Professor Soucek to Receive AALS Art Law Award for Scholarship

The Association of American Law Schools’ Art Law section will present its first-ever Art Law Scholarship Award to Professor Brian Soucek and Columbia University Teachers College Associate Professor Jennifer C. Lena, for their 2025 Cornell Law Review article “Tax Law as Muse.”

The article explores selective exemptions that seem to disadvantage popular entertainment and examines the history of federal taxation of the arts. It helps shed light on what the scholars call "a notoriously difficult First Amendment problem: how to distinguish selective support of the arts from censorship.”

The Art Law section will present the award on Jan. 7 at the AALS’ 2026 Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Professor Soucek’s primary teaching and research interests are antidiscrimination law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and refugee/asylum law. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Mark R. Kravitz in Connecticut, and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Professor Soucek is a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow. His book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.