Welcoming Professor Ariel Jurow Kleiman
Ariel Jurow Kleiman, a renowned tax law expert whose scholarship focus includes antipoverty policy, will join the faculty at LMU Loyola Law School, where she once led the school’s Low-Income Tax-Payer Clinic.
Jurow Kleiman was drawn to LLS by her respect for its faculty, its longstanding commitment to public interest and its exceptional tax program. “Loyola Law School holds an important position in the Los Angeles legal community,” she said. “I'm honored to contribute to the vital work it does educating future lawyers.”
In her prior role at LLS, Jurow Kleiman supervised students in live-client tax controversy representation and taught important tax practice and lawyering skills through a weekly seminar. In her new appointment, she plans to preserve and grow relationships with local legal aid and community organizations in addition to her coursework and scholarship.
“I know that Loyola Law School will be an inspiring, nurturing environment for me to write, teach and contribute to my community,” said Jurow Kleiman, who has taught Federal Income Tax, Corporate Tax and International Tax Law and related subjects. “Articles and op-eds are important ways to reach people, but eventually I also hope to translate my research into advocacy and policy work. If my research can help improve economic justice for struggling households, I'll be pretty happy about that.”
Jurow Kleiman’s scholarship dovetails with her passion for public interest work – touching on property, contracts, poverty law and local government law. A leading voice in the field, she has published extensively with recent placements in Harvard Law Review, Hastings Law Journal and the peer-reviewed Tax Law Review, among others. Motivated by the question of how and why communities at the local, state and federal levels share resources through public fiscal institutions, Jurow Kleiman addresses these dynamics from diverse angles of research. Her most recent project, Impoverishment by Taxation, offers a novel way to measure government fiscal burdens imposed on low-income households in the United States.
“I hope to continue my research on how tax and fiscal policies affect low-income households,” she said. “Eventually I'd like to bring together different research threads into a book project about government fiscal burdens on poor American households.”
In other recent work, Jurow Kleiman explores the damaging impact of criminal justice fees on vulnerable communities, gender and racial biases embedded within our tax laws and the anti-democratic effect of tax and revenue limits on local governments.
A commitment to public interest predates her academic career. After graduating from Yale Law School in 2014, she was awarded a Skadden Fellowship to work at Bet Tzedek Legal Services. While at Bet Tzedek, Professor Jurow Kleiman founded and directed their taxpayer clinic, which continues to provide tax legal services to low-income and immigrant taxpayers throughout Los Angeles County. She later moved to the University of San Diego School of Law.
As a teacher who strives to make her subjects accessible and relevant to students with diverse backgrounds and learning styles, the transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic was an especially rewarding challenge. In special consideration of how to best engage students in complex reasoning while they are physically and sometimes temporally separated from both campus and their fellow classmates, Jurow Kleiman supplemented her synchronous course meetings with multimedia video presentations, unexpectedly developing video editing skills in the process.
In addition to serving on USD’s Curriculum Committee, Professor Jurow Kleiman served as a faculty resource for USD students applying for public-interest fellowships. She worked closely with applicants to shape their projects, providing feedback on their application essays and preparing them for interviews. As a contributor the national community of legal scholars, Professor Jurow Kleiman has served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the ABA Taxation and Gender Equality Conference and the Organizing Committee for the Junior Tax Scholars Conference and has submitted regular article reviews to TaxProf Blog.
Jurow Kleiman joins a tax faculty that already includes some of the most distinguished tax academics in California. Her addition will further strengthen Loyola Law School’s Graduate Tax Program, which offers rigorous, practical training designed to produce practice-ready tax practitioners in a supportive and personalized environment – no matter the modality.