Ariel Jurow Kleiman is a nationally recognized expert on tax law and policy. Her research focuses on tax policies and how they affect low-income households at the local, state and federal levels, as well as how low- and moderate-income families interact with our fiscal system. She has published articles in the Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Tax Law Review, Yale Law Journal, among others.
Jurow Kleiman also founded the Bet Tzedek Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic in Los Angeles. She started working with Bet Tzedek Legal Services after being awarded a Skadden Fellowship. The low-income tax clinic, which provides tax controversy representation to low-income and immigrant clients throughout Los Angeles, continues to grow in her absence and has earned savings and refunds of over $2 million for its clients.
When she was a teenager, Jurow Kleiman had an interest in studying about poverty in general. In college, she studied both economics and development studies and was interested in how people can or cannot advocate for themselves. The moment she found her real passion was at Yale Law School.
“When I started law school, nothing really clicked until I took tax,” she says. “I realized that tax policy is how we engage in economic development in the U.S. It’s how we support industry, and how we support families and children. It’s also how we incentivize certain behaviors.”
Jurow Kleiman recently published a paper called Subjective Costs of Tax Compliance with fellow USC Gould Professor Jonathan Choi. “We explored how people experience the tax system,” she says. “We wanted to know whether people feel discomfort while filling out their taxes and what that discomfort looks like.”
Before joining Gould, she was a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, and an Acting Assistant Professor of Tax Law at NYU. While at Yale Law School, she was awarded the Florence M. Kelley Prize for her writing on taxation of migrant families.
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