The use of economic statecraft is at a high-water mark. The United States uses sanctions, tariffs, and import and export controls more than ever before. These tools have problems, though. They impose financial costs on domestic interests. They can induce retaliation by target states. And overuse of these tools could drive the United States from its central position in the global financial and economic system, undermining the effectiveness of U.S. economic statecraft in the long run. But there is an underappreciated tool that could perform valuable foreign policy work: tax law. We argue that tax law holds promise to advance U.S. foreign policy interests and that it is especially important to deploy tax tools now. Tax law has distinctive features that make it both a partial substitute and a partial complement to other tools of economic coercion, which means that it can extend the influence of U.S. economic power while reducing the risk of overusing other economic tools.

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this Article, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

This Essay takes its title from Professor Eric Foner’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Second Founding.1 Foner’s book traces the development and adoption of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments and the ensuing Reconstruction experience that endured until the election of 1876, a brief period that seemed to permit something approaching equality (at least for men) in the South. In that sense, these political developments could have amounted to a “second founding” to build on and move beyond the Revolutionary War and original adoption of the Constitution. As we all know too well today, that promise was extinguished around 1877, and during the rest of the 19th century the nation instead saw the rise of Jim Crow laws, paramilitary domestic terrorism managed by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and stasis for at least three quarters of a century in racial justice. Indeed, as recent events in this country show, that stasis has not been left entirely behind.

diverse and expansive set of writings spanning several decades, Burbank has drawn on a wide range of disciplines and methods in approaching key questions of procedure. Masterful at delivering rigorous and precise legal analysis, he has also acquired deep knowledge and sophistication in a range of allied fields, including history and political science. This has enabled him to utilize various qualitative and quantitative methods in pursuit of the deeper social meaning and purposes of the law. As he has insisted, “the technical reasoning required to be a master of doctrine is a necessary condition for . . . good scholarship about procedure,” but “it is not a sufficient condition.”1 For those who “seek to understand law’s significance,” it is vital to gain “perspectives in addition to the internal logic of technical reasoning”2—and these can be supplied only by turning to disciplines beyond the law, “including history, empiricism, and . . . political science.”3