On Tuesday, March 17, two professors from Harvard Law School (HLS), Laurence Tribe ’66 and Stephen Shay, testified before House and Senate committees. Last week, HLS Professor Mihir Desai and Visiting Clinical Professor T. Keith Fogg testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.
Laurence Tribe ’66 testified before the Energy and Power subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed 111(d) rule for existing power plants. The rule, referred to by the agency as its “Clean Power Plan,” is being advanced under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act and as part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. Read Professor Tribe’s testimony here.
Watch the hearing.
Tribe recently wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal about EPA’s Clean Power Plan, calling it “unconstitutional.” He is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard and has taught at the Law School since 1968.
Also on March 17, Stephen Shay, a professor of practice at HLS, testified on “Building a competitive U.S. international tax system,” before the Senate Committee on Finance.
Watch the hearing.
Shay joined the law school faculty after extensive experience developing and overseeing implementation of U.S. international tax policy. He served as deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury from 2009 to 2011, and as a tax attorney in private practice, representing a wide range of domestic and multinational businesses.
On March 10, Harvard Law School Professor Mihir Desai, a scholar of tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance, and Harvard Law School Visiting Clinical Professor T. Keith Fogg, professor of law and director of Villanova University School of Law Federal Tax Clinic, testified before the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing titled “Tax Complexity, compliance, and administration: The merits of simplification in tax reform.”
Desai, who also teaches at Harvard Business School, discussed tax complexity and the importance of simplification. In addition to having advised a number of firms and governmental organizations, Desai has worked at CS First Boston and McKinsey & Co and is also on the advisory board of the International Tax Policy Forum and the NCAER-Brookings India Policy Reform. Read Desai’s full remarks here.
Fogg, a national authority on tax procedure, will teach at Harvard Law School’s new Federal Tax Clinic, beginning in the Fall 2015 semester. The clinic, which will be part of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, will help defend the most vulnerable taxpayers while giving students the opportunity to learn tax practice and procedure. More information on the new Federal Tax Clinical is available on the Clinical Podcast webpage.