Report finds misconduct spread within the ATO
The Stories Behind the Cases
In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Legal Education, St John’s Professor Ashley B. Armstrong offers a systematic approach to what has long been understood as a gap in traditional law school courses. Presenting what she calls “the contextual case method”, Professor Armstrong doesn’t merely highlight the importance of expanding case analysis to include the context that led to the dispute and the concrete impact on the parties and society of the court’s opinion. She charts a three part course helping faculty incorporate context into our classrooms. She proposes we (1) interrogate judicial opinions as constructed narratives; (2) supplement court opinions by assigning texts to problematize and expand students’ understanding; and (3) teach cases “to their end” by uncovering what happened after a decision was handed down. Sounds good to me.
.Armstrong, Ashley B., The Stories We (Don’t) Teach (February 01, 2026). St. John’s Legal Studies Research Paper No. 26-0007, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6570520 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6570520
The Typo Vibe Shift
The Atlantic Gift article – “To some, they’re no longer a sign of laziness but proof of human touch…More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness—typos chief among them—are getting a new gloss. Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them. Celebrities and CEOs are sending out error-ridden emails and Instagram Stories, and instead of getting a scolding, they are praised for sounding authentic. On some dating apps, where people are, somewhat absurdly, prompted to compose their profiles with AI, typos are apparently no longer an automatic repellant. Nicole Ellison, a University of Michigan professor whose 2006 studyshowed that dating profiles with spelling mistakes turn people off, now thinks people are warming to the Tinder typo.
“A typo maybe signals that you actually do care,” Ellison toldTime recently, “because you took the time to write it yourself.” A 2024 study even found that people view customer-service chatbots more warmly when they make and correct errors: A spelling mistake, it seems, is a kind of anthropomorphizing event. A peculiar reconfiguration of what people consider careless writing is taking place.
Although typos and other mistakes don’t suddenly mean that a piece of writing is good or praiseworthy, to some people, they are at least signs that it is worth reading. On a base level, many of us are willing to invest time in reading a long email if we sense that someone actually wrote it, line by line…”
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Estimating the Present Value of R&D Tax Benefits
Brandon Pecoraro (Joint Committee on Taxation) et al, “Estimating the Present Value of R&D Tax Benefits in the United States” (NBER May 2026):
Using a panel of confidential corporate tax returns, we provide the first direct estimates of the realized present value of corporate tax benefits from R&D credits and deductions in the United States. Realized tax benefits can deviate from statutory tax benefits because firms in loss status are typically unable to fully utilize credits and deductions to offset current-year taxes and instead must carry these attributes forward. We develop a novel procedure to track the intertemporal firm-level utilization of tax attributes generated by corporate R&D spending, and find that the present value of R&D tax benefits varies substantially with firms’ loss status, age, and size. Old and large firms typically use R&D tax benefits quickly, while young firms – especially those that are small – frequently operate in loss status and use tax attributes more slowly. From 2012–2016, the average firm generated $0.41 in statutory tax benefits per dollar of R&D investment, with a realized present value of $0.36. Young and small firms in a loss position realized only $0.23 per dollar, a 44% decrease relative to the statutory benchmark.
