Paul Caron, Dean at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law, has announced that his professional blog, TaxLaw Blog, is ending after almost 56,000 posts over 21 years. (Hat tip to Prof. Josh Blackman on the Volokh Conspiracy on Reason Magazine.) The site will go dark on September 30.

Tax law is inscrutable to many, including federal judges. The problem is even worse when the tax issues involve tax-exempt organizations, that is, where the First and Sixteenth Amendments clash. At a meeting of the American Bar Association’s Tax Section’s Exempt Organization Committee many years ago, a Tax Court judge pointed out a major problem: “Most of us see an exempt organization case perhaps once a decade. We’re just not used to those kinds of issues.”

Paul Caron has the ability to bridge that gap, among many others. His writing is clear, concise and personal. His blog was, literally, a lighthouse in the darkness of tax law for tax experts, judges, government officials, the tax and non-tax media, and laypersons.

Even better, Dean Caron had the stamina to stay with an extended series of posts about controversial topics over years. Perhaps the best example of value to readers of this blog was during the “Tea Party/Lois Lerner/Be On The Lookout” era featuring the Internal Revenue Service Tax Exempt Organizations Division’s unconstitutional discrimination against certain tax-exempt organizations. See, e.g., True the Vote, Inc. v. I.R.S., 831 F.3d 551, 556 (D.C. Cir. 2016) (citing a 2013 Inspector General audit report explaining that the IRS systematically targeted conservative organizations for discriminatory treatment and finding that the IRS, though improved, had not ceased that practice), a case whose successful lead lawyers included John Eastman and Cleta Mitchell, both of whom later faced (and are still facing) shameful targeting from those who denied their legal prowess and disliked their viewpoints.

The TE/GE actions in those days haunt us still. The end result was to shatter the historical cooperation between experienced tax practitioners and tax and Treasury officials, who cooperated without partisanship to keep a complicated, controversial and changing system from spinning out of control.

Paul Caron chronicled that struggle, from White House reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), which drove Lerner to ignore TE/GE’s traditional political neutrality, to more recent times. And we relied on him and his blog for his diligence. “Prof. Paul Caron has long cataloged the massive output involved in charges and countercharges in l’affaire Lerner.” Without that historical compilation, neither available nor accessible elsewhere, will we needlessly repeat past errors?

Yet the rule of law abides in the IRS, even now. “[I]n administering the tax code, the IRS may not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint . . . to process exemption applications pursuant to different standards and at different rates depending upon the viewpoint of the applicants [is] … a blatant violation of the First Amendment.” Z St. v. Koskinen, 791 F.3d 24, 30, 32 (D.C. Cir. 2015). In other words, the tax code may not “discriminate invidiously . . .in such a way as to aim at the suppression of dangerous ideas.” Regan v. Taxation with Representation of Wash., 461 U.S. 540, 548 (1983).

TaxProf Blog is shutting down because Typepad, its hosting site, is ending all of its blogs. As Paul Caron wrote in his last post: “At this stage in my life, I am not interested in starting anew on a different platform. … I am proud of the role TaxProf Blog has played in the tax and legal education communities over the past 21 years. … When I eventually retire, I will cherish the memories of the time I spent writing this blog for over two decades in the hope that it enriched your lives just a little bit.” https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2025/09/my-last-taxprof-blog-post.html

This is a sad moment for Paul Caron and a loss for all of us who care about both tax and First Amendment law. It may sound odd that a legal blog dedicated to tax law and lawyers has enriched lives, but it did. Then, now, and hopefully in the future. Farewell, TaxLaw Blog. Thank you, Paul Caron.

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