Fourteen students participated in the virtual CERL internship program this past summer, which prepares law and graduate-level students for a national security career.

Summer internship projects comprised research, writing, and other projects stemming from the subject matter of future CERL conferences and current critical national security and governance issues that demand CERL’s immediate attention and action. Each intern served on teams that examined the ethical and rule of law issues in the areas of 2020 election security, nuclear threat escalation, U.S. violent extremism, today’s Department of Justice policies and practices, Arctic climate change, state and federal COVID-19 response, and lasting damage to the rule of law caused by the CIA’s illegal post-9/11 torture program. The students researched and wrote memoranda, reports, and blog articles for CERL’s blog, The Rule of Law Post.

Throughout the internship, leading authorities in national security made virtual presentations on topics related to the curriculum and engaged with the interns in free-flowing dialogue.

The Center for Tax Law and Policy remains at the forefront of serious research on the most important and challenging tax policy questions of the day. Two issues dominated the landscape during most of 2020: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which rewrote significant portions of the U.S. tax code, and bold proposals floated by major Presidential candidates concerning the taxation of wealth. Center scholars have written on both these topics. Founding Co-Director Chris Sanchirico, for instance, recently published two seminal articles in the field’s leading faculty-edited journal on key provisions of the TCJA, one aimed at incentivizing exports, and the other at curbing profit-shifting. Moreover, Sanchirico’s paper on the growth and equity effects of taxing capital and wealth — a critical analysis of oft-cited economic models — is forthcoming in another leading faculty-edited journal. Copies of these and other tax policy papers are available for download at the Center’s website.

The CTIC has been awarded a $350,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support research into the economics of digital services. The goal is to provide a better understanding of technology companies whose business models are predicated on access to user data. The resulting contributions should provide an evidence-based foundation that will help inform the proper scope of antitrust enforcement and regulatory intervention in two key areas. The first is digital platforms’ greater reliance on algorithms and data. The second examines the economic implications of vertical integration and other emerging business models employed by tech companies. The project will be an interdisciplinary effort that leverages the expertise in Penn’s Law, Engineering, Wharton, and Annenberg schools and its Department of Economics.

The Institute for Law and Economics (ILE) makes significant contributions to scholarship, policy, and practice on important issues facing corporations today. ILE, a joint research center of Penn Law, the Wharton School, and the Department of Economics, brings together lawyers, business leaders, investors, bankers, judges, policymakers, and academics for programs on cutting-edge issues in business, governance, and corporate and securities law. This fall, ILE programs included a public program on securities enforcement with SEC Chairman and Law School alumnus Jay Clayton ENG’88, L’93, panel discussions about virtual shareholder meetings, ESG mutual funds, and MAE disputes in mergers, a moderated conversation on venture capital and entrepreneurship with Scott Kupor, Managing Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and programs on allyship and corporate governance and racial equity. In December, ILE will host a roundtable with leading scholars and practitioners on IPOs and developments in the capital markets.

The ILP’s principal activities — workshops and conferences — were put on hold by the pandemic. When life returns to near-normal, the ILP intends to resume a full slate of programming, including hosting the next annual meeting of the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference (the ALPC). The ALPC is the discipline’s major annual event, featuring rigorous Q and A on five works-in-progress written by ALPC members, a leading philosopher whose work intersects analytical jurisprudence, and a junior scholar whose paper is selected from a blind call for papers. This academic year, the ILP welcomes Kimberly Kessler Ferzan L’95 as a new Co-Director. Ferzan, a graduate of the law school, whose love of criminal law theory was inspired by her courses at Penn Law, joins the Law School from the University of Virginia. Ferzan is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Law and Philosophy and the current Chair of the AALS Jurisprudence Section.

The Legal History Consortium re-launched its Legal History Workshop series this fall, bringing to our (virtual) campus top scholars and exciting new work in the field. Using a legal-historical lens, our speakers will explore such urgent topics as reproductive justice, protection for “whistleblowers,” enforcement of voting rights, police authority and violence, and the meaning of citizenship. The Consortium also continues to support a growing community of legal historians at or around Penn, through its informal writing workshop.

Throughout its history, the Documentaries & the Law Program has produced advocacy videos addressing important social justice problems arising in both criminal and civil contexts. Redemption stories and parole eligibility for lifers remains on the agenda in the coming year. There will also be a focus on stories involving economic issues. In the pipeline of student-produced work are videos on the tax abatement controversy in Philadelphia and Penn Law BLSA’s public service project comparing black reparations movements in the US and Brazil, which took students to Rio. The Program will also look at the impact of unsolicited “We Buy Homes” offers on West Philadelphia residents.

The Penn Program on Regulation is undertaking the first book-length study that systematically investigates the relationship between regulation and inequality in the United States. The editors of The Regulatory Review are also at work on a forthcoming series on race and regulation that will feature voices from Black scholars and non-Black scholars of color. As scholars and practitioners of regulation have much more to learn about how systems of rules can both reinforce and resist institutionalized racism, the Penn Program on Regulation is committed to listening to Black people and learning from their experiences to understand better how to improve the management of regulatory and law enforcement organizations to breakdown historic patterns of oppression.

The Quattrone Center is coordinating a review of public safety on the Penn campus. The goal of the review is to assess Penn’s success in creating a physically and emotionally safe environment on campus and in the surrounding community, while treating every person with dignity and respect, and in a way that prioritizes and promotes anti-racism, racial equality, and justice. Penn’s vision for the Initiative is to seek to provide an environment in which every member of the University community can experience a sense of equal belonging.