Bryan Camp (Texas Tech)

• B.A. 1982, Haverford College
• J.D.  1987, Virginia
• M.A. 1988, Virginia
• LL.M. 1993, Columbia 

I joined the academy less than four years ago. Coming to it relatively late in life (at 41) and coming from a long practice background, I have had to work that much harder to establish myself as someone who adds value to the scholarly enterprise, whether through traditional scholarship, or through less traditional methods, such as my regular column in Tax Notes and my active participation in the ABA Tax Section. I am a firm believer that part of the scholarly mission is to aid those who “do,” both by teaching and by giving useful guidance on practice issues that lawyers face. I do not view teaching as the “’price” one must pay to do scholarship, nor is scholarship the “price” one must pay to teach. And we all must pull our weight on the oars of law school governance or risk our schools drifting unwittingly into dangerous waters. I am delighted to be a tax professor because I think tax academics are better and more solidly connected to their practitioner counterparts than many other substantive areas of the law. That’s a good thing.

It was a long, hard -- but not particularly strange -- trip to get here. My life philosophy has been "when in doubt, go back to school." I’m just a geek at heart, and proud of it!  After graduating from Haverford College in 1982, I tried teaching high school and programming computers before deciding to ... go back to school.  One thing I learned from my U.Va. Law School experience was that I was not enamored of the large-firm route.  I was not sure what to do.  So I stepped off the conveyer belt to ... go back to school, at U.Va. for an M.A. in History. Geek heaven.  After that, I needed money.  So I clerked in what is now called the Court for Federal Claims, and then became an Assistant County Attorney for Arlington, Virginia.  There, I got to practice what I call "transactional constitutional law."  It was fascinating.  I also litigated on behalf of Child Protective Services, which was also fascinating, but emotionally draining.  After doing too little of the former and too much of the latter, I left to become the third lawyer in a small Washington D.C. firm.  It was while there, at the end of 1991, that I decided to ... go back to school.  Permanently.  Little did I realize it would take 10 years.

I started my journey with a year at Columbia in 1992-1993, to “recommit” myself to academics. I spent the next summer writing the mother of all church/state articles.  It is still in my file cabinet.  After that, I needed money.  Another recurring theme.  Among the over 140 rejections I received from various administrative agencies and NGOs in the D.C. area was a rejection letter from the IRS Office of Chief Counsel.  Imagine my surprise when I received a call for an interview there three weeks after the letter reached me.  I love the government.  I started Nov. 1, 1994.

I never expected to be almost 8 years that IRS Office of Chief Counsel. But it took me that long to get into academics.  Cf. David W. Case, The Pedagogical Don Quixote De La Mississippi, 33 U. Memphis L. Rev. 529 (2003) (article by my friend from the Columbia LL.M. program whose similar dogged determination was rewarded, coincidentally, the same year as was mine, in 2001).  Of course, the fact that a week before the 1998 AALS recruiting conference I stiffed the 15 schools who had agreed to interview me did not help.  But I had to do it.  My wife Susan and I received the sudden, but welcome, notice that we had to be in Ha Noi that weekend to adopt our darling daughter, Lillian.

By the time I had teaching offers from Texas Tech (and one other school) in 2001, I had a promising career the Office of Chief Counsel. I truly enjoyed the work and, more importantly, the people.  Ironically, I did not practice tax law. I was a proceduralist.  I delved into the details of subtitle F of the Internal Revenue Code and the subtleties of the Bankruptcy Code, dispensing advice to IRS field attorneys across the country and helping devise appropriate responses to adverse judicial opinions.  In 1997 and 1998 I was privileged to be a fly on the wall when Congress ground out the Internal Revenue Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (the RRA).  I participated in the IRS efforts to affect that legislation, in particular the CDP provisions.  I went to lots of meetings.  After the RRA's enactment, I became the guidance “stuckee” for several of the new provisions, including section 7602(c), an innocuous-looking statute that turned out to be one of the most complicated of the RRA provisions.  I went to lots more meetings and was the lead drafter on the resulting regulation.  As a result of going to all those meetings, I received numerous awards for going to meetings, the last one being the 2000 Attorney of the Year for what was then the General Litigation Division, now (more accurately) titled “Collection, Bankruptcy and Summonses.”

I joined the faculty at Texas Tech University School of Law in June 2001.  It’s a great school, on any number of levels, and I feel enormously lucky to have begun my academic career here.  Heck, after seeing the hiring process from the inside, I feel enormously lucky to have gotten any teaching offers.  I am lucky enough to teach not only Baby Tax and, my specialty, Tax Practice and Procedure, but I also get to teach Administrative Law and Legal History.  Geek heaven.

I have never worked so hard as I have in the last three and one half years of teaching.  I have not had time to pursue my favorite hobbies:  piano, poker, singing, and swing dancing (NONE of which are forbidden, as many suppose, by my Quaker religion).  I have barely had time to see my family.  It helps that I have a 7 minute commute.  I must say that I could not have survived my first years without the TaxProf listserv.  It’s a great resource and has connected me to some truly outstanding tax colleagues both as friends and mentors.  I love going to the AALS conventions.  Geek heaven reprised.  Indeed I was depressed after the last meeting because I finally realized that I have too many projects to fit into my remaining actuarial lifespan.

My scholarship is defined by two words:  process and praxis.  As to the first, my scholarship studies process, and does so from doctrinal, jurisprudential, and historical viewpoints.  The process I study is the process of law creation and application to human actions, whether by “them” (administrative agencies like the Internal Revenue Service or judicial agencies like federal courts) or “us” (practitioners).  My articles examine how law is conceived and interpreted, as well as how our society sets up institutions to apply the law, both historically and currently.  As to the second, my work neither dwells in the world of abstraction nor the world of practice.  It instead seeks to connect those worlds together, both by constructing theories from practices (whether historical or contemporary) and by using theory to explain and advocate best practices.  It seeks to translate and make sense of experience through abstractions and translate and make sense of abstractions through experience.  So although my (relatively) small scholarly output seems diverse and will continue to seem diverse, it is unified by those themes.  Here’s the list of traditional publications and Tax Notes columns to date:

Law Review Articles:

• Tax Administration As Inquisitorial Process & the Partial Paradigm Shift of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, 56 Fla. L. Rev. 1-133 (2004)
• Form Over Function in Fifth Circuit Tax Cases, 2001-2002, 34 Texas Tech Law Rev. 733 (2003)
• Bound By the BAP: The Stare Decisis Effects of BAP Decisions, 34 San Diego L. Rev. 1643 (1997)
• Avoiding the Ex Post Facto Slippery Slope of Deer Park, 3 Am. Bankr. Inst. L. Rev. 329 (1995)
• Dual Construction of RICO: The Road Not Taken in Reves, 51 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 61 (1994)

Book Chapters:

• Limitations Periods Applicable to Government Action, Chapter 8 in Federal Tax Practice and Procedure (Leandra Lederman, Ann Murphy eds.) (LexisNexis, 2003)
• Taxpayer Refunds, Chapter 10 in Federal Tax Practice and Procedure (Leandra Lederman, Ann Murphy eds.) (exisNexis 2003)
• Judicial and Statutory Doctrines that Avoid Limitations Periods, Chapter 12 in Federal Tax Practice and Procedure (Leandra Lederman, Ann Murphy eds.) (LexisNexis 2003)

Other Published Work:

• CDP Should Be Repealed, 24 ABA Section of Taxation NewsQuarterly No. 1, at 11 (Fall 2004)
• The Costs of CDP, 104 Tax Notes 1445 (Dec. 6, 2004)
• The Failure of Collection Due Process, Pt. 2: Why It Adds No Value, 104 Tax Notes 1567 (Sept. 27, 2004)
• Failure of Collection Due Process, Pt. 1: The Collection Context, 104 Tax Notes 969 (Aug. 30, 2004)
• The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them, 104 Tax Notes 439 (July 26, 2004)
• The Inquisitorial Process of Tax Administration, 103 Tax Notes 1549 (June 21, 2004)
• Why Tax Experience Is Necessary for Tax Court Appointment, 22 ABA Section of Taxation NewsQuarterly No. 4, at 15 (Summer 2003)

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