About

Joshua D. Blank is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, where he serves as the Director of the UCI Law in NYC Program. Prior to joining UCI Law in 2018, he was a member of the full-time faculty at NYU School of Law, where he held roles including Professor of Tax Law, Vice Dean for Technology-Enhanced Education, and Faculty Director of the Graduate Tax Program. He is an internationally recognized scholar specializing in tax administration and compliance, administrative agency explanations of law, tax privacy, and tax transparency. Professor Blank has authored influential books such as 'Untaxed: The Rich, the IRS, and a New Approach to Tax Compliance' and 'Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance,' both published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. His scholarly articles have appeared in numerous prestigious law reviews, and he is a frequent contributor to major media outlets including Bloomberg, CNN, Fortune, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His research has significantly impacted the understanding of automated legal guidance, tax enforcement, and administrative law, and he has been actively involved in policy studies, including a notable study conducted for the Administrative Conference of the United States. Blank has received multiple awards for his teaching excellence and holds memberships in esteemed professional organizations such as the American College of Tax Counsel and the American Bar Foundation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Business
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Marketing
• Macroeconomics
• Public economics
• Public relations
• Internet privacy

Selected publications

• Automated Agencies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-04-03

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Automated Agencies is the definitive account of how automation is transforming government explanations of the law to the public. Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky draw on extensive research regarding the federal government's turn to automated legal guidance through chatbots, virtual assistants, and other online tools. Blank and Osofsky argue that automated tools offer administrative benefits for both the government and the public in terms of efficiency and ease of use, yet these automated tools may also mislead members of the public. Government agencies often exacerbate this problem by making guidance seem more personalized than it is, not recognizing how users may rely on the guidance, and not disclosing that the guidance cannot be relied upon as a legal matter. After analyzing the potential costs and benefits of the use of automated legal guidance by government agencies, Automated Agencies charts a path forward for policymakers by offering detailed policy recommendations.

  PublisherDOI

• Automated Legal Guidance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Public relations

  Through online tools, virtual assistants and other technology, governments increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to help the public understand and apply the law. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, encourages taxpayers to seek answers regarding various tax credits and deductions through its online “Interactive Tax Assistant.” The U.S. Army directs individuals with questions about enlistment to its virtual guide, “Sgt. Star.” And the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suggests that potential green card holders and citizens speak with its interactive chatbot, “Emma.” Through such automated legal guidance, the government seeks to provide advice to the public at a fraction of the cost of employing human beings to perform these same tasks.\nThis Article offers one of the first critiques of these new systems of artificial intelligence. It shows that automated legal guidance currently relies upon the concept of “simplexity,” whereby complex law is presented as though it is simple, without actually engaging in simplification of the underlying law. While this approach offers potential gains in terms of efficiency and ease of use, it also causes the government to present the law as simpler than it is, leading to less precise advice, and potentially inaccurate legal positions. Using the Interactive Tax Assistant as a case study, the Article shows that the use of simplexity in automated legal guidance is more powerful and pervasive than in static publications because it is personalized, non-qualified and instantaneous. Further, it argues that understanding the costs as well as the benefits of current forms of automated legal guidance is essential to evaluating even more sophisticated, but also more opaque, automated systems that governments are likely to adopt in the future.\nWith these considerations in mind, the Article offers three recommendations to policymakers. First, it argues that governments should prevent automated legal guidance from widening the gap between access to legal advice enjoyed by high-income and by low-income individuals. Second, it argues that governments should introduce more robust oversight and review processes for automated legal guidance. Finally, it argues that the government should allow individuals to avoid certain penalties and sanctions when they have taken actions or claimed legal positions in reliance upon automated legal guidance. Unless these steps are taken, we believe that the costs of these automated legal guidance systems may soon come to outweigh their benefits.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Audit Guides and the Administrative State

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to Automated Agencies: The Transformation of Government Guidance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Untaxed

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-22

  book1st authorCorresponding

  One of the most common complaints about the tax system in the United States is that rich taxpayers are able to lower their tax liabilities through abusive tax practices, often outmaneuvering the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Untaxed offers a fresh perspective on the long-standing dilemma of tax avoidance and evasion by the rich by proposing a new legal response: means-based adjustments to the tax compliance rules. These compliance rules govern interactions between taxpayers and the IRS, from filing tax returns to responding to audit letters to paying tax penalties. Untaxed shows how tax compliance rules can be adjusted based on taxpayers' means to level the playing field between the rich and everyone else. Timely and innovative, this book is a must-read for legal scholars, policymakers, tax students, and anyone interested in tax policy and administration.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 39: Mandatory Disclosure Rules in the United States

  WU Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law, tax law and policy series. · 2023-06-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This book aims to provide tax authorities, policymakers, courts and practitioners with a systematic legal comparison of domestic mandatory disclosure regimes or comparable rules, which are either based on BEPS Action 12/DAC6 or were in force prior to these instruments.

  PublisherDOI

• Democratizing Administrative Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Simplicity Lost

  Pittsburgh Tax Review · 2023-03-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

    

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Automated Agencies

  Minnesota law review · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When individuals have questions about federal benefits, services, and legal rules, they increasingly seek help from government chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated tools. Most scholars who have studied artificial intelligence and federal government agencies have not focused on the government’s use of technology to offer guidance to the public. The absence of scholarly attention to automation as a means of communicating government guidance is an important gap in the literature. Through the use of automated legal guidance, the federal government is responding to millions of public inquiries each year about the law, a number that may multiply many times over in years to come. This new form of guidance is thereby shaping public views of and behavior with respect to the law, without serious examination. This Article describes the results of a qualitative study of automated legal guidance across the federal government. This study was conducted under the auspices of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency of the U.S. government charged with recommending improvements to administrative process and procedure. Our goal was to understand federal agency use of automated legal guidance, and offer recommendations to ACUS based on our findings. During our study, we canvassed the automated legal guidance activities of all federal agencies. We found extensive use of automation to offer guidance to the public by federal agencies, with varying levels of sophistication and legal content. We identified two principal models of automated legal guidance, and we conducted in-depth legal research regarding the most sophisticated examples of such models. We also interviewed agency officials with direct, supervisory, or support responsibility over well-developed automated legal guidance tools. We find that automated legal guidance offers agencies an inexpensive way to help the public navigate complex legal regimes. However, we also find that automated legal guidance may mislead members of the public about how the law will apply in their individual circumstances. In particular, automated legal guidance exacerbates the tendency of federal agencies to present complex law as though it is simple without actually engaging in simplification of the underlying law. While this approach offers advantages in terms of administrative efficiency and ease of use by the public, it also causes the government to present the law as simpler than it is, leading to less precise advice and potentially inaccurate legal positions. In some cases, agencies heighten this problem by, among other things, making guidance

  PublisherDOI

• Automated Legal Guidance at Federal Agencies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leigh Osofsky

  8 shared

• Ari D. Glogower

  8 shared

• Noël B. Cunningham

  New York Law School

  6 shared

• John P. Steines

  New York Law School

  6 shared

• Daniel Shaviro

  6 shared

• Lily L. Batchelder

  6 shared

• David Kamin

  4 shared

• Michael Knoll

  William Carey University

  4 shared

Education

• B.A.

  NYU, College of Arts and Science

• Other

  Harvard Law School

Awards & honors

• 2020 Teacher of the Year Award from the Association of Ameri…
• 2017 Legal Teaching Award from the NYU School of Law Alumni…
• Podell Distinguished Teaching Award from NYU School of Law (…
• Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel
• Fellow of the American Bar Foundation