In updates to her report on law school hiring information, Professor Sarah Lawsky recently published data on entry-level hires as of Spring 2026. Her data show 108 new hires for the 2026 year, she further breaks down the data by schools, where hires earned degrees, whether hires had a fellowship, when hires earned their degree, and several other parameters.
When a law is inconsistent, further guidance should come from Congress, courts, and administrative agencies to create clarity. In her recent article, Professor Sarah Lawsky examines via a programming language framework an example of a tax statute that mandates inconsistent outcomes for the same set of facts and shows how that inconsistency has been addressed by the Treasury and the IRS. Her article was also the subject of a TaxProfBlog article, which you can read online.
Direct File, a program that allows some taxpayers to file federal income tax returns with the United States government online for free, is an extraordinary accomplishment, Professor Sarah Lawsky writes in a new article published in the Pittsburgh Tax Review. Examining the computer code underlying Direct File, Lawsky finds choices that make “the application of the law and various administrative choices more transparent even to those who are not comfortable reading computer code.”
Professor Sarah Lawsky, along with co-author Leandra Lederman, published the paper “Constructing Deductions” on SSRN.com. The abstract follows:
This Essay identifies drafting “building blocks” that are present in the Internal Revenue Code and that are used to construct many of the deductions available to individuals. The Essay represents these building blocks using mathematical formulas and graphically, and it then shows how the building blocks are combined to create complex deductions. These formalizations and visualizations yield insight into statutory drafting choices. They also reveal “negative space”–that is, ways that federal income tax deductions could be drafted but are not.
In this episode we speak with our two newest full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty, Eric Baudry and Sarah Lawsky. They shared about themselves, their research, and what they are looking forward to as members of the College of Law faculty.
About Eric Baudry:
Eric Baudry is an assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois, where he teaches and writes about tax law, poverty, and redistribution. He is especially interested in the experiences of low-income taxpayers as subjects of and actors within the institution of the United States tax system. His scholarship has appeared in the Columbia Journal of Tax Law.
Following law school, Baudry clerked on the Eastern District of Michigan and the Ninth Circuit, provided wage theft and tax representation for low-wage workers as a Skadden Fellow at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, and spent two years as a Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan law school.
About Sarah Lawsky:
Sarah B. Lawsky, the L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law, studies tax law, computational law, and the intersection of the two. Her recent work focuses on the formalization of tax law. Professor Lawsky’s research arguing for using a particular nonstandard logic to formalize tax law is the conceptual foundation for the domain-specific programming language Catala, which is the project of a team of computer scientists and lawyers.
Before joining the University of Illinois, Professor Lawsky taught at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, UC Irvine School of Law, and George Washington University Law School. Before entering academia, she worked as a tax lawyer for large law firms.
For more information, visit the personal website of Professor Lawsky: https://www.sarahlawsky.org/
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On October 17, Professor Sarah Lawsky was part of a panel discussion at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law covering “AI in Tax Law: Tax Administration &
Educating the Next Generation.” She was one of eight panelists from academia, industry, government sharing expertise on the role of artificial intelligence in tax administration, legal practice, and tax law education.
In the most recent issue of the Yale Journal on Regulation, Professor Sarah Lawsky has published a note as part of the symposium on Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky’s “Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance.” In her article, she concludes, “Automated guidance thus might exacerbate the access to justice gap. Unlike publications, automated guidance may fool people into thinking that they have received individualized guidance, when they actually have not.”
The University of Illinois College of Law is proud to welcome Eric Baudry and Sarah Lawsky as new faculty members this fall. Baudry joins as an assistant professor of law with a specialty in tax law, poverty, and redistribution; Lawsky will serve as the L.B. Lall and Sumitra Devi Lall Professor of Law and the co-director of the Innovation Law and Technology Program.
“I’m really excited about joining the law school here because of the vibrant intellectual life among the faculty,” Lawsky said. “The University of Illinois is such an incredible institution, and the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work here at the law school with the other parts of this university is really exciting.”
Lawsky comes to Illinois having previously taught at George Washington University Law School, UC Irvine School of Law, and, most recently, at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Her work focuses on computational law, with a focus on formal methods and the formalization of tax law. As part of the Innovation Law and Technology Program, she hopes to continue her work in conjunction with experts from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and the School of Information Sciences as well as others. At the College of Law, Lawsky will be teaching contracts and federal income tax courses, aiming to meet the existing high standards of the law school.
“Illinois has an amazing tax professor in Dick Kaplan, who’s terrific. My goal is to try to match the very high level of quality of tax instruction that he has established,” she said.
Also an expert in tax law, Baudry comes to Illinois Law with experience as a clerk in the Eastern District of Michigan and the Ninth Circuit, a Skadden Fellow at Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, and a faculty fellow at the University of Michigan Law School. He will teach income taxation, corporate taxation, and a seminar on the intersections of taxation and poverty.
“I’m interested in planting roots in this community, both as a person who lives in Champaign and as a tax scholar who cares about inequality in our community. Specifically, I’m interested in how residents experience impoverishment and how our local and state governments can use tax law as a vehicle to help improve the lives of their citizens” Baudry said. “My long-term goal as a professor would be to bring that work into the law school.”
Both Lawsky, who has spent the last nine years at Northwestern, and Baudry, a native Minnesotan, expressed their excitement to be a part of Illinois Law and the local community. Having a son in the state university system gave Lawsky an idea what to expect, and she says she’s eager to “learn what it means to be a part of the University of Illinois system.” Baudry shared his enthusiasm to talk to students, alumni, and faculty about his professional expertise as well as his personal passion for games.
“Getting to know the faculty and the staff and the spaces at Illinois Law, I immediately felt like this is a place that would push me to be my best, while also offering fantastic resources and supports for my journey to get there,” he said.
The College of Law is pleased to welcome Baudry and Lawsky to the faculty and looks forward to their accomplishments as part of the University of Illinois.