More than a year after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, legal, social and cultural questions raised by the case are still being discussed across the country. The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations will analyze a number of these questions during the 10^th annual CSRRR Spring Lecture, which will bring together experts from nine different departments at UF along with keynote speaker, New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow.

“At Close Range: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” will take place Wednesday at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180. The panel presentations will be from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and Blow’s keynote lecture will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and law school parking restrictions will be lifted in the green lots. The event will also be webcast at http://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/0bb612b41ae84a359f258f135abb99321d.

The panels will look at a wide variety of issues raised by the case, from a multitude of academic perspectives. Some of the featured panels include “Jim Crow Riding High: The 21^st Century Assault on African-American Voting Rights in Florida,” “Half-Baked: Weed, Race and the Demonization of Trayvon Martin,” and “Racial Profiling, Security and Human Rights.”

“The Trayvon Martin case is a social touchstone precisely because it serves up topics we’re uncomfortable talking about in public, including race, crime, policing, interracial crime, use of deadly force, black crime victims, Southern race relations, media representations of race, and gun control,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the CSRRR and Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law. “The case offers an important opportunity for us to learn about, discuss and debate these myriad and overlapping issues. Our Spring Lecture event will contribute to the national discussion of the case and emphasize policy recommendations.”

The departments of political science; health services; philosophy; sociology, criminology and law; journalism and communications; history; English; anthropology, and African-American studies will all be represented. The academic papers, which comprise the basis for the panel discussions, will be compiled for the first installment in a new series in collaboration with UF Law’s Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center. The panel agendas and abstracts for the papers can be seen in the Collections of the UF Law Scholarship Repository at, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/csrrr_events/10thspringlecture/panels/. For more information regarding the spring lecture, please visit the CSRRR homepage, http://www.law.ufl.edu/academics/centers/csrrr.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law’s CSRRR is committed to fostering communities of dialogue on race. The center creates and supports programs designed to enhance race-related curriculum development for faculty, staff and students in collegiate and professional schools. Of the five U.S. law schools with race centers, the CSRRR is uniquely focused on curriculum development.

About Charles Blow

After graduating cum laude from Grambling State University, keynote speaker Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. The Louisiana native went on to become the paper’s design director for news before leaving in 2006 to become the art director of National Geographic Magazine.

Blow often appears on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Starting Point and AC360. He has also appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and Hardball with Chris Matthews, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, the BBC and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs.

More than a year after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, legal, social and cultural questions raised by the case are still being discussed across the country. The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations will analyze a number of these questions during the 10^th annual CSRRR Spring Lecture, which will bring together experts from nine different departments at UF along with keynote speaker, New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow.

“At Close Range: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” will take place March 20, at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180. The panel presentations will be from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and Blow’s keynote lecture will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and law school parking restrictions will be lifted in the green lots.

The panels will look at a wide variety of issues raised by the case, from a multitude of academic perspectives. Some of the featured panels include “Jim Crow Riding High: The 21^st Century Assault on African-American Voting Rights in Florida,” “Half-Baked: Weed, Race and the Demonization of Trayvon Martin,” and “Racial Profiling, Security and Human Rights.”

“The Trayvon Martin case is a social touchstone precisely because it serves up topics we’re uncomfortable talking about in public, including race, crime, policing, interracial crime, use of deadly force, black crime victims, Southern race relations, media representations of race, and gun control,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the CSRRR and Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law. “The case offers an important opportunity for us to learn about, discuss and debate these myriad and overlapping issues. Our Spring Lecture event will contribute to the national discussion of the case and emphasize policy recommendations.”

The departments of political science; health services; philosophy; sociology, criminology and law; journalism and communications; history; English; anthropology, and African-American studies will all be represented. The academic papers, which comprise the basis for the panel discussions, will be compiled for the first installment in a new series in collaboration with UF Law’s Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center. The panel agendas and abstracts for the papers can be seen in the Collections of the UF Law Scholarship Repository at, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/csrrr_events/10thspringlecture/panels/. For more information regarding the spring lecture, please visit the CSRRR homepage, http://www.law.ufl.edu/academics/centers/csrrr.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law’s CSRRR is committed to fostering communities of dialogue on race. The center creates and supports programs designed to enhance race-related curriculum development for faculty, staff and students in collegiate and professional schools. Of the five U.S. law schools with race centers, the CSRRR is uniquely focused on curriculum development.

About Charles Blow

After graduating cum laude from Grambling State University, keynote speaker Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. The Louisiana native went on to become the paper’s design director for news before leaving in 2006 to become the art director of National Geographic Magazine.

Blow often appears on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Starting Point and AC360. He has also appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and Hardball with Chris Matthews, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, the BBC and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs.

Hap Shashy (JD 73), chief counsel to the IRS from 1990 to 1993 and now Partner in Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, explains the debt and deficit to UF Law students and faculty during the Ellen Bellet Gelberg Tax Policy Lecture on Friday, Sept. 30. Watching are Eric Solomon, assistant secretary for tax policy in the U.S. Treasury from 2006 to 2009, now director of Ernst & Young LLP's National Tax Department; and Lindy Paull (JD 79, LLM 80), former Senate Republican Finance Committee staff director and chief counsel, now principal at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. (Photo by Kimberly Burroughs)

The federal debt and deficit are rising to never-before-seen heights, and this reality is driving Congress and the president to get serious about deficit reduction. Despite a newfound determination from the political class to deal with the problem, the way forward for federal taxes and budgets remain uncertain, according to three experts who spoke at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Students, faculty and staff filled the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180, for the second Ellen Bellet Gelberg Tax Policy Lecture on Friday, Sept. 30, when three experienced Washington hands laid out their insights on tax and budget policy.

Click here for a webcast of the lecture.

Annual spending exceeding government revenue – what’s known as the deficit – has been customary since World War II, explained Hap Shashy (JD 73), chief counsel to the IRS from 1990 to 1993 and now Partner in Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.

Shashy pointed to two line graphs showing the deficit bouncing along with a small gap between spending and revenue through most of the post-war period. Until, that is, came an economic shock to the system.

“The deficit transcends time, it transcends political parties … and it also transcends different versions of the tax system,” said Shashy, who sits on the Levin College of Law Board of Trustees. “And then the meltdown hits and the Great Recession hits and that’s when the deficit – the gap – became very big, unsustainable, and got everybody’s attention and people started thinking seriously about what needs to be done with it.”

Three years since the economic meltdown of 2008 and the national debt has grown rapidly, equal to about 100 percent of the economy’s yearly output. Even after the economy recovers from its current doldrums, rapidly expanding health care costs and interest on the national debt will keep deficits high, Shashy noted.

This rapid increase in the debt and deficit has spurred on initiatives such as the House-Senate supercommitee, charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction through 2021, said Lindy Paull (JD 79, LLM 80). Paull was Republican staff director and chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee from 1986 to 1998 and is now principal at PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP where she guides clients through the governmental tax and regulatory thicket.

“The debt is something a lot of people have started to seize on – the growth of the debt, the size of the debt relative to the size of the economy,” Paull said. “And that’s why I think you see a lot of alarm bells going off with policymakers, while you really didn’t see that in the early days of deficits.”

Shashy said solving the problem is likely to include a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and growth for the economy.

How much of any of these elements will contribute to solving the debt-and-deficit problem remains uncertain because of political deadlock over whether to raise taxes; upcoming elections that could alter the political landscape; the knotty issue of tax reform; and the confusing nature of budget deficit and debt projections.

One way to slice through this problem could be a value added tax.

“There has been testimony before Congress that all roads lead to a VAT,” Paull said. “Economists believe they don’t impact economic growth the way income taxes do.”

A VAT, which 140 other countries employ, is similar to a national sales tax but the tax is applied at each level of production. It could raise $3 trillion to $7 trillion in 10 years and that money could be used to lower income tax rates, to lower the deficit or be directed toward health care costs, which many other countries use VAT revenues for, Paull said.

Following other countries in using a VAT for health care costs could make sense in the American context because Medicare and Medicaid represent the largest drivers of the debt, Paull noted.

And then there is the option of comprehensive tax reform. Comprehensive tax reform is often used as shorthand for eliminating deductions for individuals and corporations to simplify the system. Deductions tend to encourage behavior that isn’t optimally productive so the more deductions, the less efficient the economy.

Though it is only 10 percent of the nation’s tax revenue, corporate taxation policy takes up a seemingly much larger percentage of the tax policy debate, said Eric Solomon, assistant secretary for tax policy in the U.S. Treasury from 2006 to 2009, and now director of Ernst & Young LLP’s National Tax Department.

He said the corporate tax system is widely blamed for encouraging American companies to keep overseas profits overseas because companies are taxed if those profits are brought home. Converting to a territorial tax system, which other major economies use, might help solve that problem. The repatriating of American companies profits could create jobs, increase economic growth and thus restrain the deficit.

While altering the tax system might goose economic growth, it almost certainly would redistribute the tax burden. But it might not raise much more revenue for the government as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.

Another of Shashy’s graphs showed that taxes raised by the government as a percentage of GDP have stayed constant at about 18 to 19 percent of GDP. Sashay, the former IRS counsel, notes that every change in the tax regime since World War II has prompted a change in the behavior of taxpayers so that roughly the same percentage of national income goes to the taxman.

“That’s the business you’re going to be in pretty soon: Responding to tax changes, helping tax payers figure out some way to navigate this morass we call the U.S. tax system,” Shashy told UF Law students.

Gelberg (LLM 77), who sponsors the lectures, was a practicing tax attorney and partner in the firm of Lamont Neiman Interian & Bellet, P.A., which has offices in both Miami and Boca Raton. She is a member of the Levin College of Law’s Board of Trustees.

The lecture series examines tax policy and how its implementation affects the economy and people’s lives as well as the underlying policy considerations that lead to the tax rules, which tax professionals deal with everyday. Gelberg holds a J.D. and an LL.M. in taxation from the college of law.

Hina Jilani, advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, speaks at the sixth annual Center on Children and Families Weyrauch Distinguished Lecture in Family Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. The lecture is tomorrow at noon in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180. It is free and open to the public.

Jilani’s work in the area of children’s rights has included working for legal aid, proposing and drafting reformative legislation, and creating and implementing programs that protect the human rights of disadvantaged groups. She is responsible for establishing the first all-women’s law firm in Pakistan in 1981. According to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, Jilani has been under 24-hour-a-day surveillance by Pakistan since 1996 because of her activism in women, children and human rights movements.

Jilani held the position of special representative of the United Nations secretary general on human rights defenders from 2000 to 2008.

In 2006, Jilani was appointed to the UN’s fact-finding commission on Darfur, Sudan, and in 2009, was appointed to the UN’s fact-finding commission on the Gaza conflict. She is also affiliated with the Carter Center and the UN Conference on Women. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Editor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement by The Lawyer Awards in London.

The Center on Children and Families Weyrauch Distinguished Lecture in Family Law was made possible by an endowment supported by Frank G. Finkbeiner (JD 72) and T.W. Ackert (JD 72).

Walter Weyrauch, who passed away in 2008, was a distinguished professor of law at UF Law. Originally from Germany, Weyrauch joined the UF Law faculty in 1957 as associate professor. He became professor in 1960, was Clarence J. TeSelle Professor 1989-1994, and became Stephen C. O’Connell Chair in 1994 and distinguished professor in 1998. He was named an honorary professor of law at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Germany, and was visiting faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; Rutgers University School of Law and University of Frankfurt.