Each year, the Washington University Law Review publishes an issue featuring papers presented at our annual symposium. This year’s symposium, held at the Law School on September 26, 2025, focused on the general theme of “Taxing, Spending, and the Constitution.” This symposium began to take shape almost two years ago, after the 2024 presidential election but before the inauguration, in

Appropriations law is a unique body of federal law. Appropriations law imposes its own somewhat baroque set of statutory interpretation rules, approves of very broad delegations to the Executive Branch without meaningful limiting principles, and is often exempt from judicial review. One leading scholar has referred to these and related differences from ordinary public law doctrine as reflecting “appropriations marginalization”

This Article contributes to the development of the constitutional law of executive conditions. The appropriations presidentialism of the second Trump Administration—the shift from bilateral executive/legislative cooperation and compromise in federal spending to executive unilateralism in defiance of congressional control—has forced courts into the administration of federal spending like never before. As a result, judges have been forced to

At the federal level, the boundary between public and private functions is under pressure. On top of longstanding trends toward privatizing government functions and running agencies like businesses, the second Trump administration has sought to enlist private resources more broadly for performing public functions. This Article for the Washington University Law Review’s symposium on “Taxing, Spending, and the Constitution” outlines

American law is grappling with basic questions about the President’s power to impose tariffs—questions concerning whether Congress can delegate this authority, and the degree to which it has. But the ongoing tariff controversy emerges against a backdrop of conflicting and shifting historical practice. Early Congresses drafted tariff statutes in painstaking detail, while some of the broadest delegations in the

The President’s dramatic use of tariffs has unleashed a host of constitutional and statutory interpretation challenges that promise to make new law. In the leading case, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court struck down presidential tariffs. This represents the beginning, not the end, of modern legal developments on the question of the President’s authority to impose tariffs.

For more than a century, progressive taxation has constituted the American fiscal state. A resurgent and expanding tariff regime, however, threatens that commitment to progressive distribution. Given the ongoing popularity of tariffs, this Article examines how they might be designed and administered in a way that mitigates their regressive distributive impact. The Article thus develops and assesses proposals to

In the aftermath of Moore v. United States, there has been a modest rise in interest in U.S. consumption taxes, not only for revenue raising but as a response to inequality. This Article argues that these consumption tax proposals are not likely to be a satisfactory response to inequality, even if they may have other features to recommend them for

The founders have been credited with “splitting the atom of sovereignty” in creating our federal system.[3] Yet this revolutionary achievement has fractured into a bewildering array of doctrinal silos, each with its own tests, exceptions, and internal contradictions. Federal regulatory incursions into state fiscal authority trigger Commerce Clause analysis, while federal spending that pressures states invokes distinct Spending Clause jurisprudence.

In the spring of 2025, President Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, accusing it of “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness.’” In the following months, the Administration has continued to threaten nonprofits with which it disagrees, such as those advocating critical race theory, Palestinian rights, and climate change, in a variety of ways. As this Article shows, these threats violate

The U.S. Constitution’s Treaty Clause, which requires Senate approval by a two-thirds vote for treaties, has significantly influenced the development of international tax law. This Article examines the implications of Senate supermajority requirements on bilateral and multilateral tax treaties and agreements, alternative instruments, relevant international tax standards, and global tax governance. Historically, tax treaties have been approved exclusively as Article