2019 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

This past Thursday through Saturday (May 30-June 1), I was attending, as I do most years, the Law and Society Association’s Annual Meeting, which was held this year in Washington D.C. (Next year, Denver.)

I went to a couple of LSA annual meetings about twenty years ago, then stopped going because there was almost no one there who had any interest whatsoever in tax or budget topics. But then Neil Buchanan created an institution in which lots of tax people would attend the LSA and have their own panels – kind of a separate conference within the LSA conference. And when Neil eventually got tired of doing all the grunt work year after year after year, Jennifer Bird-Pollan and Mirit Eyal Cohen volunteered to help out so that he / they / we could keep the thing going.

This was a typical year, with a tax panel in every single conference time slot (including a lunchtime slot), and I think about 60 tax people attending – mainly from the U.S. and Canada, but also from farther afield, such as the EU and New Zealand. It’s a nice group, with diverse interests and a supportive / collegial vibe that makes attending the LSA a pleasure. The seniority range is from very junior to very senior plus everything in between.

In this type of setting, one won’t have read the papers that are being presented, absent significant extra effort. But you do get to hear the twenty minute talks, and if one paper doesn’t happen to interest you enormously (as is inevitable when there are so many), there’s always the next one. Its being a “law and society” conference tends to reduce – but not eliminate – hardcore public economics content in favor of diverse methodologies and interests, but you get a range of standard tax policy papers, tax history, sociology, focus on retirement or inequality issues, etc.

This year, because it’s a hot topic, there were several papers touching on the digital service taxes that are currently emerging in the EU and elsewhere (does the UK still count as “EU” for this purpose?). This was good news for me, as DSTs are a current interest that I’m writing about. Indeed, during spare moments I was able to think about the structure of my paper-to-be. Current working title, which is perhaps too long and wordy: “Digital Service Taxes and the Broader Shift From Determining the Source of Income to Devising (Sub?-) Optimal Tariffs.”

My own talk concerned a paper on P.G. Wodehouse that I may or may not write, either as a freestanding piece or as an early chapter in Volume 2 of a possible book sequence on literature and high-end inequality. I have already written Volume 1, which is currently on offer to publishers and has the working title Dangerous Grandiosity: Literary Perspectives on High-End Inequality Through the First Gilded Age. 

My talk discussed the completed book, along with what I might (or might not) write about P.G. Wodehouse. Its title is “Reading Wodehouse Seriously (?!),” with the ?! serving to acknowledge the point, why on Earth would one want to be such a spoilsport as to do that? The slides are available here.

At least one audience member had thought in advance – quite reasonably and logically, I’d say – that I meant to discuss P.G. Wodehouse v. Commissioner, a well-known U.S. international tax case. But that was not the case, and the main Wodehouse text that I discuss discussing is his immortal Right Ho, Jeeves.

This is the novel that begins something like this:

Jeeves, I said, may I speak frankly?

Certainly, sir.

What I have to say may wound you.

Not at all, sir.

Well then, Jeeves –

But then our narrator, who is of course the immortal Bertie Wooster (rentier supreme in an era when rentiers have long since ceased to view themselves or be viewed like a Darcy), realizes that he has failed to give the reader the necessary background information preceding this exchange. So we don’t get the next words in this dialogue for maybe 30 pages or so.

The joke, immediately clear to any reader who knows about the Jeeves-Wooster relationship, is that Jeeves the servant cannot possibly be “wounded” emotionally by anything that the "mentally negligible" (his own phrase) Bertie might have to say about him.

There are actually rich possibilities in a close reading of Right Ho, Jeeves and associated works (such as its successor, Code of the Woosters), even though one doesn't wish to be stodgy or to kill all the fun. My slides briefly allude to some of the possibilities.

Conference aside, it was nice to be back in Washington (my home base for six years in the 1980s), and I also briefly got to meet these individuals.