Professor Leslie Book and Georgetown Law File Joint Lawsuit Claiming CARES Act Intentionally Discriminates Against Children

Leslie Book, Professor of Law, worked with Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection to jointly file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland challenging the CARES Act. The suit challenges the CARES legislation’s exclusion of U.S. citizen children from the benefits of emergency cash assistance in response to the coronavirus pandemic, based solely on the fact that one or both parents are undocumented immigrants.

The CARES Act provides a financial lifeline to millions of people by distributing through the tax system immediate economic impact payments of up to $1,200 per adult and up to $500 for each of the adult’s children under age 17. The lawsuit alleges that excluding US citizen children from receiving the $500 payment violates equal protection under the Fifth Amendment of the constitution.

Book is a national authority on tax procedure, tax administration and issues affecting the low-income taxpayer community. Book has written multiple law review articles considering the relationship of IRS agency actions and broader principles of administrative law, on the intersection of tax and poverty law, and on tax compliance. He is the successor author of the Thomson Reuters treatise IRS Practice and Procedure, the leading treatise on tax procedure, and is the cofounder and one of the primary bloggers at Procedurally Taxing. In 2019, Book held a Professor-in-Residence position at the IRS.

Book holds a BA from Franklin & Marshall College (magna cum laude), a JD from Stanford University School of Law and an LLM (Taxation) from New York University School of Law. At Stanford Law School, he was a founding editor of the Stanford Law & Policy Review, and he was a student-editor at the Tax Law Review at New York University School of Law.

For more information, read Georgetown Law’s press release here.