and other forms of customer service technology. Increasingly, tax authorities have begun to offer online...

Tax statutes have long been derided as convoluted and unreadable. But there is little existing research about drafting practices that helps us contextualize such critiques. In this Article, we conduct the first in-depth empirical examination of how tax law drafting and formulation decisions are...

Executive nonenforcement of the law is a hot-button issue. An important question that has surfaced in the debate about such nonenforcement is whether categorical, or complete, prospective nonenforcement of the law is legitimate. A variety of scholars and commentators have suggested that it is...

In recent years, federal government agencies have increasingly attempted to use plain language in written communications with the public. The Plain Writing Act of 2010, for instance, requires agencies to incorporate “clear and simple” explanations of rules and regulations into their official...

When individuals have questions about Federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they are increasingly seeking help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Current forms of automated legal guidance platforms include the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration...

Against a backdrop of ongoing angst regarding release of tax guidance, an important idea has surfaced in the tax compliance literature. Prominent tax compliance scholars have argued that the strategic use of tax law uncertainty may cause taxpayers to report higher tax liability. While these...

Agency regulations are full of examples. Regulated parties and their advisors parse the examples to develop an understanding of the applicable law and to determine how to conduct their affairs. However, the theoretical literature contains no study of regulatory examples or of how they might be...

This Article sets forth a new dimension for designing and evaluating the tax law. Scholars have examined how many provisions throughout the tax code serve as “frictions” on tax planning, by imposing costs as a means to deter such planning. In this Article, I argue that, by imposing costs...