A substantial academic literature considers how agencies should interpret statutes. But few studies have considered how agencies actually do interpret statutes, and none has empirically compared the methodologies of agencies and courts in practice. This Article conducts such a comparison, using...

Anti-abuse doctrines in tax law have traditionally been formulated as multi-factor tests that weigh the facts of the taxpayer's case but ignore the tax statute at issue. This approach has proven problematic: some judges import statutory considerations regardless, creating inconsistency and...

Legal scholars have long annotated cases by hand to summarize and learn about developments in jurisprudence. Dramatic recent improvements in the performance of large language models (LLMs) now provide a potential alternative. This Article demonstrates how to use LLMs to analyze legal documents....

The earned income tax credit and the child tax credit lift millions of families out of poverty each year, and are found to increase employment and improve health and education outcomes among recipients. Supporters of these programs also ascribe them with reducing average tax burdens for...

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) project seeks to reorient legal thought by centering considerations of power, equality, and democracy. This reorientation would supplant approaches to legal thought that prioritize efficiency and neutrality, and that imagine a pre-political market...

This Article addresses the difficult problem of raising revenue in developing countries with significant outmigration. Migrant-source country governments face a unique policy dilemma because emigration reduces domestic human capital and tax revenue, but simultaneously improves outcomes for...

The public finance literature tells us that user fees will introduce market-like efficiency to public good provision. Meanwhile, criminal justice scholars note that criminal justice fees have run amok, causing crippling debt, undermining reentry efforts, and raising civil rights and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered an unprecedented shock to the United States and the world. It is unclear precisely how long the twin crises, epidemiological and economic, will last, and it is difficult to gauge the extent and direction of the changes in American life these crises will cause....

Viewed in the aggregate, the U.S. fiscal system is progressive, reduces inequality, and cuts poverty. The system improves on market outcomes by transferring income from rich to poor. Yet this bird’s eye view rings hollow on the ground, where millions of low-income taxpayers across the United...

The foreign tax credit is a cornerstone of the United States’ international tax regime and enjoys broad bipartisan support. Yet despite its enduring popularity, careful analysis reveals that the foreign tax credit is surprisingly arbitrary. Taxes are creditable in their entirety or not at all,...