Cambridge Tax Discussion Group: 'A Justice Tax?'

This term's ethical perspective on the world of tax will be continued, with a presentation by Jeff Selbin, Clinical Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley.

The United States has the world’s most punitive criminal legal system. In addition to the direct harms of incarceration, people with criminal records face lifelong barriers to employment, housing, education, and civic participation. Jurisdictions also increasingly impose monetary sanctions on people in the system to generate revenue.

In this session, we will discuss how these sanctions act as a regressive and racially discriminatory justice tax, and the implications for the rehabilitative and public safety goals of the criminal legal system.

One of Professor Selbin's policy reports about the issue in California is available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2937534

Jeff Selbin is a clinical professor of law and directs the Policy Advocacy Clinic, which he founded in 2015. From 2014 to 2017, Professor Selbin served as co-faculty director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice, and from 2006 to 2015, he served as faculty director of the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), Berkeley’s community-based clinic. He founded EBCLC’s HIV/AIDS Law Project in 1990 as a Skadden Fellow, and served as EBCLC’s Executive Director from 2002 through 2006. During the 2010-11 academic year, he was a visiting clinical professor at Yale Law School.

Professor Selbin is active in local and national clinical legal education, anti-poverty and criminal justice reform efforts. He chaired the Poverty Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and co-chaired the Lawyering in the Public Interest (Bellow Scholar) Committee of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education. He currently serves as an elected member of the Clinical Law Review Editorial Board, and served two terms as an elected member of the board of directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association. From 2004 to 2006, Professor Selbin served on the California State Bar Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services [10], dedicated to improving and increasing access to justice for low-income Californians.

Professor Selbin is co-author of the casebook "Poverty Law, Policy, and Practice" (2014). Other recent publications include: "Measuring Law School Clinics" in the Tulane Law Review (2018); "Unmarked? Criminal Record Clearing and Employment Outcomes" in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2017); "Eleanor Swift’s Indelible Public Interest Legacy at Berkeley Law" in the California Law Review (2017); 'Poverty Law: United States' in the International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences (2015); and "The Clinic Lab Office" in the Wisconsin Law Review (2013); "Service Delivery, Resource Allocation and Access to Justice: Greiner and Pattanayak and the Research Imperative" in the Yale Law Journal Online (2012); and "The Clinic Effect in the Clinical Law Review (2012).

The meeting will be held in the Jesus College Roost Cafe (as usual, in the downstairs section if there are a lot of attendees).

No specific knowledge of tax is required. The meetings are open to anyone.

May Hen and Guy Mulley, Cambridge Tax Discussion Group

https://cambridge.tax