Tax Law

This job would represent a multimillion-dollar pay cut for him, but the allure is undeniable.

This is where we really hash out the best stories of the year.

Pointers from employment lawyer Beth Robinson about working in government during an age of uncertainty.

Handicapping the field of legal superstars in line for a coveted post.

* “Voters deserve to know that personal priorities will never take precedence over the national interest.” Thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s unwillingness to release his tax returns, a New York lawmaker has introduced the Tax Returns Uniformly Made Public (TRUMP) Act, which would require presidential and vice presidential candidates to disclose their income tax returns going back five years to appear on the ballot in New York. [Big Law Business]

* In what’s being considered a blow to college athletes, the Seventh Circuit has ruled that they are not employees deserving of a minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Fortunately, there may be a bright spot of hope in a concurring opinion because it shows that “[t]he nature of the relationship between kids who play FBS football and their schools, leagues and the NCAA … is a business relationship.” [Huffington Post]

* Weil Gotshal snagged a prominent antitrust partner from Simpson Thacher, and it just so happens that he’s already great friends with the attorney with whom he’ll work alongside of as co-head of the firm’s antitrust practice. Congrats to Kevin J. Arquit (and to Steven A. Newborn, who’ll be reunited with a friend). [DealBook / New York Times]

* President-elect Trump may turn to another prosecutor turned Biglaw partner to lead the SEC following the departure of Chairwoman Mary Jo White. It looks like Debra Wong Yang, chair Gibson Dunn’s crisis management practice, may become Wall Street’s “top cop” under the Trump administration. [Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)]

* If you thought that the American Bar Association had learned its lesson after the closure of Indiana Tech Law, then you thought wrong, because the ABA has granted the UMass Law School full accreditation. Feast your eyes upon these glorious bar exam passage statistics from the last two July administrations of the test. [Lowell Sun]

* Wisconsin judge deals a setback to Jill Stein’s recount efforts. [Huffington Post]

* Anthony Weiner got hit with $64,956 in fines for campaign finance irregularities. [New York Post]

* The undisclosed sponsored content on Instagram is a real problem. [The Fashion Law]

* Good news for billionaires everywhere: Donald Trump is getting (up to) a $32 million tax subsidy. [Buzzfeed]

* The tragedy of law school deans. [Law and More]

* What will Donald Trump do? The world may never know. [BronxNet]

Prominent prosecutor Preet Bharara will stay on as U.S. Attorney when President Trump takes over.

Biglaw attorneys will play a key role in this jacked-up circle of life.

* Despite the fact that President-elect Trump has called for the cast of “Hamilton” to apologize to Vice President-elect Pence for delivering a message to him after the show, Pence handled it well, saying he “wasn’t offended,” and that he reminded his kids that the mixture of boos and cheers from the audience as he took his seat was “what freedom sounds like.” [PLAYBILL]

* President-elect Donald Trump may be able to get a pretty hefty tax write-off for settling the Trump University fraud case for $25 million, since according to tax lawyer Robert Wood, most business settlements are fully tax deductible. Perhaps the president-elect — or his legal team — really does know the tax code better than anyone else. [Forbes]

* Libertarian vice presidential candidate Bill Weld is settling back into private practice after the election. The former Massachusetts governor has returned to the Boston office of Mintz Levin as a partner in the firm’s government relations practice, says that being back is a “pure pleasure because you get to sit at a desk and think.” [Am Law Daily]

* In an effort to slash their legal bills, rival fantasy sports rivals DraftKings and FanDuel will be merging in the second half of 2017. As the two sites are market leaders and their union would likely create a monopoly, there will be some antitrust issues to review before the merger closes. We wonder which firms are working on the deal. [Reuters]

* Kaplan’s Concord Law School, an unaccredited, for-profit, online-only institution, is petitioning several states to allow its students to sit for the bar exam. California is the only state that allows Concord graduates to sit for its bar exam, and their passage rate for first-timers on the July 2015 administration of the exam was 25 percent. [ABA Journal]

This is a wonderful way into federal government employment.

This departing leader leaves big shoes to be filled -- perhaps by you?

Your tax bill is about to go up...

Another prominent government lawyer is joining the elite firm.

* Is the Supreme Court being hypocritical? [New York Times] * Free lawyers for the poor actually pay for themselves. [Guile is Good] * A look at how well the federal government fares in front of the Supreme Court. [Empirical SCOTUS] * More legal woes for Theranos. [Law and More] * A great resource for gifts for the lawyer in your life. [Courthouses of America] * The pull of social conservatives in the legal industry. [Bloomberg/BNA]

A federal prosecutor turned law firm partner offers insights to law students and young lawyers.

* “[G]reed is not a component of the law of fiduciary duty anywhere.” Donald Trump’s campaign may have claimed he has “a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” but legal experts found that assertion pretty laughable, seeing as there’s no such thing as a fiduciary duty to oneself. [DealBook / New York Times]

* An attorney who serves as an advisor to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Gun Violence says he accidentally shot and killed his wife when his gun went off after hitting a speed bump. He claims he had the gun out because they were in an area where Black Lives Matter protests had been held and was afraid they were about to be carjacked. [People]

* For the first time since the days of Abraham Lincoln, the Supreme Court opened its new term with a vacancy on the bench certain to be filled in the upcoming presidential election. Without the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s voice, the Court is left split along ideological lines, with four conservative justices and four liberal justices. [Reuters]

* According to Chief Justice John Roberts, “judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” but that doesn’t mean elected judges behave as judicially as they’re expected to when retention elections are near. In fact, “[a]ll judges, even the most punitive, increase their sentences as re-election nears.” [New York Times]

* The EEOC has filed a suit against Denver Law, alleging that female full-time professors are paid less than their male counterparts. Nine female professors work at the school full-time, and on average, they’re paid about $20K less than full-time male professors. Denver Law says it stands by its “system of evaluation and merit pay.” [Denver Post]

Which Biglaw firm might file suit on his behalf?

* The New York Times has obtained Donald Trump’s tax records from 1995, revealing a nearly $916 million loss that would have enabled him to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. Marc Kasowitz, name partner of Kasowitz Benson, represents Trump, and has threatened the paper with “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” for its publication of his client’s tax records. [New York Times]

* George Mason University will host a grand opening ceremony this week for the twice renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law Antonin Scalia Law School — a ceremony that five SCOTUS justices will reportedly attend — and some students and faculty are planning to protest the Koch brothers’ funding of scholarships by wearing red tape over their mouths to symbolize their voices being taken from them. [Big Law Business]

* Katherine Magbanua, the woman who is suspected of connecting Florida State University law professor Dan Markel’s alleged killers, Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera, with the family of Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, has been arrested on murder charges. According to police, she has “received numerous benefits from the Adelsons since Markel’s murder.” We’ll have more on this later today. [Tallahassee Democrat]

* According to Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, Orlando-based firm Butler & Hosch violated the WARN Act when it closed suddenly in May 2015 and conducted mass layoffs of more than 700 employees without giving them 60 days of advance notice. The firm, which is bankruptcy, could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. We may have more on this later today. [Orlando Sentinel]

* Following the embarrassment that was former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s light sentence in the sexual assault of an unconscious woman at his school, California Gov. Jerry Brown has broadened the state’s legal definition of rape to include penetration with a foreign object, mandate prison time if the victim was unconscious at the time of the assault, and forbid judges from granting probation or parole in such cases. [Reuters]

* “Frankly, USD has been a bit behind in that, in part, up until 2014, we had no problem with the bar exam. When you’re hitting in the high 80s or 90s, you don’t worry about much.” Unofficial results from the South Dakota bar exam are out, and after years of declines in passage rates for graduates of South Dakota Law, administrators are ready to take action now that only about 50 percent of graduates passed the test. [Argus Leader]

* “I was empty and then this woman walked into my life. I didn’t think it would happen again and it did. She is it.” LGBT rights pioneer Edie Windsor, the plaintiff whose Supreme Court case rendered DOMA unconstitutional in 2013 and laid the groundwork for the high court to declare that marriage equality was a fundamental right just two years later, remarried in New York last week. Our very best wishes! [New York Times]

The putative class action claims that a faulty formula causes PACER to routinely overcharge for document downloads.

Why is Munger making this move, and what are the firm's future plans?