TaxProf Blog: Tax Prof Spotlight

November 17, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Paul M. Kohlhoff (Valparaiso)

B.S. 1981, Purdue
J.D. 1986, Valparaiso

Like many who have been featured here, I dreamed but never expected to teach at a law school. I attribute my hiring as a tax clinician at Valparaiso University School of Law to being in the right place, at the right time, with the right experience.

I was supposed to be a veterinarian. And if you were raised in Indiana and wanted to be a veterinarian, there was only one place to go – Purdue University. “Only one thing stood in my way - Organic Chemistry.” Having had more success with calculus of all things, I switched my major to business management during my sophomore year.

My first teaching experience was as a senior at Purdue where I taught an Introductory Macro-Economics course. Actually, I played a video-taped lecture to a class of 25 freshmen business students, then tried to answer their question. But, I got my first taste of teaching. I also worked for United Parcel Service during college. This was a part-time union job which compensated me well enough to pay for my college education. “I may well be one of the few in the law professoriate who has also carried a Teamster’s Union card at one time.”

The job market was pretty tough in 1981 when I was graduated from Purdue University. Unemployment and inflation were at record levels. In 1983, after toiling in the job market for a few years, I enrolled at Valparaiso University School of Law.

I was understandably attracted to the tax and business courses because of my undergraduate studies in economics and business management, so I loaded up on as many of these electives as I could. I fact, I wrote my seminar paper on the tax free exchange of patents under I.R.C. § 1235.

After law school, I clerked for Justice Alfred Pivarnik of the Supreme Court of Indiana. Most of the Court’s docket at the time involved criminal appeals, an area of law in which I had little interest. But the opportunity to work with a justice of the highest court in the State of Indiana was, as they say, priceless. As fate would have it, Justice Pivarnik swore me in when I was admitted to the Indiana bar in 1986.

My clerkship, being a temporary position, gave me some additional time to figure out just what the next step in my legal career should be. During that time, I was beginning to hear the grumblings of many of my law school classmates who had taken positions with larger law firms. “Too many hours and too little case responsibility,” was a common refrain. Determined to find a position where I would gain experience quickly, and having an interest in tax, I naturally called upon the IRS – and it accepted the call.

Thus, my first “real” job as a lawyer was as a Trial Attorney for the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, at its district office in Nashville, Tennessee. It was experience that I was looking for, and experience is what I got. I tried my first Tax Court case just three months after starting. About half my work load was Tax Court litigation, and the other half was providing legal counsel to IRS personnel. One of the most memorable cases I successfully litigated involved a substantial amount unreported income and the imposition of the civil fraud penalty against an IRS employee [and no, she did not get fired]. I had great mentors in Nashville, including Robert Nadler, my direct supervisor, and colleagues Howard Levine and Kirk Chaberski. All three were terrific attorneys and I owe a great deal of my success as an attorney to their wonderful tutelage.

The seven-year itch came a bit early in my career, and by 1993, six years after starting with Chief Counsel, I was longing for change. I wanted to be on the other side of the table. I wanted to represent taxpayers. So in 1994, with a new bride but no children yet, I hung out my shingle in Chesterton, Indiana, a small community not far from where I grew up.

It was tough starting a practice from scratch, and not something I would recommend to the faint of heart. My first actual paying client was a 20-year-old male who passed a school bus when he shouldn’t have. From there things improved as I added estate planning and real estate to my complement of legal services.

One of my most cherished clients was a local land conservation trust. The mission of this 501(c)(3) was to acquire and protect ecologically significant tracts of land in and around the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. My tax and real estate experience, and knowledge about conservation easements, was a welcome benefit to the group. Seeing a parcel of natural land preserved for future generations to enjoy was my reward. At the time, it was the most rewarding work of my legal career.

My work as the group’s legal counsel quickly transitioned into a leadership role as the group’s executive director. I also briefly served as the land acquisition manager for the Indiana Chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

My next opportunity to teach came in 2000 as an adjunct at Valparaiso where I taught a seminar on tax policy. I followed this up with teaching Introduction to Business Law at Purdue University North Central during the 2002-03 academic year.

As fate would have it, the position of Director of the Tax Clinic at the Valparaiso Law Clinic opened in 2004, and the administration asked me if I would be interested. [This is where the being in the right place, at the right time, with the right experience comes in.] I don’t think I was fooling anyone when I said, “I need some time to consider it.”

So, since 2004, I have directed the Tax Clinic which is one of the seven clinical offerings at Valparaiso. Like many other academic tax clinics, our clinic receives grant funding from the IRS as part of its Low Income Taxpayer Clinic (LITC) program. In addition to directing the Tax Clinic, I have continued to teach the tax policy seminar, and have developed and taught a Federal Tax Procedure course. This summer I will teach Trusts & Estates as the first distance (or on-line) learning course offered at the School of Law.

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my 10-year-old son. We like to hike, camp, bicycle, and kayak together. We will be visiting Mt. Rushmore this summer. And when the weather is nice here, I enjoy getting out for a leisurely round of golf.

I will be the first to admit just how fortunate I am to be in this position. I frequently tell others, “I have the best of both worlds – the opportunity to teach and work with young legal minds, and at the same time, to continue practicing law.” I doubt I could have written a better script myself.

Each Saturday, TaxProf Blog shines the spotlight on one of the 700+ tax professors in America's law schools or on one of our international tax colleagues. We hope to help bring the many individual stories of scholarly achievements, teaching innovations, public service, and career moves within the tax professorate to the attention of the broader tax community. Please email me suggestions for future Tax Prof Profiles. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.

November 17, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2007

Tax Prof Profile: New Professor Edition

Spotlight_1_1

Over the past seven weeks, I have profiled folks who have started their careers this fall as full-time law school tax professors:

T. Keith Fogg (Villanova)
David Gamage (UC-Berkeley)
Kristin Balding Gutting (Charleston)
Sarah B. Lawsky (George Washington)
Lisa Milot (Georgia)
Edward Kofi Osei (Widener)
Adam Rosenzweig (Washington University)

November 10, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 3, 2007

This week's Tax Prof Spotlight continues a series of profiles of folks starting their careers this fall as law school tax professors. I hope the profiles will help introduce our newest colleagues to the tax community.

Spotlight_1_1 Lisa Milot (Georgia)

B.A. 1992, New College of Florida
M.A. 1998, NYU
J.D. 2001, Virginia

I’ve never been able to file a 1040-EZ. And that, in short, is how I ended up fascinated by tax law.

It wasn’t why I went to law school – I was originally a graduate student in social anthropology, interested in cultural understandings of human bodies. Many of my questions had legal components (e.g., drug use and international sport, and new reproductive technologies) and I had always considered going to law school, so I left grad school after three years.

At law school, I started from the premise that I didn’t want to litigate. I quickly learned that the primary counter to litigation was corporate law, and decided that that was what I would do. I filled the gaps in the corporate law curriculum with tax classes, in the hope of understanding what all those incredibly long and complex forms I’d been filing all those years meant. I liked – finally! – learning why claiming my ex-husband as a dependent the year we were got divorced didn’t work (I had previously lost that battle with the IRS), understanding the “grossing up” formula had been the basis of my compensation rate at some of my prior jobs, and working through the proper reporting of income that spans multiple jurisdictions.

After a year or so of corporate law practice, I started to look around to see what might be a better fit for me. My timing was perfect – Ivins, Phillips & Barker, a tax boutique in Washington, D.C., was looking for a junior associate for its estate planning practice. Once there, I had the opportunity to work with absolutely fantastic tax attorneys in a variety of specialties (IP&B believes firmly in its attorneys being tax lawyers first, then specialists second, and so mandates a two-year rotation for all incoming associates), exposing me to far more of the tax world than I had expected. The unfortunate side of that, perhaps (for them, not for me), is that it got me thinking about tax law from a more intellectual perspective, rather than just focusing on my assignments. I realized that I wanted the opportunity to explore my academic interests on a full-time basis.

This summer, then, I transitioned to teaching property, tax (specifically, the taxation of non-profits), and trusts & estates at the University of Georgia. So far teaching has proven both far easier (because it feels right) and far harder (because it feels important) for me than I expected. My research interests are our relationships to those things closest to us – our bodies, our families and our possessions – as well as related areas that are in transition – for example, the legal status of pets and dynasty trusts. Tax law is a great overlay to both reflect how we think about these things, and to shape our understandings further.

November 3, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 27, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Adam Rosenzweig (Washington University)

B.A. 1995, UCLA
J.D. 1998, Georgetown
LL.M. (Tax) 2002, NYU

Similar to many others, tax law was not the field in which I envisioned I would dedicate my professional and academic life when I enrolled in law school. However, as is often the case, my path was paved by learning from and working with some of the best teachers and mentors one could hope for. In particular, I have had the great fortune to be affiliated with three of the finest tax law programs in the country - as a student at Georgetown and NYU, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern.

In retrospect, I can honestly say that I was interested in pursuing an academic career since I started studying the law. At the time, however, each step along the path of my career seemed unrelated to such an end

I enrolled at Georgetown not knowing whether I wanted to pursue a career in law at all, let alone a career in tax law. After several tax classes at Georgetown and an editorial position on The Tax Lawyer, however, I decided to accept a position as an associate in the tax department at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York while simultaneously pursuing an LL.M. in Taxation at NYU part-time. I took a one-year leave of absence from both to clerk for the Honorable James L. Dennis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, after which I returned to New York to continue at STB and to complete my LLM. The one thing all of these experiences shared was that they permitted me to delve (to differing degrees) into the policy implications of the law -- which increasingly fascinated me. By the time I completed my LL.M., I decided to pursue these academic aspects of the tax law as a full-time career. When the opportunity to teach at Northwestern as a Visiting Assistant Professor arose shortly thereafter, I immediately jumped at the chance. After two incredibly rewarding years at Northwestern, I recently joined the faculty at Washington University, where I will teach Basic Tax and International Tax as regular parts of my teaching package. My colleagues and the staff at Washington University have been wonderful, and I am excited to teach my first International Tax class this fall.

With respect to my scholarship, I intend to combine my interest and background in alternative investment funds and financial instruments with my interest in cross-border and international transactions. To this end, I have co-authored an essay on the tax treatment of partners in service partnerships [Anachronisms in Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code – Is it Time to Part With Section 736?, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 379 (2006)], and recently published an article on international tax arbitrage [Harnessing the Costs of International Tax Arbitrage, 26 Va. Tax Rev. 555 (2007)]. I am currently working on articles considering the cross-border tax aspects of hedge funds trading in derivatives and the international relations aspects of international tax more broadly. In addition, I recently joined Sandy Guerin and Philip Postlewaite as a co-author on the (hopefully soon to be) forthcoming Seventh Edition of the Aspen casebook, Problems and Materials in Federal Income Taxation. In between, I try to maximize my time with my wonderful and supportive wife Andrea (without whom I would not be where I am today) and our two sons Samuel Lee (age 2 ½) and Henry Fisher (7 mos.) as we explore Saint Louis. To the extent any time is left, I hope to return to jogging and golf, to which I have devoted less time than I would have liked over the past couple of years.

October 27, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 20, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Edward Kofi Osei (Widener)

B.S. 1981, University of Ghana
M.A. (International Management) 1985, Baylor
M.A. (International Relations) 1988, Yale
M.B.A. 1989, Stanford
J.D. 2003, Temple
LL.M. (Tax) 2007, NYU

My Ghanaian communal background, which charged me with the welfare and upkeep of my “neighbor,” has helped shape the development of my career and helped me to intertwine my well-being, happiness, hopes and dreams with those of my society. Extensive business travels have offered me the opportunity to contribute to, and be enriched by, the experiences and perspectives of different peoples and cultures. My journey to a tax professorship has been long and winding. Long and winding because I had worked in business as a non-lawyer for over 15 years before deciding to attend law school.

I was born in Ghana and had my first break in life when I was selected by my Ghanaian high school to be an exchange student to William Hall High School in West Hartford, CT. Upon graduating from Hall High, I returned to Ghana to attend college at the University of Ghana.

While in college, I quickly came to the realization that I could become self-actualized in my birth country because of political instability. I therefore began looking for a way to get back to the United States and secure financial assistance to attend graduate school. My persistence paid off when Baylor University in Texas offered me a full scholarship.

Baylor University is a wonderful institution that made my transition and immersion into the U.S. a smooth one. I had many excellent professors and mentors, including Dr. Stan Madden of the Business School, who challenged me to excel and to expand my horizons. After Baylor, I applied to Stanford Business School and Yale’s International Relations Program. I got accepted into both, and designed my own joint-degree program which enabled me to get an M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Yale.

After Stanford, I worked in the fields of Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions, Strategic Planning, and Sales and Marketing. I began my post M.B.A. career with Eastman Kodak and then moved on to Pepsi-Cola. At Pepsi, I led multifunctional teams to acquire companies worth $20 million to $100 million in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. I also spent two years in South Africa as part of Pepsi’s start-up team responsible for strategic planning. In 1996, I joined Bristol Myers Squibb as their Senior Manager for Business Planning. In 1999, I joined AstraZeneca as their Manager for Managed Care Marketing and Contracting.

It was while at AstraZeneca, that I began thinking about law school and tax law. My role at AstraZeneca brought me into daily contact with lawyers, and I began to view law school as a way of enhancing my business knowledge. In addition, in my many years of business experience, I saw companies fail to capitalize on promising business opportunities because of legal and tax constraints. Oftentimes, such failure was caused by a lack of appreciation for the legal and tax issues raised by the transactions. These experiences left me curious about the interrelation of law and business, as I was struck by the strong correlation between a strong economy and a strong legal tax system. It is for that reason that I applied to Temple Law School’s evening program and also took many tax courses at Temple Law School, and why I want to NYU to deepen my tax knowledge.

After law school, I had the opportunity to clerk for the late Clifford Scott Green of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. I then joined the law firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner in Short Hills, NJ as a litigation associate with some exposure to transactional practice.

In all those years, I realized that I live to teach and learn, and that I particularly enjoy the university environment. It was for that reason that I applied for a law teaching job at Widener Law School. Right now, I teach basic federal income tax, sales and contracts. It is quite a challenge teaching for the first time, but it gets better every day. I have, however, been pleasantly surprise at how much I enjoy teaching and how supportive my Widener colleagues have been. I look forward to a satisfying professional life.

October 20, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 13, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Sarah B. Lawsky (George Washington)

A.B. 1994, Chicago
J.D. 2001, Yale
LL.M. (Tax) 2006, NYU

As my family tree demonstrates, my current job teaching tax law at George Washington University Law School, located at 20th and H Streets in Washington, D.C., may actually be genetically predetermined [click on diagram to enlarge]:

But let me back up. While my interests in writing and teaching appeared early, my interest in tax arrived late; I didn’t take a single tax class in law school. But the year after I graduated from law school, I read Marvin Chirelstein’s classic Federal Income Taxation and Michael Graetz’s The Federal Income Tax and fell in love with tax law.

I spent the next five years as a tax associate at New York law firms, the last three and a half at Hogan & Hartson’s New York office with an amazing group of lawyers. At night I studied for my LL.M. in tax law at NYU, where I had one great teacher after another, both practitioners and full-time professors. And at least once every semester, I was able to answer a question at work by referring to my class notes from the night before. (My personal favorite was when I was taking Taxation of Financial Instruments, which really was irrelevant to my practice, and a partner came into my office one morning wondering whether a 100-year bond would be treated as debt for tax purposes. “Well, funny you should ask that….”)

As much as I enjoyed practicing tax law, I wanted to have more time to think and write about the tax issues that really fascinated me, and I also liked the idea of introducing other people to a subject as exciting and pervasive as tax. So last year I took the plunge and entered the teaching job market. And that brings us back to the opening chart, and GW Law School.

Outside of my interest in tax, I’m pretty fond of my dog, Tonka. After five years of slacking, she finally, last year, obtained gainful employment as a therapy dog (not financially gainful, though, thus avoiding the question of whether she would have to file a separate tax return, which I believe would be a Form 1040-WOOF), which means that she and I now get to visit the local hospital, where Tonka invariably impresses everyone with her endless capacity for receiving head pats.

October 13, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 6, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Kristin Balding Gutting (Charleston)

B.S. 1997, Valparaiso University
J.D. 2000, St. Louis
LL.M. (Tax) 2001, Florida

A tax lawyer was not the career I envisioned growing up. I always thought that I would be a FBI agent or some type of advertising executive. When I started college at Valparaiso University, I decided to major in marketing. I soon realized that marketing would require me to participate in several group projects a semester. Unfortunately, this was not something to which I would be able to give 100 percent, because I was on a softball scholarship and traveled throughout the Spring semester. I thought it would be unfair for me to receive a grade as a group that I was unable to attend a majority of the group meetings. So, instead, I decided that I would follow my other career path and major in accounting (a very common major for FBI agents). Throughout my undergraduate studies, I found myself really enjoying my tax classes. However, when I went to law school, I still had the idea of being an FBI agent.

In my second semester of law school, basic federal income tax was required. Once again, I found myself intrigued by my tax class (i.e. once again bit by the tax bug). Tax was a big puzzle that was always changing and which could be solved in many different ways. However, it was not until my internship with the Department of Justice – Criminal Tax Division that I realized that tax was not something that I just liked, but something I could spend the rest of my life exploring. Once it became clear that tax was the perfect fit for me, I took as many tax classes as I could during my third year of law school. Additionally, during my third year, I spent a semester teaching “Street Law” at an intercity high school in St. Louis. I discovered that while teaching I was the happiest that I had ever been. I cannot explain the feeling I felt when a light bulb would go off in one of my student’s heads, and he or she just got it. I knew from that point on that someday, I would want to be a law school professor, and what better subject than TAX. Thus, I decided to further my education (knowledge) in tax by attending University of Florida’s Graduate Tax Program. While at the University of Florida, I focused my studies primarily in the area of international tax.

After graduation, I moved to D.C., where I practiced for an accounting firm in international tax. However, I found myself reading tax opinions and wanting to make arguments that one of the parties did not make and being curious about areas other than international tax. When an old classmate called and said that she was leaving her firm where she was in the tax controversy group and wanted to know if I would be interested in interviewing, I jumped on the opportunity. As a result, in January of 2003, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where I began my practice in tax controversy at Chamberlain Hrdlicka.

Almost two years later, I moved to Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, where I worked in both the tax controversy and state and local tax groups. I enjoyed my practice (and the people I worked with) tremendously, but ultimately knew that I wanted to teach, mentor, and explore issues that were of interest to me rather than those based on my client’s current needs. Thus, when the opportunity arose to return to the University of Florida, this time as a Visiting Assistant Professor, I knew the time was right to pursue my academic interests. I had been called in past years, but just felt that I did not have enough experience to bring to the classroom until last year. However, when they called me regarding the 2005-06 school year, I jokingly asked if it would be okay if I took a maternity leave for the first three months of the fall semester, as I was due to have my first child in August of 2005 (his name is Jackson and he is now an inquisitive 14 month old little boy). Everything finally worked out, and I was able to accept the job (honor) to teach at the University of Florida for the 2006-07 school year.

After finishing my rookie year at Florida, I accepted a position at the Charleston School of Law. This fall I am teaching Federal Individual Income Taxn. In the spring, I look forward to teaching Partnership Tax and Advanced Federal Income Tax.

October 6, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 29, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 David Gamage (UC-Berkeley)

B.A. 1998, Stanford
M.A. 2000, Stanford
J.D. 2005, Yale

Two years ago, Paul asked me to submit a Tax Prof Profile just as I was beginning a fellowship teaching tax courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Now that I have completed that fellowship and have joined the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) as a tenure-track professor, my old profile strikes me as something written by a much younger, adolescent-like, version of myself.

If there is any truth to my self-perception of having grown significantly as a scholar, the credit lies primarily with the kindness and mentoring I received while at the University of Texas. I owe a profound debt to the Texas faculty – and in particular to Bob Peroni, without whom I might not have survived the job market.

Throughout my academic career, I have been blessed with wonderful mentors. As an undergraduate and graduate student at Stanford, I was lucky enough to work individually with giants like Mark Granovetter and Mitch Polinsky. At Yale, Dan Markovits, Anne Alstott, and Bruce Ackerman got me started thinking about taxation and in developing my first legal writings. Upon arriving at Texas, my work improved tremendously through the assistance of Mark Gergen, Calvin Johnson, Bob Peroni and many others. Although I have only been at Berkeley for a few weeks, I have been overwhelmed by the generosity shown to me by my new colleagues in both the law school and the economics department. I feel truly blessed to be welcomed by such eminent scholars.

I remain as interested in tax lawmaking and in the use (and abuse) of economic theory in tax scholarship as I was two years ago. But I have also developed a strong interest in how these issues play out at the state and local levels. In addition to teaching Federal Income Taxation and Corporate Taxation, I expect to add State and Local Government Law and possibly also State and Local Taxation to my course package.

Now that I actually have a job, I suppose I can admit to having a personal life as well. I live with my fiancée and our two cats. We will be formally married in June, following which we are planning to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for our honeymoon. I’ve been joking for months about wishing I had asked for a yak to pull me to the top as part of my employment contract.

September 29, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 22, 2007

This week's Tax Prof Spotlight inaugurates a series of profiles of folks starting their careers this fall as law school tax professors. I hope the profiles will help introduce our newest colleagues to the tax community.

Spotlight_1_1 T. Keith Fogg (Villanova)

B.A. 1974, William & Mary
J.D. 1977, Richmond
LL.M. 1982, William & Mary

Like most students I went to college with one career path in mind and changed as courses directed my interests to other areas. I thought I would pursue accounting but one class of accounting convinced me otherwise. I switched to a Government major and pointed toward law school.

My grandfather passed away shortly before I graduated from college and that influenced my law school choice. I attended the University of Richmond and lived on the family farm with my grandmother who had never learned to drive. I loved criminal law in school but was offered a job with Chief Counsel, IRS thus beginning journey to the tax profession.

Initially, I worked in the National Office on refund suits. After 18 months I transferred to a field office where I tried numerous Tax Court cases and represented the Service in bankruptcy court. Ten years later I returned to the National Office to head a branch in the General Litigation Division focusing on bankruptcy and collection issues. Just before returning to the National Office I participated in a program that fostered my interest in teaching. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at the University of Arizona Law School working with two great professors, Arthur Andrews and Mark Ascher.

My position as a branch chief brought me into contact with all of the tax litigation then occurring in bankruptcy courts as the 1978 Bankruptcy Code worked its way into the Circuits and into the Supreme Court on numerous issues. I convinced Georgetown Law Center there was a need for a class in its LLM program on bankruptcy and tax issues. For the past 15 years I have been an adjunct faculty member there teaching that class. The confluence of bankruptcy and tax law is where my primary research interest lies.

I returned to Richmond in 1992 as the District Counsel. That position caused me to pay attention to low income taxpayers. The inventory of low income taxpayers litigating in Tax Court was high and the interest of the more senior attorneys in the office in working those cases was low. Consequently, I began to heavily recruit volunteer interns to assist the office in low dollar cases. I quickly realized that I enjoyed working with students on cases. Simultaneously, Nina Olson began her tax clinic in Richmond, the Community Tax Law Project, to serve low income taxpayers. As I worked with that clinic and watched it serve a previously underserved population, I gained an appreciation for the benefits of low income clinics.

I am excited to have the opportunity to direct the excellent tax clinic that Les Book and Villanova Law School have developed. I will miss the many wonderful people with whom I have worked at Chief Counsel’s office and the Department of Justice.

I thank my wife, Beth, who is willing to follow me on this adventure. We have three adult children who seem to spend their time traveling the world. My hobbies are bicycling and traveling to remote (and not so remote) places to visit my children.

September 22, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 15, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Kim Brooks (McGill University, Faculty of Law)

B.A. 1994, University of Toronto
L.L.B. 1997, University of British Columbia
LL.M. 2001, York University (Osgoode Hall Law School)

I have a soft spot for Bruce Springsteen. When I was a little kid, my father would play “Hungry Heart” on high volume on our stereo, and we would jump around on our living room couches screaming the lyrics. It meant little that neither of us could carry a tune. Teaching tax law, at its best, is rather like those moments – it requires enormous energy, should be understood as a group effort, leads to sweating, and is a great deal of good fun. I love teaching tax, corporate tax, and international tax. I am always surprised that someone actually pays me to spend my days at this job.

A dedicated and dynamic tax professor, and the conceptual problems tax law presents, drew me to the subject in law school. It is hard to imagine another subject that combines such wonderful and complex problems alongside such obvious social and economic policy issues and the need to employ statutory interpretation tools.

The problem-solving aspects of tax law led me to practice tax law at a firm in Toronto for several years. However, I missed the conversations that occur in a law school environment, and was fortunate to be hired to teach beginning in 2001.

I have spent my first years as an academic building my substantive tax law and tax theory grounding. I have been fortunate to visit San Jose as the San Jose State University International Tax Policy Research Fellow and to visit Sydney as the Abe Greenbaum Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales (Atax). Indeed, I have learned an enormous amount from the close connection between Australian and Canadian tax scholars generally.

This year, I moved from UBC’s faculty of law to McGill’s faculty of law to assume the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in the Law of Taxation. Although I never met Heward Stikeman personally, I did practice at the firm he formed with partner Fraser Elliott. Stikeman was renowned for his energy and optimism, his beekeeping, and in the tax world, for his commitment to simplification of tax legislation.

I am particularly delighted to have joined McGill’s faculty – a faculty that is committed to bijuralism, bilingualism, and bringing a comparative approach to the study of law. I hope that as our tax program develops more over the next several years I am able to see some of you in Montreal!

September 15, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 8, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Pamela Champine (New York Law School)

B.S. 1985, Illinois
J.D. 1988, Northwestern
LL.M. (Tax) 1990, NYU

In my 20th year after graduating from law school, I enjoy tax as much as I did when I took my first tax class with Charlotte Crane. Initially, I was drawn to tax law by the Code’s ostensible precision and organization. I quickly learned that the Code offered fewer clear answers and more underlying inconsistencies than I had first thought, but that drew me even more strongly to tax. Having received my undergraduate degree in Accountancy, I welcomed the opportunity to integrate my understanding of the established principles and provisions of tax law with the opportunities to see ambiguities and to think about how alternative interpretations of ambiguous provisions advance competing tax policies.

After a year of general practice in a small Chicago firm, I headed to NYU to improve my understanding of tax law. I joined the Personal Affairs (a/k/a Trusts & Estates) Department of a major NYC law firm, where I focused on estate and gift tax, private foundations, and individual income tax planning. Eventually, practice became routine and I looked for a new challenge. I found that in the Law Department of the New York County Surrogate’s Court, serving first as Principal Court Attorney and later as Law Secretary to Surrogate Eve Preminger. I had dreamed of becoming an academic, but understood the improbability of securing a teaching appointment without a federal clerkship or law review experience.

My dream of an academic appointment came true when I joined the faculty of New York Law School. At NYLS, I focus on trusts & estates and teach tax courses as well. Similarly, I write about trusts and estates issues that involve tax as well as trusts and estates issues that have no significant tax component to them. My current scholarship interests focus on testamentary capacity, and specifically the use of forensic psychology to improve evidentiary determinations in this area.

September 8, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 1, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Cheyañna Jaffke (Western State)

A.B. 1993, Idaho
J.D. 1996, Idaho
LL.M. (Tax) 1997, University of Washington

“Federal Income Tax saved me from dropping out of law school.” After my first year of law school at the University of Idaho, I did not think that law school was for me. But I decided to stick it out for one more semester and one of my classes that semester was Federal Income Tax with John Miller. Finally, a class in law school that I could understand and seemed black and white. I had a code book that I could find the answers in. I did not understand why my classmates thought the class was hard.

That summer I interned with the District Counsel’s office of the IRS in Seattle. I then got my LL.M. in Tax from the University of Washington, because my professor, Jeff Maine told me that "an LL.M. in Tax will open doors for you."

Almost immediately upon graduation a door was opened, I started teaching as a visitor at Western State University. I was the entire tax department. After a year, I was offered a tenure-track position. I started a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program on campus that won awards from the ABA for several years.

I have also managed to have a small tax practice handling a handful of clients, some I have had since I graduated law school.

I also volunteer by teaching fourth, fifth and sixth graders in the Children’s ministry at my church. I am planning a trip to Israel in May 2008. I am hoping to do some geo-caching while I am there.

But my true claim to fame is that I went to high school with Jamie Foxx. Although, I knew him as Eric Bishop and he was a year ahead of me.

I was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury to serve on the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel. I was Chair of the California Committee, which represents California taxpayers in grassroots efforts by identifying taxpayer’s issue and making recommendations to improve customer service at the IRS. I authored changes to the Offer in Compromise form that was adopted by the IRS.

When I am not reading the tax code for fun, I love to go geo-caching. I have partnered up with another law professor and we use a GPS receiver to hunt for secret caches that other have hidden. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and "treasure," usually toys or trinkets. I have heard stories of others finding goodies, like concert tickets, but we have not had that luck. We hid a cache with a lottery ticket in it, but no word on if it was a winner.

September 1, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 25, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Glenn Coven (William & Mary)

A.B. 1963, Swarthmore
LL.B. 1966, Columbia

I have always felt badly that I could not answer the question, “And why did you decide to go into teaching tax, Mr. Coven?”, with something like “Gee, ever since I was a little kid I yearned for the day when I could put a smile on the faces of other boys and girls by explaining the beauty of the internal logic of section 336.” Not so. In fact, I seem to have gotten here by stumbling aimlessly down a path that just kept unfolding before me.

In high school I thought I wanted to be an architect (that would have been a disaster) but in my senior year I could not get into a class on mechanical drawing so I decided to become a lawyer instead. Apparently I didn’t reexamine that decision all the way through Swarthmore because I ended up at Columbia Law School. I was so impressed by that experience that, at the end of my first year, I applied to the New York Telephone Co. for a job as a lineman. They turned me down for the reason that I was over-qualified (which seemed untrue) and I returned to Columbia.

Following a slightly more pleasant second year of law school (law review helped), I took a summer associate position at what was then called Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts. On my first day tour of the offices, I was introduced to the senior tax partner and it seemed polite to remark that tax sounded interesting. Apparently no one had ever said that before. In any event, the remark landed me in the tax department where I spent a reasonably enjoyable summer. When I returned to the firm full-time (following an enormously enjoyable clerkship on the Second Circuit with Harold Medina), it was assumed that I would be a tax associate -- which indeed was just fine with me.

I greatly enjoyed the general tax practice of a Wall Street firm but in the mid-70s, the economy tanked and Congress passed the ERISA legislation. That combination of events suggested that I would spend the next few years rewriting pension plans and that meant it was time to change jobs. My plan was to pursue my hobby and become a studio potter while teaching on the side (how much time could that take?) until I became established. Happily (I think), the teaching worked out better than the ceramics and the rest is history.

I had the good fortune to begin teaching at the University of Tennessee which, at the time, had (and probably still does) a very strong socratic teaching tradition. That shaped my style to the present day although I must admit that today I am quicker to decide to explain the world as I see it rather than try to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear perceived by my students.

Back in those early days and after my move to William & Mary, while I enjoyed teaching, I enjoyed writing much more –- which was a good thing. Who could forget all those happy hours spent hunched over a portable typewriter retyping page after page without the slightest thought of a summer grant. Like my career, my scholarship has followed a crooked path. In fact, it has been my policy (generally followed) to never write on the same topic twice. Writing on a broad range of topics is a great antidote to boredom –- and to the development of expertise with all its attend burdens.

Having never stayed with anything (except Joan, my wife) for a decade, it never occurred to me in 1976 that I would stay long in teaching. Yet, here I am 31 years later in my final year of full time teaching and very pleased indeed with what I stumbled into.

August 25, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 18, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Brian Galle (Florida State)

A.B. 1995, Harvard
J.D. 2001, Columbia
LL.M. (Tax) 2006, Georgetown

I started out wanting to be a professional writer. But then, I was eight; to me, a “starving writer” was what you were when you had to finish your homework before you could have dessert. By sixteen, I was hip to finances, and I had a plan: be a lawyer, make the big bucks, retire young. Write full-time by fifty.

In college and shortly thereafter, I discovered two very important things. First, that arguing is more fun than writing (this is the obligatory debate-team shout-out). More importantly, that it was very, very unlikely that any novel I wrote would make any difference to social justice, or, for that matter, any difference to anyone who needed anything other than a way to pass their time on the beach or the bus.

So, I went to law school (Columbia). The new plan was: get government job. Get lots of litigation experience quickly. If government feels insufficiently worthy, find or start a public-interest legal organization (the National Housing Law Project, where I summered, seemed a reasonable possibility. By the way, you can visit them on-line, and give them the money they deserve). I wanted white-collar prosecution work, but didn’t enjoy my time in Antitrust (all grand jury, no trials). So the first semester of my third year I took Dave Schizer’s tax course, hoping it might lead me to a job in the DOJ Tax Division.

Fast forward two years. By good fortune, there was a rare opening in DOJ at the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section of the Tax Division just as I was applying. It was, in many ways, the perfect job. Writing, policy, arguing. A little bit of Supreme Court practice. No discovery, no document review. Near-total autonomy 99% of the time. Great colleagues, wonderful leadership all the way to the top of the Tax Division.

But then there were the post-it notes. They’d begun gathering in my 3L summer at the Office of Legal Counsel, and I moved them from job to job. I kept them in the top center drawer. Pretty soon the center drawer was full, and they started covering the top right and left drawers, too. Anytime I had an idea, an idea that whatever was on top of the desk raised, but, oh, the existing law didn’t really get it *right* -- I wrote a post-it. I found myself spending more time thinking about what was inside the desk than what was on top of it.

Finally, it dawned on me: “Hey, if somebody will pay me to write about these post-its, I *can* be a professional writer, and maybe do a little bit of public service, too.” But my interests at the Tax Division had gotten mostly to be in tax and public finance, and I, frankly, just didn’t know enough about either field to be a really good scholar. So I got an LLM in Tax at Georgetown, which fortuitously was (1) three blocks away, and (2) willing to pay my tuition. I’m sure other LLM programs are also excellent, but it’s hard to think of a better environment for a future tax academic. If there’s not enough tax happenings at the law school for you (unlikely), there’s Brookings, CBPP, AEI, and (for gluttons for punishment) those folks under the big white dome.

The next January I again lucked into a great job. In the middle of callbacks at other schools, I spotted an e-mail on the TaxProf email listserv (by this remarkably prolific Joseph Dodge fellow) calling for applications for a tax professor at FSU, which hadn’t deigned to interview me in D.C. The rest is history. While maybe no one would complain if it there were less humidity or more non-stop flights, my colleagues (especially my tax colleagues) are remarkable. I’m not sure why they changed their minds about me, but I’m glad they did. Now if only they could help me to figure out what to do with all these darned post-its...

August 18, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 11, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Mona L. Hymel (Arizona)

B.B.A. 1981, Texas
J.D. 1992, Texas

I started preparing tax returns when I was about 15 years old. My father owned a small accounting business in South Texas, and I earned extra money working for him. All of his clients worked in the Shrimping Industry, so I worked mostly on Sub S and individual tax returns. I got my accounting degree from the University of Texas and went to work for Arthur Young (one of the Big 8 then) in Houston after college. After a year as an auditor, I moved to tax. I found tax work much more interesting and challenging. From Arthur Young, I moved to a large real estate developer and a multinational construction contractor where I continued to working in tax compliance. Although the work was interesting, I did not feel challenged.

After working as a CPA in Houston for 8 years, I decided to return to law school. Preparing tax returns had lost its appeal. OK – it never had appeal. Tax policy issues were endless and infinitely more interesting. My decision to become a professor stemmed from my love of academics and writing. I spent three years at the University of Texas badgering my professors for advice on how to become a law professor. With great mentoring and lots of luck, I ended up at the University of Arizona in 1995.

Although the years preparing tax returns did not hold my favorite career experiences, much of my research passion stems from those days working in Houston. Much of my work was dominated by oil and gas and real estate interests. My research on the use of taxes to stimulate the oil and gas industry, as well as my interest in environmental taxes stems from experiences working in this area. My interest in the regulation of lawyers also stems from my curiosity over the professional differences between CPAs and attorneys that provide tax advice and planning services to clients. Multidisciplinary practice issues continue to interest me, and I believe that boundaries between professionals will always be contentious.

Despite my children growing up too fast and the truth about gravity, I feel pretty lucky to have such a great career.

August 11, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 4, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Heather M. Field (UC-Hastings)

B.S. 1997, UCLA
J.D. 2000, Harvard

I took an indirect road to tax law – when I started college, I wanted to be a chemistry professor. I majored in biochemistry at UCLA, and I planned to pursue a Ph.D. and teach chemistry at the college level. However, near the end of my college career, I realized that although I loved studying chemistry, I did not enjoy being in the laboratory. Since it is pretty hard to be a great research chemist without spending a lot of time in the lab, I was forced to rethink my plans, and I decided to go to law school.

There is not an obvious connection between chemistry and law, but my father went to law school after working as a chemical engineer, so my choice to go to law school did not seem particularly unusual to me. When I started Harvard Law School, I did not know what type of law I wanted to practice until I had the good fortune to take federal income tax with Louis Kaplow and corporate tax with Reuven Avi-Yonah. I liked all of my law school classes, but everything just clicked for me in my tax classes. I enjoyed studying the intricacies of the Code; tax law seemed like a big puzzle, and dare I say – fun.

After law school, I practiced at Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles, and it was there that I really got hooked on tax. I was incredibly fortunate to work with a superb group of lawyers, including Larry Stein, who was a wonderful mentor and teacher. I found that the more tax work I did, the more tax work I wanted to do. In my almost six years at Latham, I had the opportunity to work on the tax aspects of wide variety of transactions in areas including M&A, private equity, corporate finance and structured finance. My practice experience gave me quite an education about corporate and partnership tax, and now, my practice experience informs both my teaching and my research.

As much as I liked tax practice and my colleagues at Latham, I wanted to be in an academic setting where I could share the tax code and my experience in tax practice with students and where I could research and write about the things that are most interesting to me. In 2006, I joined the faculty at UC Hastings College of the Law. I feel so privileged to join an outstanding faculty, including an esteemed tax faculty (Dan Lathrope, Steve Lind, Steve Schwarz, Bill Hutton and Leo Martinez). Last year, I taught federal income tax, corporate and partnership tax, and a seminar on tax policy, and this coming year, I will also teach a course on advanced issues in corporate and partnership tax. My advanced issues class tracks closely with my research interests, which focus on the impact of tax law on business. [See Fiction, Form and Substance in Subchapter K -- Approaching Partnership Mergers, Divisions and Incorporations.]

It was with some regret that I abandoned my plans to teach chemistry, but now that have found my way back to academics as a tax prof, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.

August 4, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 28, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Karen Green (Mississippi)

B.S. 1971, Mississippi
J.D. 1974, Mississippi
LL.M. (Tax) 1976, NYU

I began my education as a math major at the University of Mississippi in the late 60s. When I graduated in 1971, I had two job offers -- one in the corporate trust division of a Memphis bank and one as a systems analyst for IBM. Somewhat oddly, considering my love of math and computer programming, I chose the bank job and became interested in becoming a securities lawyer. I returned to Mississippi to attend law school, where I discovered that I enjoyed all things tax -- corporate, partnership, individual, etc. Upon graduation from law school, I immediately entered the graduate tax program at NYU, which was a wonderful academic experience for me.

During my year at NYU, one of my former law professors, who taught in the estate & gift tax field, retired and I was offered the opportunity to teach tax. When I began teaching, women were just beginning to increase their numbers in law school and there were very few in the field of taxation. In fact, I spoke at many meetings of practicing lawyers around the southeastern part of the country where I would be introduced as the “best female tax attorney in Mississippi.” Of course, at the time, I was the only female tax attorney in the state. I have spent many years focusing on current issues in the estate tax field and speaking to practicing attorneys and other professional groups. However, I have most enjoyed teaching in the area of partnership tax, which I teach both at Mississippi and at the Alabama LL.M. tax program. I think it has a certain special appeal for math types and it is such a hot topic with the growth of private equity and hedge funds. During my career, I was also lucky enough to serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs under Dean Louis Westerfield, our first African-American dean, which turned out to be a challenging and very rewarding experience.

Outside of my work, I enjoy trading stocks in a small investment account, where I place bets on companies with legal problems. My husband and I are currently restoring an 1850s farmhouse where we’ll retire in the next few years, which will open a nice faculty position here in the delightful town of Oxford for some bright young tax scholar.

July 28, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 21, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Arthur Cockfield (Queen's University)

H.B.A. 1990, University of Western Ontario Richard Ivey School of Business
LL.B. 1993, Queen’s University Faculty of Law
J.S.M. 1996, Stanford
J.S.D. 1998, Stanford

Now in my eighth year of law teaching, I still have to occasionally pinch myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming. Like many others, it is hard for me to imagine a better job than working as a law professor. It is truly a privilege to be able to teach and write for a living (not to mention padding around my house in my pajamas this summer’s day for most of the morning, but I digress …).

How did I get to be a tax prof? My interest in tax began during my undergraduate degree where I majored in finance at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario; I was lucky to have been taught tax and finance courses by the late Sam Martin, a truly inspiring teacher. Having wanted to work as a lawyer since a young kid (hokey but true!), I then went off to study law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and, again, was fortunate to have strong tax teachers and researchers, including the late Alex Easson.

As a law student, I began to develop an academic interest in the law, considered becoming a prof one day, but worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. So off I went to a downtown Toronto firm (Goodmans LLP) for a couple of years of practice, then graduate law studies at Stanford where I was extremely lucky (third time’s the charm) to take tax courses taught by Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman, along with dissertation research support from Tom Heller and Jack McNulty of Boalt Hall. Our first son, Arthur, was born during this time and I was able to take care of him for a couple of years while my spouse Mariah worked; our days were filled with Jamba Juice and trips to the Half Moon Bay beach.

My first appointment as an Assistant Professor was at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego in 1998. I taught there for three years, surrounded by amazing colleagues and wonderful weather. In 2001, I took a position back at Queen’s where I was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar, and have been there ever since. I’ve been the Associate Dean for the past couple of years and am looking forward to returning to full-time teaching and writing when my sentence ends in another year.

In terms of tax teaching, I have tried to develop a "narrative law teaching" method for most of my classes. I’ve experimented with different approaches, but the main approach is to create a small novel comprised of say eight chapters that tells the story of a lawyer struggling with a particular dramatic issue; at the end of each chapter, I set out tax problems that the students work on at home, and which we take up during the next class. The students seem to be receptive to this approach, and this summer I’m working on a "novel" for a new course I’m scheduled to teach in the fall: Accounting for Lawyers. In addition to teaching Federal Income Tax, Taxation of Business Entities, and International Tax (in both Canadian and U.S. tax law), I’ve also taught non-tax courses such as Contracts, Cyberlaw, E-commerce Law, Corporations, and Corporate Finance.

With respect to scholarship, I’ve focused my research on issues surrounding the taxation of e-commerce, trying to understand how technology change challenges traditional tax rules. In another line of research, I’ve tried to discern an appropriate tax policy response for Canada, the United States, and Mexico under regional economic integration promoted by NAFTA. In addition, I’ve done some research in the area of privacy law and law and technology theory. Some of these works are set out in my SSRN author page. My most recent SSRN posting is Purism versus Contextualism in International Tax Law Analysis: How Traditional Analysis Fails Developing Countries. I argue that much international tax law scholarship (including—gulp—my own) has been overly influenced by international tax economics instead of taking into account the broader context such as the political dynamics that shape international tax reform efforts.

Since becoming a prof, I’ve authored or edited the following books:

Technology, Privacy and Justice (Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice, 2007) (with Lisa Austin)

International Taxation in Canada: Practices and Principles (LexisNexis, 2006) (with Jinyan Li & Scott Wilkie)

NAFTA Tax Law and Policy: Resolving the Clash between Economic and Sovereignty Interests (University of Toronto Press, 2005)

The End (SSI Publishing, 2003) [an environmental apocalypse novel]

Cyberspace Law: Cases and Materials (Aspen Publishing, 2002) (with Raymond Ku & Michele Farber)

UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (UNESCO Publishers, 2002) (co-theme editor of "Law" and "International Law" with Aaron Schwabach)

Hobbies include watching too many cheesy movies (and occasional good ones), playing tennis, and coaching kids’ soccer. Yet another great aspect about working as a law prof is the flexibility that it provides so that I can help raise our three children, Arthur, Jack, and William.

July 21, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Fred B. Brown (Baltimore)

B.S. 1982, Rutgers
J.D. 1985, Georgetown
LL.M. (Tax) 1986, NYU

I believe that my interest in tax law stemmed from my background as an engineering major in college. Engineering students are often working with complex formulas and applying them to factual situations. I see the work of tax professionals as similar, given that the Code is composed of formulas – expressed in prose instead of symbols, but formulas nonetheless. Engineering students also often use diagrams to analyze situations, another element in common with the study and application of tax law.

While in law school at Georgetown, I took several tax courses, and having enjoyed them, I decided to pursue an LL.M. in Taxation at NYU immediately following law school. My favorite course at NYU was Tax Policy with Noel Cunningham, which really helped to tie everything together and give it meaning. I was fascinated by Noel’s explanation of tax theory, and I think it was at this point I decided that teaching and writing about tax law was the thing for me.

During my second semester at NYU, I became aware that the school was accepting applications for positions as acting assistant professors in the graduate tax program. I jumped at the opportunity, and was very fortunate to receive one of the appointments. It was a wonderful and valuable experience. I learned a great deal about teaching from the very talented teachers on the tax faculty there, in particular, Noel, Deborah Schenk, Brooks Billman, and Lenny Schmolka. I also benefited a lot from my student evaluations, which at first were quite poor and then got progressively better. Even though I didn’t write while at NYU, I still learned something about scholarship. I was quite honored and surprised when Noel and Deborah asked me to read and comment on their pieces, and even more so when they seemed to listen to what I had to say. They have been great mentors, and I owe them a lot for all of their help and advice.

After my two years of teaching at NYU, I had pretty much decided that I wanted a career as a tax professor. Nevertheless, I felt that I had to practice tax law – I might enjoy it, and at very least, the experience of practicing tax law should help to make me a better teacher and scholar. I took a position with Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C., working in the firm’s tax group. There I worked mainly with several excellent attorneys in addressing the taxation of foreign corporations with U.S. business operations. It was my first exposure to international taxation, and the work was quite exciting and challenging, especially since we were working on many cutting edge issues raised by recently promulgated regulations dealing with the branch profits tax, the excess interest tax, and interest expense deductions.

While I enjoyed and benefited from my time in private practice, after a couple of years I felt it was time to begin my career as a tax professor. I was fortunate to receive an appointment at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and I have been there ever since, primarily teaching tax courses in the school’s graduate tax program (which I have directed since 1999). The graduate tax classes at the University of Baltimore contain a mix of lawyers (going for an LL.M. in Tax), accountants (going for an M.S. in Tax), and law students, and this provides an interesting learning environment for the students as well as for me. Like other law teachers, I am constantly learning from my students, both with respect to teaching technique and the law, and their inquisitive minds force me to continue learning and developing as a teacher and tax professional. I still get a high when a class goes well, and a bit of a low when it doesn’t. Like many teachers, I find it quite gratifying when I see that the students really do get it, and that I had something to do with it.

My scholarship has focused on some fundamental issues, such as realization and nonrecognition, as well as on international tax issues. Like many others, I am somewhat frustrated over the complexity of the tax system and how irrational it is in some respects, and I aim to find a better way. I have benefited greatly from my wonderful tax colleagues at Baltimore -- Walter Schwidetzky, Wendy Gerzog, Jack Lynch and Keith Blair. Through our frequent discussions of tax issues and reviews of each other’s articles, I have learned a great deal about tax and writing about tax. I value their friendship and support.

When I am not busy with school work, I enjoy spending time with my wonderful spouse, Grace, and my three great kids, Molly, Aaron, and Reed. We enjoy playing (or watching in my case) sports, riding bikes, hiking, playing games, and just hanging out talking or watching TV/movies. We also take at least one long family vacation each year, and are about to leave for China and Taiwan. Grace and I realize how fleeting the time is that parents have with their children, and we make an effort to spend as much time with them as possible. I also do quite a bit of running. My very good friend and (nontax) colleague, Don Stone, and I run together frequently, including several marathons. We are currently training to run a half marathon in the fall. What we lack in speed we make up for in style (well not really).

Each Saturday, TaxProf Blog shines the spotlight on one of the 700+ tax professors in America's law schools. We hope to help bring the many individual stories of scholarly achievements, teaching innovations, public service, and career moves within the tax professorate to the attention of the broader tax community. Please email me suggestions for future Tax Prof Profiles. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.

July 14, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 30, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Roger M. Groves (Florida Coastal)

B.A. 1974, Michigan State
J.D. 1978, Wayne State

Roger undoubtedly is the only TaxProf who played the piano at Magic Johnson's wedding and opened for Stevie Wonder. He is a former tax judge in Michigan, partner in Howard & Howard and counsel to Lewis & Munday. He teaches in the fields of federal taxation, state and local taxation, business organizations, and emerging issues in the business of sports. Prior to joining Florida Coastal, he was a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark.

Roger has provided business and tax representation of multi-national corporations, hospitals, governmental agencies, high profile individuals (e.g., Aretha Franklin, The Winans), and major college football coaches.

He has been a vice president and general counsel of a national health care distributor of sterile operating room equipment to over 600 hospitals and 125 surgery centers.

He has published the book Innocence in the Red Zone (2005), as well as numerous articles. His hobbies include playing the piano. He played at Magic Johnson’s wedding. and his college band opened for Stevie Wonder, Main Ingredient, and jazz great trumpeter Clark Terry. He has written a book on playing the piano by ear with a soulful style.

June 30, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 23, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Ben Alarie (Toronto)

B.A. 1999, Wilfrid Laurier
J.D. 2002, Toronto
M.A. 2002, Toronto
LL.M. 2003, Yale

At the age of 14 I sat alone at the kitchen table with a pencil, an eraser, a solar powered calculator, two information slips, and an unpopulated tax return. My Dad had suggested I take a shot at filling out the return on my own. It was my first formal encounter with income taxes. At the time, I was amazed and deeply impressed by the at best partly obscured complexity of the income tax, and the curious puzzles it raised.

A few years later, I enrolled at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, where I majored in economics and finance, and took a number of courses in philosophy. After second year, I decided that I would continue with post-graduate studies. The only question was whether that would take the form of law school or graduate work in economics. I confronted the hard choice by choosing both, and shortly after graduation was enrolled at the University of Toronto in both the J.D. program at the Faculty of Law and the M.A. program at the Department of Economics.

In the summer following my first year as a law student, I was tremendously fortunate to work as a research assistant with Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels. I had an amazing three months of learning, researching, and writing in law and economics. Later, I took the introductory tax course with David Duff. Courses in corporate tax, tax policy, and international taxation soon followed. For the better part of law school the idea of becoming a tax academic with interests in law and economics was all-consuming.

I spent 2002-2003 as a graduate fellow at Yale Law School, where I took, among other courses, federal income tax with Michael Graetz. Coincidentally, I was lucky enough to be in New Haven to also assist with the Foundations of International Income Taxation. Other highlights included courses with Alan Schwartz, Henry Hansmann, Ralph Winter, Guido Calabresi, and a directed research project under the supervision of Ian Ayres.

During 2003-2004, I clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Madam Justice Louise Arbour (who is now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), and started searching for an entry-level teaching position. In February 2004, I was ecstatic after receiving an offer to return to the University of Toronto, this time with my back to the chalkboard. I snapped it up.

Among other delights since joining the Faculty of Law in July 2004, I have had the pleasure of inaugurating and coordinating the James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop with David Duff. The workshop has been an excellent way to keep abreast of some of the most interesting and important emerging scholarship in tax law and policy and has allowed us to bring to Toronto a number of the world’s most outstanding tax scholars, for our benefit and the benefit of the law school community.

If anything, I am now even more amazed and deeply impressed than I was at 14 at the complexity and richness of the income tax. I fully expect to be fruitfully occupied by its curiosities for many years to come.

June 23, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 16, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Janet E. Milne (Vermont)

B.A. 1973, Williams
J.D. 1981, Georgetown

Janet Milne specializes in environmental tax policy at Vermont Law School, where she also teaches land use regulation and regulatory takings. Her interest in law and taxation started shortly after she graduated from Williams College when went to work for Maine Coast Heritage Trust, one of the first land conservation organizations to promote the use of conservation easements. “I never entertained the idea of law school when I graduated, but working on land conservation projects with landowners and their attorneys shed a new and very interesting light on the role of attorneys—and the role of tax incentives.”

After five years in Maine, she went to Georgetown University Law Center, in part because of its tax offerings, and she served on the editorial board of the Georgetown Law Journal. At Georgetown, “I had the privilege of taking a superb tax policy seminar co-taught by Prof. Stephen Cohen and The Brookings Institution’s Joseph Pechman, which left an indelible mark and reinforced my interest in tax policy.”

Following law school, Janet clerked for Frank M. Coffin, then Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and returned to Washington, D.C. to work as an in-house attorney for The Washington Post, and then as an associate at Covington & Burling. In 1990, she went to Capitol Hill, where she was legislative assistant to Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Three years later, she headed north when her husband became publisher of a daily paper in northern New England. Vermont Law School, which specializes in environmental law, responded favorably to Janet’s proposal to teach a course in environmental taxation and subsequently invited her to teach other courses, including tax. “I had always wanted to teach after building a foundation of other professional experiences, and the stars lined up perfectly. I was able to merge my professional training in taxation with my interest in environmental issues earlier in my career.”

Through the Environmental Tax Policy Institute that Janet has created at the law school, she conducts externally funded research, and she hosted the Third Annual Global Conference on Environmental Taxation in 2002. She is a member of the four-person steering committee for the Annual Global Conference and is co-editor of the book series that publishes selected papers from the conferences, Critical Issues in Environmental Taxation (Oxford University Press). She also serves as a Vice Chair of the ABA Tax Section’s Energy and Environmental Taxes Committee and recently spoke at the European Commission’s first Brussels Tax Forum, which focused on environmental taxation. She continues to enjoy working at the intersection of tax law and environmental law. “For a tax professor, it’s a bit like being a hybrid vehicle—I have the extra battery pack of environmental law on board—but the combination of tax policy and environmental policy creates some fascinating opportunities.” In her spare time, Janet enjoys cooking, traveling, and watching for moose.

June 16, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

The SMU Graduate Tax Program began more than 50 years ago and prospered under Dean Charles O. Galvin. Today, U.S. News ranks SMU among the Top 20 law schools in tax and among the Top 10 graduate tax programs. In recent years, the SMU Law Review has published a special tax issue, including

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

Over this five-part series, TaxProf Blog has profiled SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy:

June 9, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 2, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy.

Joshua C. Tate

B.A. 1996, Pomono College
M.Phil. 1997, University of Cambridge
M.A. 2000, Yale
M.Phil. 2001, Yale
J.D. 2002, Yale
Ph.D. Candidate, Yale

Joshua C. Tate joined the SMU law faculty in 2005. He teaches courses on wills & trusts and property as well as legal history. In terms of scholarship, Josh divides his time between the modern law of gratuitous transfers and legal history. His most recent article, Conditional Love: Incentive Trusts and the Inflexibility Problem, appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of the Real Property, Probate, and Trust Journal.

Josh took several tax courses in law school, and the branch of tax most relevant to his research is estate and gift taxation. His work on dynasty trusts led him to study the GST tax and its generous exemption, which has been responsible for the abolition of the Rule Against Perpetuities in several states. Josh has argued that tax considerations are not the only reasons why dynasty trusts are being created, but he acknowledges that the tax advantages of such trusts are a primary consideration.

Josh is the son of an estate planner who still practices in southwest Colorado. Josh went to college intending to become a lawyer, but after taking several history courses he decided academia was more his style. He attended Yale Law School and worked as a summer associate at Jenner & Block in Chicago and Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, where he researched several tax matters. He was then selected as a Ribicoff fellow at Yale and a Golieb fellow at NYU, where he worked on his Ph.D. dissertation on the history of property rights (still in progress). Current research projects include an article on the inheritance rights of children and several legal history papers.

For prior SMU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

June 2, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 26, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy.

John J. Mylan

B.S. 1961, Fordham
J.D. 1964, Stanford
LL.M. (Tax) 1965, NYU

I am a native New Yorker and graduate of Fordham with a degree in mathematics. I changed both career path and geographic location upon graduation by attending Stanford Law School, I certainly had no thought of becoming a tax lawyer until I took the basic income tax course from Professor Joseph T. Sneed, a gifted and charismatic teacher whose insights into the tax system I still find valuable today. After Stanford, I returned to New York for a year to earn a graduate tax degree from NYU. My year as a student with that outstanding tax faculty was a great intellectual opportunity.

During my five years of tax practice in Southern California, I taught in the UC system to professional groups in the evenings and on weekends. Realizing these teaching experiences were the high points of my work life, I decided to try full-time teaching. My wife and I and our two small daughters then moved to Oregon and I taught at Willamette Law School for eleven years.. I enjoyed the intimacy and sense of community offered by teaching at a small law school. That was balanced by the three occasions in those eleven years when I was invited to teach in graduate tax programs. In my third year of teaching, I spent a year as a visiting professor in the NYU Graduate Tax program, a truly memorable experience to be on the faculty for a year with so many of my former teachers. I was later a visiting professor on the Florida graduate tax faculty, another exceptional group of individuals. Finally, we came as visitors to Dallas for a year so I could teach in SMU's J.D. and LL.M. tax programs. That visitorship has turned into a twenty six year affiliation with a tax program which was built by Charley Galvin in his years as Dean at SMU. I have appreciated having my former NYU student Hank Lischer and Christopher Hanna, another NYU LL.M., as tax colleagues.

I enjoy studying and teaching tax law with all that it reveals not only about commerce, law and politics, but about the human condition as well. I derive different satisfactions teaching in the J.D. and the LL.M. tax programs. I still find the vast landscape of the four-hour basic income tax course to be the most challenging to teach, but in many ways the most rewarding. I have taken particular satisfaction in having students with no prior interest in tax indicate that they now want to pursue tax as a career. I also find the basic tax course to be the best venue to engage in my secret desire to be a stand up comedian. On the other hand, the graduate tax courses I teach give me an opportunity to master some really complex Code provisions and, hopefully, make them understandable to our students.

I have published numerous tax articles and in 1990 co-authored a multi-volume treatise, Federal Taxation of Close Corporations (Thomson-West 1991), with my good friend Ed Hood of UMKC. This work is supplemented twice a year. For a number of years I have supplemented the twenty-four chapters covering Subchapter C, Subchapter S, and Employee Benefit Plans without the assistance of my co-author. I have also co-authored a treatise, Closely Held Businesses in Estate Planning (Aspen 2d ed. 1998), which we supplement annually.

In my 37 years of law teaching, there has rarely been a day that I have not looked forward to being in the classroom. I feel fortunate to have come upon the perfect career for me. Even after I retire from full-time teaching, I hope to teach as a visitor from time to time.

For prior SMU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

May 26, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 19, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy.

Henry J. Lischer, Jr.

B.B.A. (Accounting) 1967, Iowa
J.D. 1970, Iowa
LL.M. (Tax) 1974, NYU

Some of us end up as lawyers or law professors because we had, at a young age, a vision of what career to pursue. That was not my path to the tax professoriate. Being young (17) and uninformed when I headed off to the University of Iowa, I had no idea about what to study, so I followed my businessman father’s advice to study accounting. After one summer’s exposure to industrial accounting, I decided that I did not want to be a practicing accountant. My father, upon hearing that I did not want to be an accountant, said "Why don’t you go to law school?", and I again followed his advice and was admitted to the University of Iowa College of Law.

To my great good fortune, I found law school to be an extremely stimulating and satisfying experience, and I have been ever thankful for my father’s suggestion. During my second year of law school, I had Meade Emory as my tax teacher. Many of you know Meade or know of him, and I will not belabor his great skill as a classroom teacher. Suffice it to say that, from the first day of his highly entertaining and informative income tax class, I was hooked on tax. I took all of the tax courses that I could from Meade, and I cannot imagine a better foundation than the one Meade provided me.

I started law school in the fall of 1967 as the Vietnam war raged, shortly after President Johnson did away with graduate school deferments from the draft. LBJ did give my class a one-year deferment, so it was not likely that I would be able to finish law school without interruption. To avoid being drafted into the Army, I sought and obtained a slot in the Marine Corps Judge Advocate Corps. The advantage of the Marine Corps was that it would permit me to finish law school and then go on active duty. The disadvantage of the Marine Corps was that (1) I had to complete the regular Marine Corps 10-week OCS at Quantico, Virginia, after my first year of law school, (2) upon graduation from law school, I had to complete the Marine Corps 6-month infantry training at Quantico before attending Naval Justice School in Newport, Rhode Island, and becoming a Judge Advocate, and (3) I had a three-year service commitment. I survived all of that, saw lots of the United States (including my last two years of military service living in Laguna Beach, California, defending the shores of California from the ravages of war), and my wife and I had our two children while on active duty.

Upon discharge from the Marine Corps, I attended NYU to get my tax LL.M. in 1973-74, so I had as teachers two of the historical greats of the NYU graduate tax program: Gerald Wallace and Charles Lyon. Visiting at NYU that year was Jack Mylan, who taught one of my classes and eventually became my long-time colleague at SMU.

Upon completion of the NYU program, I headed back to California to practice in Los Angeles. When the law firm tax group disintegrated and a teaching position opened up at the University of Alabama, I took it. The move from Los Angeles to Tuscaloosa was a big adjustment for me and my family, but my ever-supportive wife (who was not invited on my interview trip to Tuscaloosa and had never set foot in the state of Alabama) was willing to go along with this change in my professional activities. It ended up that we loved Alabama, and I decided that being a tax law professor was a really satisfying career. While at Alabama, we started a part-time graduate tax program that sometimes took me to Birmingham to teach part of my load.

In 1977, after my second year at Alabama, I finished a draft of an article, and I tracked down my mentor Meade Emory to ask if he would review it. Meade had left the Joint Committee on Taxation staff, and he then was a visiting professor at SMU. After I delivered the article to Meade, he passed it on for the consideration of the tax faculty, and I was invited to SMU for an interview. The dean at that time was Charles Galvin, a highly respected and highly prominent tax lawyer, and the tax and related faculty included Bill Streng (now at the University of Houston), Scott Morris (now in practice), and Regis Campfield (still my colleague at SMU). I joined the SMU faculty during the fall of 1978, and I have been here since, with the exception of a year in Washington, D.C., at the IRS as Professor-in-Residence, and a return visit to the University of Alabama. I have enjoyed my colleagues at SMU, and SMU has been an excellent professional home for me.

Rather late in life, I discovered the joy of standing in a cold mountain stream with a fly rod in my hand, and my school teacher wife and I now spend our summers at our cabin in Montana, where I can (despite a painfully slow Internet connection) get lots of professional work done. I have written several articles, Tax Management Portfolios, and parts of books in Montana because (other than the call of the mountains and rivers) there are very few distractions. I fish less than I would like, but I hope to fish more after I retire.

Since the early 1980's, I have served as the Tax Court admission examiner for the non-attorney admission examination. In recent years, two other law professors have joined in that task, including Deborah Schenk of NYU. I have been active in ABA Tax Section, and am a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel and an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

For prior SMU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

May 19, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy.

Christopher H. Hanna

B.S. 1984, Florida
J.D. 1988, Florida
LL.M. (Tax) 1989, NYU

My father, a CPA who specializes in taxation, first generated my interest in tax law when I was a college student at Florida. However, when I began law school in the fall of 1985 at Florida, I tried to enter with an open mind as to what area of law I might be interested in concentrating.

During the summer of 1986, immediately after my first year of law school, I took Income Tax I from Walter Nunnallee, who was a visiting professor at Florida. He was terrific. He made the course interesting and challenging. That fall, I took Income Tax II from Boyd Dyer, who was visiting Florida from Utah. Like Professor Nunnallee, Professor Dyer was also an outstanding classroom teacher. He made the material interesting and also covered current events, such as the tax consequences of the government's settlement with Ivan Boesky.

I then took a number of tax courses from Professors Steve Lind, Dennis Calfee, George Yin, James Freeland and Mike Oberst. They were all great classroom teachers. I became Professor Lind's research assistant my third year in law school, and he first suggested to me a career as an academic. Professors Lind and Calfee had the reputation at Florida for being among the finest teachers in the law school and for being the most loved professors by their students. I consider both of them my mentors.

After graduating from Florida, I attended the graduate tax program at NYU. Like Florida, NYU had some great professors, including Noel Cunningham, John Steines, James Eustice and Brookes Billman. Meade Emory was visiting NYU at that time, and I was fortunate that he took an interest in my career and also became a mentor to me. I took a job with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. but knew that I wanted to make the jump to the academic world in the not too distant future.

I enjoyed my time at Steptoe, working with great people like Jim Holden and Susan Serling. After working at Steptoe for a short time, I was recommended by Noel Cunningham for a teaching position at SMU. In deciding whether to accept the offer from SMU, I consulted with a number of academics, including Bob Peroni (who was then at George Washington) and Michael Graetz (who was then at the Treasury Department on leave from Yale). They were unanimous in recommending that I pursue the position at SMU. I remember practicing on the weekends the presentation I was to give at SMU with one of my tax colleagues at Steptoe, Sam Olchyk, critiquing my presentation.

I have enjoyed every minute of my 17 years at SMU. My tax colleagues, Regis Campfield, Hank Lischer, Jack Mylan, and Josh Tate, have been great to work with. Former SMU Dean Charles Galvin also has been a wonderful colleague. Many times I wished I had overlapped with him when he was teaching full-time at SMU. Academics at other law schools, including Calvin Johnson, Larry Lokken, Dan Halperin and Marty McMahon, have been very supportive of me. I have also been very fortunate to have done visits at the Joint Committee on Taxation, being invited by the chief of staff -- first, Lindy Paull and later, George Yin and Tom Barthold. Paull first invited me as a consultant to the Joint Committee in 2000 working on a simplification study and then later on the Enron study. I also worked on various pieces of tax legislation. Working at the Joint Committee enabled me to see a different piece of the tax world (the legislative side), and I will always be grateful to Lindy Paull for giving me that opportunity.

For prior SMU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

Regis W. Campfield

May 12, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 5, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Time, Tax, and Money (1999)
Business Purpose, Economic Substance & Tax Shelters (2001)
Incremental and Fundamental Tax Reform (2003)
Charles O. Galvin Tax Symposium (2006)

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile SMU's full-time Graduate Tax Faculy.

Regis W. Campfield

B.B.A. 1963, Notre Dame
J.D. 1966, Virginia

I was reared in a small town in the abandoned coal fields of Western Pennsylvania during and in the aftermath of WWII. I went to college at Notre Dame and law school at Virginia, married Mary, a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia, and began practice at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. After having said "yes" when asked if I had any interest in wills, I became a wills and trusts lawyer by having so much to do that I never had the opportunity to try anything else.

Again, virtually by default, I returned to teach at Notre Dame law school. Our children were born while we were at Notre Dame and, so too, was the Notre Dame Tax & Estate Planning Institute, a continuing legal education program, now in its 33rd year, that I have chaired from inception. With a registration sometimes exceeding 1,000, it is one of the more successful programs of its kind. The written materials produced each year are supported by a more than 65 page comprehensive index of the materials distributed at previous sessions, making the cumulative materials accessible to current users. All this was leavened by a brief period as an Air Force enlisted man followed by a turn as a Navy Reserve JAGC officer.

In 1977, I came to visit at SMU and accepted an offer to join the permanent faculty as Professor of Law (I currently hold the Marilyn Jeanne Johnson Distinguished Law Faculty Fellowship). Giving up a tenured post at Notre Dame was difficult but SMU was, and is, an exciting place, with a great faculty, strong leadership (then Charles O. Galvin and now John B. Attanasio), good students—and my wife’s hometown. Moreover Dallas, and Texas as a whole, offered a wonderfully strong cadre of practicing lawyers specializing in trusts and estates and provide an invigorating professional climate with modern statutes and a strong Bar committed to their continuing evolution in the service of Texans. The supportive environment provided not only by SMU but also by my tax colleagues, Henry Lischer, Jack Mylan, Christopher Hanna, and our newest colleague, Josh Tate, make life here particularly satisfying. A highlight was a year at the University of Virginia as a visiting professor.

Professionally, among other interests, I am a Life Fellow of the American Law Institute, a past Regent of the American College of Trust & Estate Counsel, a past member of the Council of the International Academy of Trust and Estate Law, a past chair of a committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association, and a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel. Of significant intellectual meaning to me is my membership, since 1978, in an invitational group known as the Estate Planning Study Group, a group of 34 practicing lawyers and one academic, representing virtually every major area of the country, who meet 2-3 times annually for a full day of debate and discussion immediately before the meetings of the ABA Tax Section. These professional associations have given me a perspective on developments in the law and practice and thus greatly enhanced my contribution to the learning environment that we provide students at SMU.

I have just published the 3rd edition of my Thomson-West casebook, Estate Planning & Drafting (which contains a full working copy of the Wealth Transfer Planning estate planning drafting software system, provided courtesy of its authors, Jonathan G. Blattmachr (New York City) and Michael L. Graham (Dallas, Texas) and their publisher, InterActive Legal Systems). In 2006, Martin Dickinson, William Turnier and I published the 23rd edition of our Thomson-West casebook, Taxation of Estates, Gifts, and Trusts.

Currently a member of the editorial group responsible for the Martin Dickinson-edited CCH volume, Federal Income Tax Code and Regulations -- Selected Sections, my publications range from law review articles dealing with concurrent ownership arrangements to BNA Tax Management Portfolios on revocable trusts and migrating clients.

May 5, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 28, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Patricia C. Bradford (Marquette)

B.A. 1977, SUNY-Buffalo
J.D. 1981, Hastings

If someone had told me when I entered law school that I would eventually spend my entire career as a tax professor, I would said, “Your crystal ball is broken.” First of all, when I entered law school, I had never done anything since leaving home for more than 2 years. I dropped out of college after a year and a half because I had completed enough credits for junior status (taking Spanish and Art as electives) and I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. I moved from Northern California to Santa Barbara and got my first real job as the file clerk in the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. Before long, I moved again and became a court clerk in a small two judge county. That’s when I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I went back to college and finished an English degree at SUNY-Buffalo a year and a half later. A year after that I started law school at Hastings. I was sure I would end up specializing in criminal law. (Every criminal case had a great story. The problem was, I couldn’t decide which side – prosecuting or defending – had the fewest ethical and moral dilemmas.)

When I was registering for my second year of law school, other students advised me that “everyone has to take at least the basic federal income tax class.” Convinced that I wouldn’t like the course, I decided to get it over with. At Hastings we had the option of taking a 3 credit or a 4 credit Federal Income Tax course. Since I didn’t want to learn much about tax, I opted for the 3 credit course. The first week of classes the professor would ask a question and numerous hands would go up. I had never been in a class where so many students volunteered. And their answers were all correct. I studied hard, still telling myself I was just getting tax out of the way. Then one day I discovered that I was doing my class preparation for tax before preparing for any other course. I discovered that I like tax! I didn’t even seem to mind carrying home the book, Code and the three volume set of regulations we had to have for the course. At the end of the semester when I was registering for classes, I read the description for the 3 credit course I enrolled in. I discovered that it was an “accelerated” course for students with a tax background. The second part of the course was offered in the Spring. It covered Partnership Tax and Corporate Tax at an accelerated 3 credit pace. I enrolled. After that I took every tax course Hastings offered.

After graduating in 1981, my first long-term job was with a local Milwaukee firm (14 members) that primarily focused on real estate development. It was bath by fire. When I wasn’t working on the tax section of private offerings, I was handling tax litigation for clients of other firms who had retained our firm after their deals got audited. Business was good – rapid ACRS deductions, no passive loss rules, no Section 704(b) or (c) regulations and high appreciation made the deals fairly easy for the dealers to sell. Occasionally, we had some exotic shelters that individual clients wanted us to assess involving reproductions of fine arts. Meanwhile, I taught a class occasionally for the partners who were adjunct professors at Marquette and UW Milwaukee (Masters of Tax program).

I started teaching fulltime at Marquette in Fall, 1983. (I had heard Marquette was looking for a tax professor and I called the chair of the Faculty Recruitment committee. Even though I only had two years of experience (and they usually required five), I was hired. I think the article I had co-authored with a partner in the Journal of Taxation, tipped the balance in my favor. (Back then it was unusual for a candidate to have any completed scholarship.)

I regularly teach Federal Income Taxation of Individuals, Taxation of Partnerships and S Corporations and Taxation of Corporations and S Corporations. I taught Law and Economics for a number of years, but now I teach Torts. Amazingly, I seems as though I keep a huge classroom full of Individual Income Tax students more fully engaged that a class of 1L Torts students. I owe this to the fantastic tax professors I had at Hastings who I’m sure benefited from the fact that I was taught to analyze and think critically by Profs Mary Kay Kane and William Crawford. Prof. William Hutton taught a course called “Tax Strategies for Personal Investment.” That class taught me how to make the individual income tax class relevant to my students – whether they are thinking about the clients they will one day advise or how to build and invest their own savings. As much as I like teaching income tax, my favorite subject is still Partnership Tax.

My personal life revolves around my kids and my husband. My son, Mike (12) and my husband, Tom (52) play hardball. Tom still pitches, he’s a lefty. My daughter, Sally (9) plays softball. That’s a lot of games to watch. The rest of the year, Sally plays soccer and Mike plays tackle football and basketball. We all play golf, but even Sally out drives me – with my driver! Maybe this will be the year that I finally break – I’m not telling.

April 28, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Janice Kay McClendon (Stetson)

B.A. 1987, Texas
J.D. 1996, Utah
LL.M. (Tax) 1997, NYU

Janice Kay McClendon graduated from University of Utah College of Law with honors in 1996 and received the degree of Master of Laws in Taxation from New York University School of Law in 1997. While at the University of Utah, she was a William H. Leary Scholar for every semester in residence for outstanding academic performance, a teaching assistant for Professor Edwin Firmage, Constitutional Law, an extern for Justice Christine Durhman, Utah Supreme Court, a finalist in the Saul Lefkowitz Trademark/Patent Moot Court Competition, received American Jurisprudence awards for the highest marks in trial advocacy and civil procedure, and developed and taught a First Amendment course in Salt Lake City secondary schools. Professor McClendon is a member of the Order of the Coif.

Professor McClendon received her Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude from University of Texas in 1987. Before entering law school, she was a Captain in the United States Air Force where she served as senior missile instructor and trained troops in emergency war order procedures for the Minuteman II ICBM weapon system.

After completing her degree of Master of Laws in Taxation, Professor McClendon clerked for the Honorable Judge David Laro of the United States Tax Court in Washington, DC. During her clerkship, she assisted Judge Laro in instructing business planning and advanced pension planning courses at Georgetown University Law Center. Following her clerkship, she continued teaching with Judge Laro at Georgetown University Law Center as co-instructor and practiced law for three years in Washington, DC and Tampa, Florida, first with Steptoe & Johnson LLP and most recently with Kalish & Ward. Professor McClendon's practice included extensive work in the areas of federal taxation, employee benefits, and Employee Retirement Income Security Act compliance and litigation. While in private practice, Professor McClendon's pro bono projects included representing indigents in levy and garnishment proceedings brought under the Internal Revenue Code.

April 21, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 14, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Vada Waters Lindsey (Marquette)

B.A. 1983, Michigan State
J.D. 1988, DePaul
LL.M. (Tax) 1992, Georgetown

I went to law school to become a lobbyist. I majored in Political Science at Michigan State University and worked as a legislative aide for a Michigan State Senator prior to attending law school. I loved the political environment, but I quickly realized that I could not advance in my career without additional education. I felt confident that a law degree would enable me to strengthen my persuasive and analytical abilities and enhance my likelihood of success as a lobbyist.

My plans were derailed when I took my first tax class at DePaul University College of Law. I happened to take my first tax class during 1986 – the year of the infamous Tax Reform Act of 1986. How could I avoid falling in love with the tax system when my first real exposure to tax law occurred shortly after one of the most important tax acts in this country’s history? I was hooked and developed a lifelong passion of tax law. After my epiphany, I took every possible tax class at DePaul and served as a research assistant for two years helping a tax professor research the tax law.

It did not take me long to realize that not only did I want to become a tax attorney, but I also wanted to become a tax professor. Unlike many students, I loved the law school environment. I had the foresight to realize that being a law professor was one of the best jobs in this profession. Prior to entering the Academy, I worked at the Chief Counsel’s Office at the IRS. Although I had a four-year commitment to work as a trial attorney at the IRS, I left after two years to serve as an Attorney Advisor for Judge Joel Gerber at the United States Tax Court. I loved clerking for Judge Gerber and interacting with other law clerks and judges. I also earned my Tax LL.M. in from Georgetown after taking classes during the evenings. Upon the completion of my clerkship and LL.M, I worked for a few years as in-house tax attorney for a fortune 500 corporation.

I have been a law professor at Marquette since 1996. I teach Federal Income Taxation, Federal Taxation of Gifts, Trusts and Estates, Tax Policy, Real Estate Finance and Development and Property Law. Hence, my concentration is in the areas of tax and real estate laws. While my Real Estate Finance and Development course covers essentials such as mortgages and foreclosure, I devote approximately 30% of the course to relevant tax issues.

Three years ago, I started a VITA program at Marquette. Several of my students volunteer during the spring semester to electronically complete tax returns for low income and elderly taxpayers. In addition, the Marquette site is the only local site that completes tax returns for nonresident aliens. As I have learned, these returns are substantially different from the regular Form 1040’s and require an understanding of tax treaties. I am very proud to provide this service because I believe that pro bono service is important and it is a great opportunity for my students to gain some practical experience.

In my scholarship, I primarily focus on the effect of the Internal Revenue Code on lower to middle income taxpayers. My articles have addressed progressive taxation, charitable deductions and the taxation of self-help programs. I will continue to write articles regarding the impact of the Code on lower to middle income taxpayer, but I also write articles on other interesting tax issues. For example, I served as an associate editor of a symposium volume of the Marquette Law Review exploring state tax issues and wrote a piece for the volume pertaining to whether the tax incentives should be used to promote education at the primary and secondary levels and whether tax incentives should be used to encourage businesses to locate to and remain in Wisconsin. I also wrote an article pertaining to the need for proper tax planning for retirement which was recently highlighted on TaxProf Blog. Too bad I did not spot the typo in the conclusion until it appeared on the blog! My latest article addresses the use of legislative history in deciding tax cases.

Now that I have reflected on my career, I realize in many ways, I have become a pseudo lobbyist in my role as a law professor by explaining the laws to my students and writing articles on issues of interest. I absolutely love being a law professor and have never regretted my decision to enter academia.

April 14, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 José M. Gabilondo (Florida-International)

B.A. 1987, Harvard
J.D. 1991, Boalt Hall

It all started with the tax benefit rule in Bobbie Barton’s “baby tax” when I was a 2L at Boalt. She asked about a deduction, and I said “but what about the tax benefit rule?” Brightening, Bobbie said, “What a wonderful answer!” It was my first experience with synthesizing code provisions and the first time a teacher complimented me about something that I had said, so that was all the encouragement I needed. Then a smaller group of us took corporate and partnership tax. She covered the C, S, and K and reorgs in just 4 credits using this terrific CCH book that she did with her tax mentor, Adrian Kragen. (Now as a teacher, I find that amazing.) Each day she would peel off her driving gloves (she was a class act), figure out where our understanding of a case or statute was, and move us along, gently but rigorously. Bobbie was the second woman to get tenure at Boalt (after Herma Hill Kay) and whatever I become as a teacher, I owe to her talent and kindness.

Although I had been a sociology undergraduate, it was tax that introduced me to seeing the world in economic terms, starting with the Haig-Simon definition of economic income. That approach stuck. I practiced tax only in my first job – at a boutique firm run by my estates and trusts professor, Jerry Witherspoon – which funded pro bono services to people with HIV through tax and conservatorship work. After teaching comparative law in Barcelona for two years, I spent the next eight years in Washington as an attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the World Bank, and the Department of the Treasury (in Banking and Finance). I loved Treasury because there even (we) Democrats were fiscal conservatives. It wasn’t tax, but it came out of the economic perspectives learned in tax and deepened in other courses. When I started teaching at Albany Law School, they asked me to teach con law but obliged my preference for tax instead, something for which I am grateful.

I teach to the whole class but look out for those who might “find themselves” in tax. They’re out there. You can only teach what you know, and that was my experience. Using Burke and Friel, I spend at least the first week in intro tax on the “big picture” to give them a sense of tax’s coherent deep structure and how it really does all fit together. Last year, I began using a tax history timeline to plot tax law against U.S. fiscal history (including GDP and public debt) to drive home that this is all about funding the government. (Maybe it’s a generational thing, but they don’t seem to appreciate or identify with the fisc the way I do.) My single favorite thing in the intro course is § 7872, which I (cruelly) do in the income section because the tax treatment of below-market loans opens up so much, especially the difference between tax effects and cash flow. I harp on basis, repeating (after the proper cultural disclaimers) that “You can never be too rich, too thin, too tanned [sic], or have too much basis.” And I love the story of tax martyr Beulah Crane, who paid tax so that others wouldn’t. (I used to think that “What is income?” was the big question, but now I’m gravitating more to “when?”) I use Jeff Kwall’s great book for corporate and partnership tax and I sequence the course by entity (C, K, and then S), not function. Here too, I use schematics for each entity to suggest “statutory paths” along which each provision must be construed.

I love teaching tax and hope that I always get to do it. Debt finance is my primary area of scholarship because it lets me explore problems from practice. My father left Spain during their Civil War and then Cuba after the Cuban Revolution. I was born in Cuba, so a secondary scholarly and service interest is Cuban legal studies, especially in banking and finance. My third scholarly interest is heterosexuality studies which I don’t use much in tax, although I do joke about the straight debt safe harbor in the S.

April 7, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Christian Johnson (Loyola-Chicago)

B.A. 1984, Utah
M.Pr.A. 1985, Utah
J.D. 1990, Columbia

I have always been interested in what tax does to a deal. After working for two years as a tax accountant at Price Waterhouse, however, I realized that tax lawyers did one hundred percent of the time, the work that I most enjoyed but only did twenty percent of the time. From there, it was an easy decision to attend Columbia Law School and practice tax law at Milbank Tweed in New York. Although I enjoyed the tax work, I was still fascinated, however, with the deal itself.

After moving to Chicago, I persuaded Mayer Brown that they should let me do deal work. I very much enjoyed banking and transaction work that I was doing at Mayer Brown, but found very little opportunity to apply and use my tax background. Fortunately, as I made the transition into teaching, I have been able to teach tax while at the same time pursue my scholarly interests in banking and corporate finance.

I have loved the mix of tax and corporate subjects during my twelve years at Loyola University Chicago. Because tax was a required course, Loyola has developed a very strong tax program. During my tenure, I have found myself teaching Federal Income Tax at least twice a year. I have also taught International Tax, Corporate Tax and Nonprofit Organizations, all of which have complimented my other teaching interests. I have found that my scholarship in corporate finance has only been improved and augmented by my continual teaching involvement in our tax program.

Although I love writing and discussing corporate finance, I realized from the beginning that the basic Federal Income Tax course was much more fun to teach than courses on banking and derivatives. Much to my student’s frequent surprise, Federal Income Tax is not the dry and deathly boring review of Internal Revenue Code that they anticipated, but instead a veritable smorgasbord of issues dealing with death, divorce, and home ownership, among others, that affects all aspects of their lives. Students that came to law to study child or criminal law will often approach me, and in an apologetic and conspiratorial manner, whisper that that they really like tax (although they appear terrified that one of their fellow students might overhear their confession).

Currently I am visiting at the University of Utah College of Law where I have been able to continue my love of teaching Federal Income Tax. I look forward, however, to returning in the Fall to Loyola and picking up with tax colleagues where I left off.

March 31, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 17, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Robert I. Keller (Maryland)

B.S. 1963, Penn
LL.B. 1966, Harvard

Thirty five years of teaching and no regrets. I can’t imagine a better life.

After majoring in accounting at the Wharton School, I actually entered law school (in 1963) with thoughts of being a tax lawyer. Bernie Wolfman’s course in basic income tax (he was visiting at Harvard in 1964) made me even more enthusiastic. Immediately after law school, I joined the Philadelphia law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, the firm where Bernie Wolfman had been a partner. It was a large firm (by 1966 standards) of 60+ lawyers. I didn’t know how to spend my huge $7,800 salary. (Within one year our salaries were raised to $13,500, when New York firms dramatically raised starting salaries to $15,000).

I spent exactly one day “rotating” through the firm’s various departments. On my second day, the senior tax partner asked me if I would like to join the tax department and I accepted. Then, about two years after I entered the firm, Jerry Kurtz returned to the firm from his tour at Treasury as Tax Legislative Counsel under Stanley Surrey. Jerry introduced me to the tax expenditure budget, and I was forever hooked on tax policy. Actually, I think I always enjoyed talking about tax and tax theory more that practicing tax law. (In fact, some of the firm’s partners often had to remind me that I was part of a business firm.)

The movement from the law firm to the academy was more problematic. I loved the thought of being an academic, but I thought I was a bit shy to stand in front of a class. However, during my fifth year at the firm, over a period of several months, I was asked to do presentations to the firm on a variety of issues (stock options, real estate investment trusts, and professional corporations). These presentations were very well received and my reputation in the firm soared. So, before they realized at Wolf, Block that I was all talk, I applied for law teaching jobs and landed one at Maryland. I was extremely pleased, although my father asked my wife whether I was being fair to her and my children, giving up a potentially lucrative career for the classroom, but I digress.

During my first year at Maryland, I was promised an easy schedule by the Dean; that schedule consisted of two sections of income tax, and one of corporate tax, estate and gift tax (which I had never practiced), and a tax policy seminar. I always wondered what a hard schedule would have been like. Anyway, I loved teaching from the first day, and, thirty five years later, my feelings are unchanged. I feel the same enthusiasm and rapport with the students that I did then. I still feel young, even though some of my former students have already retired from practice. I still get a charge every time a student comes into my basic tax class gritting his or her teeth, and leaves with thoughts of becoming a tax lawyer. I am delighted that my former students now serve on the Tax Court, as law professors, in government, and in firms throughout the country.

I still remember my excitement when one of my earliest articles on interest-free loans was used as the basis for a “brilliant” dissent by the late Judge Irving L. Goldberg of the Fifth Circuit in a case called Martin v. Commissioner. Then a few year’s later, Joel Newman wrote a piece entitled “Determining Value in Barter Transactions: A Response to Robert Keller’s The Taxation of Barter Transaction.” I was in heaven: my name was actually in the title of someone else’s article.

For thirty of my thirty five years at Maryland, I have shared the tax teaching with my friend and colleague, Dan Goldberg. To this day, we never seem to run out of tax talk. Dan’s recent writings on the implementation of a consumption tax have helped make me become totally conversant with all of the exotica of that area.

I am currently teaching courses in income tax and business tax, as well as a new offering I call “Tax and Financial Planning for Individuals.” I am also working on an article on the asymmetry of the tax law (i.e., all those areas in which recoveries of previously paid items would be nontaxable, even though nonrecoveries would result in either no deduction or only a limited deduction).

Who could ask for anything more?

March 17, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Kathryn L. Moore (Kentucky)

A.B. 1983, Michigan
J.D. 1988, Cornell

I was exposed to tax at a very young age. When my brother and I were kids, my father would buy us ice cream. He never bought ice cream for himself, though. Instead, he charged us “tax” on our ice cream - at the notable rate of about 33 percent.

Due to this early exposure to tax and other unknown reasons, I entered law school expecting to like tax. I was not disappointed. Russell Osgood was a brilliant teacher. In his upper level tax classes, he would call on one student for the entire fifty minute class. It was both frightening and exhilarating to be on the hot spot in his class. (I tried to emulate his practice my first year of teaching but couldn’t pull it off.)

After graduating from law school, I spent a year clerking for Judge Fong in Honolulu, Hawaii. (It was a cold February in Ithaca, New York, when I had to decide where to apply for clerkships.) I didn’t have any tax cases that year, but I did work on three ERISA cases.

After finishing my clerkship and traveling for a few months, I became associated with the tax group of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan in Washington, D.C. One of my early assignments was helping to draft a petition for certiorari in a state tax case. Although cert was denied, I was labeled a state tax expert. Two years later, when the firm was asked to file a petition for certiorari in another state tax case, I was again drafted in light of my state tax “expertise.” This time, cert was granted, and after working on the case for over 1,000 hours, I did become an expert, at least in state tax discrimination under the dormant commerce clause. I also did a fair amount of employee benefits work while at Sutherland.

After practicing for about three years, I applied for a teaching job. Although I expressed a willingness to teach tax on my AALS form, I ended up at a school, the University of Kentucky, that actually did not need a full time tax professor. Instead, they needed a property professor. So, since joining the UK faculty in 1993, I have taught property and property-related courses in addition to employee benefits and state and local tax. Although it is not a typical teaching package, I have enjoyed it. (I tell my students that if they like future interests, they will probably like tax.)

My early scholarship focused on state and local tax law. Then, when seven of the thirteen members of the 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security recommended that the Social Security system be fundamentally restructured to include some kind of individual or personal accounts, I started writing about Social Security. (I thought the proposed change was ill advised then, and I still do now.) Since 1997, most of my scholarship has focused on Social Security reform. In addition, I have co-authored an employee benefits casebook and written a few articles about the French retirement system. (I’ll leave my foray into the French retirement system for another day.)

All in all, it’s been a fun and fulfilling career and I wouldn’t trade it for another.

March 10, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 3, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Randall W. Roth (Hawaii)

B.S. 1970, Regis
J.D. 1974, Denver
LL.M. (Tax) 1975, Miami

I remember two of my uncles laughing when I told them about my tax classes. They claimed never to have paid taxes. Looking back, I’m not sure if they were tax protestors, tax cheaters, or bad farmers. Actually, I think they were just pulling my leg, but when I suggested that to them, they just laughed some more.

I come from a small town in Kansas, called Ellinwood. My parents were born and raised on small farms a few miles outside of town, as were their parents. Our ancestors who settled those farms had left Germany in the mid-1800s to avoid the draft.

My dad never attended college; mom had one year at Fort Hays State. Unlike my brothers, I left Kansas to pursue higher education, ending up in Denver, a six-hour drive to the west. I majored in accounting and economics because I liked the professors who taught those courses.

Following graduation I entered the Society of Jesus (a.k.a. the Jesuits), having a few months earlier gotten what some people refer to as a “calling.” My Jesuit superiors and I eventually agreed, however, that this particular calling had been a wrong number. I returned to Denver, worked at Touche Ross for one tax season, and then taught accounting and economics at Metropolitan State College while attending law school, mostly at night. Midway through my 2L year I met my wife, Susie, on bus #6. I had boarded it across the street from the church where I was the live-in custodian. She introduced herself as Susie Worm, and added, “That’s Worm, as in apple.” Of course I fell in love immediately. Several months later we married. She refers to our chance encounter on that bus as, “a fare to remember.”

Sometime during my 3L year I decided to get a tax LL.M. Susie had no problem with that until I told her that the go-to program was in New York City. Some years earlier she had been there with her class from Divine Savior/Holy Angels High School in Milwaukee. According to her, one of the first things they saw from their bus windows upon entering New York City was a guy on the side of the street opening his trench coat to reveal an absence of clothes. She said I could spend a year in New York City if I wanted to, but that she would not be with me.

We ended up at the University of Miami, and considered ourselves fortunate to get a tuition waiver for the first semester. Because the LL.M. program director, Phil Heckerling, had stressed to me in writing that the waiver was only for one semester, I accepted that as a given. Shortly before the second semester started, however, Susie instructed me to ask for another waiver. I explained to her that Professor Heckerling was a man of exceptionally strong opinions, and that it would be a waste of time to ask him to change his mind, but she insisted, and so I gave it a shot. It turned out that Heckerling remembered meeting Susie and hearing her introductory line, “that’s Worm, as in apple.” He gave me the waiver.

After Miami, Susie and I returned to Denver and moved back into the church apartment. She started having and raising our babies while I practiced law by day and taught as an adjunct professor at Denver University at night. I enjoyed practicing tax law, but not nearly as much as I enjoyed teaching it. So after three years of tying to do both, I took a full-time tax position at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Susie and I thoroughly enjoyed the twin cities, but when a tax position opened at Washburn in my home state of Kansas, I eagerly applied.

In those days I was giving CLE seminars for state bar associations and CPA societies (e.g., “Ten Techniques for Shifting Income from a High to a Low Bracket”). One summer I made 46 separate 8-hour presentations. In the fall of 1981 the Hawaii state bar association sponsored my “Ten Techniques” program, which gave Susie and me (and our 3-month old #3 child) a long weekend in Hawaii. That was more than enough time to convince me of where we should move. Susie was less enthralled with the Islands than was I, but since Honolulu was not Topeka, she agreed to let me interview for an opening at the University of Hawaii. Six months later we were living in Honolulu, and that was twenty-five years ago. I still teach the basic tax course, but now I also teach Trusts & Estates, Nonprofit Organizations, and Professional Responsibility.

In 1997 I taught as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Two years before that the Wall Street Journal had called Hawaii’s Bishop Estate “the nation’s wealthiest charity,” and had raised a number of troubling questions about how it operated. I recall lunches at the Quadrangle Club where Chicago professors wanted to know more information about Bishop Estate than I could provide. Upon returning to Hawaii, I began researching a piece that became known locally as the “Broken Trust” essay. Senior federal district judge Sam King and I recently co-authored a related book called, Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust. We’re giving all royalties to early childhood education charities in Hawaii. I’ll end this sketch with three quotes about the book:

“King and Roth build tension and suspense by describing how the trustees react to the tightening grip of at least four separate civil and criminal investigations. Subpoenas fly, surveillance photos are snapped, phones are bugged, tires are slashed, judges cry in court, suicide factors in. The IRS swoops in like a huge predatory bird and threatens to revoke the trust's tax-exempt status, which would cripple the schools. Is paradise lost?” Eve Lichtgarn, Hawaii Reporter.

“The players in Broken Trust jump off the page…. What makes Broken Trust so fascinating is that it works on multiple levels. It's a well-researched book about Hawaii's history and culture; a dramatic story of judicial, political, and corporate corruption; and a cautionary tale for acting or future charitable trust board members ….” Christopher Quay, Exempt Organization Tax Review.

“I just finished Broken Trust last night. I couldn't put it down! It read like a novel and I couldn't wait to get to the ending.” Martin D. Begleiter, Ellis and Nelle Levitt Distinguished Professor of Law, Drake University.

Professors can get a complimentary copy of Broken Trust by emailing me their mailing address.

March 3, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 24, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Stephen W. Mazza (Kansas)

B.S. 1989, Samford
J.D. 1992, Alabama
LL.M. (Tax) 1993, NYU

It’s four degrees in Lawrence, Kansas as I write this: Four (4) degrees! For someone who spent the first 20-odd years of his life in Alabama, this is a shock. My people aren’t used to these sorts of temperatures. Momma’s folk are from Mississippi and Dad’s people come from the hills in central Italy. As the story goes, my great uncle arrived in New York in the late 1800s and was conned into traveling to Chicago with the promise of work. Abandoned in Chicago, he started walking south and didn’t stop until he found an area that reminded him of his farm in Italy: Huntsville, Alabama.

He started a grocery store, went into real estate development, and eventually became a slumlord. Grandad inherited the slum and Dad took it over in the 1950s. By the mid-1980s, the City of Huntsville had had enough and they acquired the property by eminent domain. With my career as a slumlord cut off before it began, I decided to go to law school.

I can’t think of anything in my background that triggered an interest in tax, so I guess I have to blame Jim Bryce and Norman Stein at Alabama for getting me started. Norm (as the students called him behind his back) carried on lively policy discussions with himself during the basic tax class and I soaked it all up. Jim was the perfect example of what I thought a tax lawyer should be (smart, detail oriented) and with his encouragement I decided to spend a year at NYU getting my tax LL.M.

The best part of my experience at NYU was working on the Tax Law Review with Deborah Schenk and Lily Khang, who was an Acting Assistant Professor at the time. Lily mentioned one day that I should consider applying for the AAP position. Having already accepted a job in Atlanta, I decided it was best to honor my commitment to the firm. While law firm life was fine, I’d often daydream about the life of a law professor. A few years later I contacted Deborah to see if NYU had an AAP position open. They did, and to my surprise and delight, I got it.

Those two years teaching at NYU were some of the best of my life. Getting to work with people like Deborah, Noel Cunningham, and Paul McDaniel was an honor. After filling in for Leandra Lederman (she and I were on the Tax Law Review together while at NYU) at Mercer Law School for a year while she visited at George Mason, I went in the market and found a position at KU Law School. I’ve been here ten years and couldn’t be happier. Martin Dickinson is one of the finest mentors and colleagues a person could have. The students, as well, are top notch, although occasionally they write some frightfully hurtful and inane things on my class evaluations: I know I’m a smartass, you don’t have to tell me; and why do you care whether I wear a blue oxford shirt to class everyday?

My decision to write a casebook early in my career turned out, I think, to be the right one. If anything, it gave me a chance to develop a wonderful professional relationship with Leandra. Although the annual supplements are a pain and the new editions are worse, it seems worth it. My scholarship focuses mostly on tax compliance, but at times it seems to be written primarily to offend Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate. Over the past several years I’ve spend a portion of my summer teaching in KU Law’s Summer Abroad Program in Istanbul, Turkey, and this summer I’m off to China. The new dean at KU has also talked me into being the associate dean for academic affairs. I hope she knows what she’s getting herself into, because I don’t.

February 24, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Jeffrey A. Maine (Maine)

B.B.A. 1989, Florida Atlantic
M.B.A. 1990, Florida Atlantic
J.D. 1993, Stetson
LL.M. (Tax) 1994, Florida

Having grown up as a Florida boy and receiving all my formal education there, I began teaching tax law at the age of 27. After completing the LL.M. program at Florida -- my classmates that year included David Brennan (Georgia), Sam Donaldson (Washington), and Darrell Jones (Stetson) -- I worked as an associate for Holland & Knight in Tampa, and in the evenings taught tax at Stetson. I soon learned of a visiting position at Idaho. I applied on the deadline, received an offer within a week, gave my firm two weeks’ notice, packed what I could in my Celica, and drove 3,000 miles to Moscow, Idaho.

It was crazy, but teaching at Idaho turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. I saw snow for the first time, learned to ski, and learned to fly fish. More importantly, the Idaho experience led to a faculty position at Texas Wesleyan, where I taught for six years while serving for two years as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

When Mike Lang became director of Chapman’s Graduate Tax Program in 2003, a tax position opened up at Maine. I couldn’t resist. What better place to be than a place named after you! Maine Law has been wonderful. It’s a small school with an impressive faculty and a strong sense of community. Maine Law has its own Technology Law Center and Patent Program, and has been expanding its focus on intellectual property issues.

I have been focusing my research and writing on the taxation of intellectual property, a subject niche that has been relatively undeveloped. In addition to teaching Federal Income Tax (a class with about 100 students each fall), Business Tax, and Estate & Gift Tax, I teach a Taxation of Intellectual Property seminar using two books I have co-authored on the subject:

Intellectual Property Taxation: Transaction and Litigation Issues (BNA, 2003) (with Xuan-Thao N. Nguyen (SMU))

Intellectual Property Taxation: Problems and Materials (Carolina Academic Press, 2004) (with Xuan-Thao N. Nguyen (SMU))

Having served as Associate Dean at a large private school, I never imagined myself doing it again so soon at a small public school. As a friend recently joked, I used to be a fire hydrant for 650 dogs, now I’m one for only 275 dogs. While I enjoy the administrative side of legal education as Associate Dean, my heart remains in the classroom. I enjoy working with students, and I try to make tax fun using interesting cases and examples to bring the Code to life. I’ll soon be using my new casebook to teach the basic tax course. The topics, the selection of cases, and the design of the problems in The Fundamentals of Federal Taxation (Carolina Academic Press, Spring 2007) (with Jack Miller (Idaho)), are all calculated to make tax fun and thought-provoking. My greatest reward as a teacher is seeing so many students each year pursue tax as a career. Next year, two Maine Law graduates will be clerking at the Tax Court. Not bad, considering we’re one of the smallest law schools in the country.

Writing this profile has made me think about all the people who have had such a profound impact on my life: Bernie Barton at Holland & Knight, who threw a copy of Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia at me whenever I asked too many questions (the book, originally published in 1899, is now required reading in some of my courses); John Cooper (Stetson) and Richard Gershon (Charleston), who encouraged me to pursue full-time teaching; Jack Miller (Idaho), who gave me my first full-time teaching position; and Colleen Khoury (Maine), who convinced me that Maine was home. And then there are those who have reviewed my scholarship over the years, including Evelyn Brody (Chicago-Kent), and Philip Postlewaite (Northwestern) and David Cameron (Northwestern), pioneers in the field of taxation of intangibles and have paved the way for new scholarship on IP taxation. I am forever grateful to all of them. Their constant support and guidance have led me into a fulfilling professional life.

February 17, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 10, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Anne-Marie Rhodes (Loyola-Chicago)

B.A. 1973, Albertus Magnus College
J.D. 1976, Harvard

I have always thought that I am one of the lucky ones, for I love what I do. Dealing with students and providing opportunities for them provides continual satisfaction and challenges. My teaching focuses on estate planning, estate and gift tax, wills and trusts, and basic income tax. In addition, I teach seminars in art law and international law.

I arrived at Loyola University Chicago by way of an interest in teaching long before law school, work in mathematics and art in college, and a conscious decision to learn estate planning while working at a large corporate law firm in Chicago. One day, the opportunity to teach full time at Loyola literally walked into my office.

I had taught as an adjunct previously but had never pursued a full-time position. Frankly, the decision was a professional deep breath and plunge into the pool. I thought I would like it, but I was uncertain if I wanted to give up the real world connection of a practice. Happily, I have enjoyed the teaching, having Jeffrey Kwall and Christian Johnson as colleagues and friends ensures that. I have also retained the connection to practice.

Since ERTA ’81, I’ve been Of Counsel at a mid (very soon to be a large, international) firm with 10 attorneys practicing estate planning. My Of Counsel relationship has been invaluable to me professionally for the real world context of clients and personally for the wisdom and friendship of my mentor. From him and from law firm colleagues, I have lived and learned that the best counseling requires the fullest understanding of all the implications of the decisions, not simply the dollars involved.

Professionally, I am an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC). Anyone who attends an ACTEC conference comes away with sophisticated technical insights into current issues. For Academic Fellows, additionally, the meetings and the people they draw offer especially rich opportunities and insights. As any tax professor can attest, the ABT principle (Anything But Tax) operates strongly to limit the interest of most colleagues in tax issues, and the opportunity to connect with other estate planning professors regarding our teaching is valuable and as well as refreshing.

One of my favorite Loyola accomplishments outside of tax was establishing with my colleagues Thomas Haney and Dean Nina Appel a foreign study program in Rome in 1983. More recently, we launched a comparative law course on Chile in affiliation with the Jesuit law school, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, that includes a field trip to Santiago over spring break. For 2008, a program in China is in the works. At times I think of the old slogan for the U.S. Navy, "Join Loyola, See the World." The only downside to the international travel is leaving my husband David (a lawyer) and my two sons, James and Peter.

The comparative aspect has worked its way into my research interests. I have come to enjoy the tax aspects of art. I have written about several aspects and, most recently, about the taxation of Nazi-looted art in addition to papers related to tax and other aspects of estate planning. As the law evolves regarding cultural property, its control and taxation will raise new policy decisions and issues. Working with my Chilean colleagues has highlighted issues of tax administration and differences in approach by tax lawyers in the civil law and the common law systems.

It is hard to imagine a more satisfying professional life.

February 10, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 3, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Martin Dickinson (Kansas)

B.A. 1960, Kansas
M.A. 1961, Stanford
J.D. 1964, Michigan

When I graduated from law school, I had no interest in becoming a tax lawyer. Although my tax instructor (L. Hart Wright) was perhaps the most charismatic faculty member at Michigan, I didn’t find tax that interesting. Now, however, I look back happily on 42 years with the Internal Revenue Code–and more to come.

It was fortuity that brought me to tax. When I joined Holme Roberts & Owen in Denver after graduation, I was assigned to the tax and estate planning department as my first rotation. These were intelligent, creative lawyers wrestling with fascinating puzzles. Soon I was hooked–as I still am.

After three years in Denver I returned to the University of Kansas (my undergraduate alma mater) to teach tax in the Law School. Four years later I was named dean, and I spent nine years on the “dark side.” Fortunately, I taught a half-time load throughout my deanship, always in tax. Often the only sane time in my day was the hour in my tax class.

My writing has been more practical than theoretical. I’ve authored Tax Management Portfolios, casebooks on income taxation and estate and gift taxation, and a variety of articles and other works. I especially enjoy CLE work and have done lots of that.

I continue to edit CCH’s Income Tax Selected Code and Regulations volume. This is a fascinating process each year, and I get a close look at what Congress does and why. Holding the volume to a reasonable size, however, gets more difficult every year as Congress adds layer after layer of new law. How much more can tax practitioners handle?

I have especially enjoyed work on the local scene, participating in law reform of various kinds in Kansas. Although this kind of work seldom gets national attention, I think it is an important responsibility of law faculty at state university law schools.

My students are delightful–mature enough to be serious but still possessing the energy and enthusiasm of youth. I enjoy exploring the mysteries of the Code with them–and they teach me new things every semester.

For 42 years I’ve watched the Code grow exponentially. As bad as the complexity has become, I think the U.S. will continue to rely primarily on the income tax as we know it unless and until there is a major war, depression, or other calamity. I think the income tax has become so deeply imbedded in the American culture and economy that only a major societal upheaval could bring about a change. So, if you like job security, become a tax professor. Besides, it’s good for lots of laughs.

February 3, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 27, 2007

Spotlight_1_1 Myron Grauer (Capital)

B.A. 1971, Vermont
J.D. 1975, Pittsburgh
LL.M. 1980, Yale

My career path has been one of turning failure to reach my teenage ambitions into the greatest job a law-trained person could ever hope for (and perhaps, just as Al Gore claims responsibility for the existence of the Internet, I can claim credit for the existence of TaxProf Blog and the TaxProf email listserv.

Now, I have to admit that being a teacher had always been my ambition; it just wasn’t being a law teacher. No, my goal as a teenager was to be both a ski instructor and a comic actor and theatre teacher.

I had gone to boarding school in Vermont where I raced on the ski team, but got more credit for my graceful technique than for my speed through the slalom gates. I then enrolled in the University of Vermont (UVM) and, for a while, majored in Theatre. Unfortunately, I had a difficult time memorizing lines and keeping a straight face on stage, so all I did was ad lib. While these proclivities kept me out of a career in theatre, they held me in good stead for a career in law teaching where ad libbing is necessary and the students love it if you crack up on stage now and then.

After graduating from UVM, I was hired to be a ski instructor at Bolton Valley Ski Area near Burlington. However, I had second thoughts about the job before I ever started once I was informed that I would be teaching pre-schoolers and wiping their runny noses as they whined for most of the day. Nonetheless, I rented a basement apartment in Burlington from an elderly woman and decided to give it a go. But that first night in the apartment convinced me that I had made a major mistake in my career path. The landlady kept me awake all night with a horrible cough, and when she told me in the morning that she thanked the Lord for bringing me into her life to take care of her in her old age, I decided to get as far away as I could from her and the prospect of the runny-nosed children and immediately headed home to Pittsburgh where I worked for six months in Democratic political campaigns. While working on the campaigns, I came in contact with many lawyers and decided that law school might not be a bad place to hang out for a few years.

I was accepted into the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and loved it from the start. I had always gotten a kick out of reading Ann Landers and Dear Abby for their outrageously humorous fact patterns, and here I was being required to read fact patterns in cases that were even funnier. After I took my first year exams, I was convinced that I had better build up my muscles and that all the laughs were over because all I had ahead of me was a career as a ditch digger. Then the Law School Registrar sent me my grades and informed me that I had made Law Review because I was in the top 10% of my class. I knew that 90% of my classmates weren’t dumber than me, but if I learned one thing my first year of law school, it was when to keep my mouth shut, so I decided not to tell the Registrar that she must have matched my name with the wrong exam number, and I moved on to my second year of law school.

Pitt required all second-year law students to take basic income tax, and I was fortunate to be in Professor Bill Brown’s section. Bill had recently received his LL.M. from Yale and constantly made references in class to what Marvin Chirelstein would say. (This was before Chirelstein had ever written the first edition of his landmark book, so I was hearing the oral story of “Tax According to Chirelstein” from the mouth of Bill Brown, just as Homer heard the oral history of The Odyssey from the Greeks before he wrote it down.) Bill Brown was (and still is) such an engaging person that he not only became my mentor, but also one of my closest personal friends, so much so that we even were guests at each other’s weddings . By the time I graduated from Pitt, I knew I wanted to follow in Bill’s footsteps, get my LL.M. from Yale, and be a tax law professor. (The fact patterns in so many tax cases were so humorous that I knew I had found a motherlode of materials for performing my comic routines in front of captive audiences.)

Despite the fact that I now realized that my goal in life was to be an academic bum (It sure beat being a ski bum and having to wipe the runny noses of crying kids!), I convinced a couple of law firms that I really wanted to practice law and was able to spend four years practicing in D.C. and Pittsburgh so that I would have a few war stories to tell my future students. Although I did get to practice a little tax law, most of my practice work involved antitrust, commercial real estate mortgage lending, and commercial litigation. At least one partner with whom I worked figured me out and told me I really belonged in academia, so I took his advice to heart and sent in my LL.M. application to Yale.

Yale accepted me, not knowing that my goal in life was to be a ski bum. The Yalies figured me out, however, when I tried (unsuccessfully) to organize a Yale Law School Ski Team to compete in a winter carnival that the Vermont Law School was trying to get started. Actually, my year at Yale was one of the most enjoyable years of my life, and one of the reasons was that I had Marvin Chirelstein as my advisor and took a couple classes with him. When I accepted an offer to teach at Southern Illinois University, Marv said to me, “If you can do for their law school what Walt Frazier did for their basketball program, well….” And off to Carbondale I went.

At the time I taught at Southern Illinois, it was a very exciting place to be. I was hired by the founding Dean, Hiram Lesar, who had been the dean at Washington University in St. Louis and who was also a tax person. Because of Hiram’s vast experience in legal education (he was also a major contributor to Casner’s American Law of Property), he was able to get many distinguished senior professors to accept visitorships to SIU. I felt quite privileged as a first year law teacher to count as a colleague and friend the late Reed Dickerson who was teaching Legislation at SIU. At AALS meetings, all that we on the SIU Faculty had to do was be anywhere near Hiram and we would be introduced to a “Who’s Who” of legal education.

SIU also prided itself on having contacts with many universities around the world. Some of those universities were in Poland, and there was a sizable number of non-law graduate students there from Poland. One such graduate student named Grazyna, whom I met at a party, called me after the party to ask if I would review a contract of employment she had been offered. Not being a member of the Illinois Bar, I told her that I could not represent her, but that I would be happy to have lunch with her. So have lunch we did, and we now have been married for over twenty-one years! (I certainly am glad I was not admitted to the Illinois Bar because, as I tell my students, you should not date your clients, but since I was not a member of the Bar, Grazyna could not be my client, so I was free to date and then marry her.)

While teaching at SIU, I sent my first article out to law reviews. It had nothing to do with tax; it had to do with the NFL’s antitrust problems. Three weeks after I sent it out, I received a call from the Michigan Law Review wanting to know if I would let them publish it as the lead article in the then-current volume. At first I thought the call was a joke, but, beginner’s luck, it was a genuine offer, and I had a great experience working with their editorial board. Shortly after my article was accepted at Michigan, I was recruited by the University of Cincinnati to join their law faculty. Although SIU was (and still is) a great law school, I missed living in an urban environment and accepted Cincinnati’s offer.

I spent six wonderful years on the Cincinnati law faculty and made many friends there. An overwhelming majority of the tenured faculty voted to grant me tenure, but a small minority of the tenured faculty (including the dean who had already resigned) had a different view. I was told by one person that my problem was that my scholarly record was on downward spiral because I followed up my Michigan antitrust article with tax articles that appeared “only in” the Georgia Law Review and the Washington University Law Quarterly. Although this experience was quite difficult at the time, I now look back on it as just another humorous event in my life. I received an offer from Capital to join its Faculty as a full professor and was granted tenure during my first year there.

It is my departure from Cincinnati, however, that makes me believe I am entitled to receive credit for the existence of TaxProf Blog and the TaxProf email listserv. Once I accepted the offer from Capital, Cincinnati had an opening on its tax faculty that needed filled, and I participated in the hiring process to find my replacement. There were many interesting candidates whom we interviewed, but the person we chose to replace me was a guy named Paul Caron, and the rest is history.

I am now in my seventeenth year on the Capital Law Faculty and have the greatest colleagues one could ever hope for. I teach Basic Income Tax, Estate and Gift Tax, and Estates and Trusts (or, as I tell people who ask, “Death and Taxes”). Since coming here, I have spent more time doing administrative duties than I ever dreamed I would. I have served as Interim Director of Graduate Law Programs on more than one occasion and, in a moment of insanity, agreed to serve as Interim Associate Dean of the Law School for a year while we were in a dean search. I have served as Chair of the University’s Academic Program Review Committee and as Vice Chair of the Faculty Senate. Eight years ago when Capital had its last ABA/AALS inspection, I chaired the Self Study Committee. Unfortunately, I forgot to screw up the last Self Study, because, on the theory that no good deed goes unpunished, I was assigned to chair the Self Study Committee again for the next ABA/AALS visit that is to occur in a few weeks. Despite these administrative duties, I have continued my scholarly work on the Supreme Court’s approach to tax cases and have an article on Justice O’Connor’s approach to tax cases that is due to be published in the Arizona State Law Journal in May.

All in all, things have turned out well for a would-be ski bum turned academic bum. In fact, I have only one complaint. There’s no good skiing in central Ohio!

January 27, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 20, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

The Boston University Graduate Tax Program, established in 1959 as one of the first graduate tax programs in the nation, continues to be one of the best. It consistently ranks among the Top 10 tax programs. The program offers a broad and diverse curriculum, with five required courses and 33 electives and concentrations in three areas:

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In a five-part series, TaxProf Blog profiled Boston University's full-time Tax Faculty:

January 20, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 13, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile Boston University's full-time Graduate Tax Faculty.

David I. Walker joined the BU faculty in 2002. He straddles the divide between corporate and tax law, teaching both and often doing research on topics that fall at the intersection of the two disciplines, such as executive compensation. Recent work has added a third leg to this stool - corporate accounting. For example, his paper Financial Accounting and Corporate Behavior, recently posted on SSRN and blogged here, examines the effect of accounting (and tax) on the behavior of managers and their firms. Other work in progress includes an empirical investigation of the interplay between tax, accounting, and corporate governance; an economic analysis of the stock option backdating phenomenon; and a study of regulatory tax penalties.

If forced to chose, David prefers teaching tax over corporate law because expectations are lower. But seriously, he finds that if he has a comparative teaching advantage (which he doubts) it lies in an ability to clarify complex transactions, concepts, and rules, and that this knack pays off most clearly in tax class. This skill isn’t innate; it’s largely due to the skillful teachers he had at Harvard, such as Al Warren and Dan Halperin. David’s baby tax class is shamelessly copied from Al Warren.

David came to the law fairly late and to tax even later. David entered Harvard Law School in 1995 after spending over a decade in the oil industry, including a couple of stints as an oil trader, which is less exciting than one might think. At Harvard he focused more on corporate law than tax, but when he took a firm job following graduation, a clerkship (for the marvelous Karen Nelson Moore of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals), and an Olin Fellowship back at Harvard, several mentors advised him that for a first or second year associate, tax work would be much more interesting than corporate. This turned out to be very good advice as David thoroughly enjoyed his two years in the tax department at Ropes & Gray in Boston and became a (partial, at least) Tax Prof as a result.

David’s scholarship and teaching have been vastly improved by advice from his extremely helpful and supportive colleagues at BU (and by no means just the tax faculty), Harvard, and BC, as well as from his old friends at Ropes & Gray. Boston, he says, is a great tax town. But he also feels extremely fortunate to have become part of the larger academic community and particularly values the relationships formed with junior faculty members across the country.

For prior BU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

January 13, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 6, 2007

Spotlight_1_1

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile Boston University's full-time Graduate Tax Faculty.

Theodore S. Sims first taught at the BU as a visiting professor during the spring of 1990 while on leave from George Washington and pursuing coursework towards a Ph.D. in economics at MIT. Since returning to the BU faculty in 1996, he has taught a number of courses in the tax field and in trusts and estates, as well as a survey course in social scientific methods.

Professor Sims’s recent writing includes work on game theory, the relationship between tax-motivated behavior and stock market returns, and the treatment of cancellation of indebtedness income.

He has served as a visiting professor at Michigan, taught in the NYU/IRS Continuing Legal Education Program, and made presentations to the Harvard Law School Tax Group, the National Tax Association, and the American Law and Economics Association.

Earlier in his career, Professor Sims clerked for Judge John Godbold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, practiced with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., and spent several years in the Office of Tax Policy of the U.S. Treasury, to which he subsequently served as a consultant.

For prior BU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

January 6, 2007 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 30, 2006

Spotlight_1_1

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In this five-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile Boston University's full-time Graduate Tax Faculty.

Park_2 William W. Park (known as Rusty) joined the B.U. Faculty in 1979 after five years of corporate practice in Paris and two years teaching at Cambridge lecturing on public international and “company” law. In addition to international tax, he teaches arbitration and international business transactions, and served for three years as Director of the Law School’s Center for Banking and Financial Law. He also has an interest in the interaction of law and religion.

Visiting appointments permitted him to teach tax in Dijon, Hong Kong, Geneva, and the Fletcher School. On several occasions he took leaves from the Law School to serve as counsel to a commercial banking group based in Switzerland.

Park’s current scholarly and professional activity focus on commercial arbitration. He is the author of a casebook and two treatises on the subject, and with David Tillinghast co-authored the monograph Tax Treaty Arbitration. He is General Editor of Arbitration International, a Vice President of the London Court of International Arbitration and a member of the NAFTA Financial Services Roster.

At present he sits on the Appeals Tribunal for the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, and served during four years as Arbitrator on the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland. Last year he retired as Chair of the ABA Committee on International Commercial Dispute Resolution.

For prior BU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

December 30, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2006

Spotlight_1_1

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In this five part series, TaxProf Blog will profile Boston University's full-time Graduate Tax Faculty.

As Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, Ernest M. Haddad is responsible BU's Graduate Tax Program, Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law, and Office of Foreign Programs. These departments offer a number of academic programs and services, including LL.M. degrees in American Law, Banking and Financial Law, Intellectual Property Law and Taxation.

Dean Haddad graduated from Trinity College in 1960 and BU in 1964. After two years of law firm practice, he returned to BU Law to serve as assistant dean.

In 1971 he entered public service as assistant secretary-general counsel in the newly created Massachusetts Executive Office of Human Services, then in 1976 joined Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts as general counsel. In 1981, Dean Haddad became secretary and general counsel of The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the largest teaching hospital affiliate of Harvard Medical School. In 1995, when MGH joined with Brigham and Women’s Hospital to create Partners Health Care System, Inc., he became its first General Counsel and Secretary, participating in the creation of the largest academic health care and biomedical research organization in the country. After 21 years in these positions, he left to return once again to BU Law.

Dean Haddad’s academic interest is in the financing and governance of complex exempt organizations with diverse tax issues. He is the author or co-author of several articles and book chapters on tax exempt organizations and health law.

Dean Haddad is involved in a variety of bar and community service activities. Among his current activities, he serves as a member of the governing boards of the International Institute of Boston and the New England Legal Foundation. He recently completed several years of service as an officer and governing board member of both the Boston Bar Association (BBA) and the Boston Bar Foundation (BBF) and continues to serve as chairman of the joint Audit Committee of the BBA and the BBF.

For prior BU Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

Alan Feld

December 23, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2006

Spotlight_1_1

Business Tax
Estate Planning
International Tax

In this five part series, TaxProf Blog will profile Boston University's full-time Graduate Tax Faculty.

A member of the faculty since 1971, Alan L. Feld has testified before a number of congressional committees on issues surrounding tax laws. Before coming to Boston University, he practiced tax and corporate law at two New York firms: Barrett Knapp Smith & Schapiro and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Professor Feld is the co-author of a major corporate tax casebook, Federal Income Taxation of Corporate Transactions, and Patrons Despite Themselves: Tax Payers and Arts Policy. In addition, he is the author of Tax Policy and Corporate Concentration. He has been published in the nation’s leading tax law journals, and his most recent written works include Preserving Basis After Redemption (Tax Notes), Rendering Unto Caesar or Electioneering for Caesar? Loss of Church Tax Exemption for Participation in Electoral Politics (Boston College Law Review), and Congress and the Legislative Web of Trust (Boston University Law Review). He has written articles on tax issues for Newsweek and The Washington Post, as well.

Over the years, Professor Feld has taught a number of courses at Boston University in the areas of tax law, law and the arts, nonprofit organizations and legislative process. In 2002, he received the School’s Michael Melton Award for Teaching Excellence. In addition to his responsibilities at Boston University, he has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania, and as Professor-in-Residence at the Office of Chief Counsel, Internal Revenue Service. Professor Feld served as Co-Reporter for the American Law Institute project on Principles of the Law of Nonprofit Organizations from 2000 to 2004 and now serve on the Advisers group.

December 16, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 9, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Elena Marty-Nelson (Nova)

B.S. 1980, Miami
J.D. 1983, Georgetown
LL.M. (Tax) 1986, Georgetown

I knew very early on that I wanted to be a lawyer and a teacher. I left Cuba as a child in the care of my grandparents. My grandfather–who helped raise me until I was reunited with my parents–was my inspiration. He had been general counsel for two banks in Cuba but felt he was too old (and too broke) when he came here to learn a new legal system. So, although he loved the law, he was never able to practice in this country. As is typical of many immigrants, he also put his faith in education. He explained that no matter what happens no one can take away your education and what is in your head. The best way I thought I could honor him would be to become both a lawyer and a teacher. I decided to do it for him–but really it has been terrific for me.

After law school, I worked for several years at a large firm in DC. It was a great learning experience. Even as a young attorney I was able to work on cutting edge deals. I quickly got hooked on the tax side of corporate work and took LL.M. courses at night. After some more years at the firm, I had learned a lot and had earned enough to pay off student loans. So, I gave up the flash (and paycheck) associated with private practice for my first teaching job. I taught in the real estate finance clinic at Georgetown–The Harrison Institute–as a graduate fellow. It was a different world. My students were representing low income tenants who were trying to obtain grants and avoid evictions. It was wonderful to see the students making a difference. I also realized that teaching was a blast.

When my first child was born I knew I could no longer hold off my extended family who had kept insisting I move back to Florida. I convinced my husband, who I had met in first year of law school, to pack up with our infant son and move to South Florida. I started teaching at NSU in Fort Lauderdale and I have been here ever since. That newborn is now in high school. One reason it works it that my associate dean, Dean Gail Richmond, is a true tax person. As a tax professor herself, she understands and encourages my need to question, to experiment, to challenge myself and our tax students. I highly recommend having a tax professor as a dean. Gail also lets me teach some of my other favorite courses such as securities regulations and wills/trusts. She has even team taught tax with me. Once we taught an online version of income tax to 115 students. Another year we team taught a hybrid version of income tax to about 90 students. She has also co-authored with me. Last week we sent our wills and trusts casebook to the publishers.

Outside of work, when we are not dodging hurricanes, my husband and I are in the stands watching our two boys swim in varsity swim meets.

December 9, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 2, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Kimberly Stanley (Golden Gate)

B.S. 1978, BYU
J.D. 1985, George Washington
LL.M. (Tax) 1989, Georgetown

One of the joys of teaching Federal Income Tax in our JD program is seeing a student who has no particular connection to tax law come to the realization of how fun it can be. That was my experience. As a first-semester 2L at George Washington University Law School, I enrolled in a tax class only because I had met a Tax Court judge, Steve Swift, who was SO enthusiastic about tax law that I became intrigued. Before law school I taught high school history and my only real exposure to tax law was filling out my annual Form 1040EZ. But as I sat in class that semester, I could hardly believe how interesting and topical the subject was, and how much I enjoyed it – once I got over the fear of not being able to “crunch the numbers,” I was hooked.

I was fortunate to clerk for Judge Swift during my second summer, part time during my third year of law school, and then full time for two years following my graduation from GW in 1985. What a fantastic and life-shaping experience! After a year, I started the LLM Tax program at Georgetown at night, learning from (and with) some of the best tax minds in the country. After a lot of thought, I declined the offers to enter private practice, and took a job with the Department of Justice Tax Division, Appellate Section, in 1987. With only two years of legal experience, I couldn’t believe they’d actually let me argue cases before appellate judges! It was a sharp learning curve, but a wonderful job. I remember one Tenth Circuit judge asking me, almost as an aside, “So tell me, counselor, exactly what is a tax shelter?” Try explaining the doctrine of economic substance in 10 minutes or less!

After five years of government service, I wanted to give private practice a try and return to my California roots. I joined Gray Cary in San Diego as a tax associate and soon became a fixture in the local and state tax bar associations. Some of my partners downplayed the benefit of bar association work because “that’s not where the clients are,” but I could not disagree more. After only two years, I left Gray Cary with a partner and opened a boutique tax firm in La Jolla. We had a great run for 6 years – I did primarily federal and state tax litigation and controversy resolution – but with IRS downsizing, restructuring, and lack of enforcement I switched gears and pursued my long-time goal of law teaching. Say what you will about the AALS meat market, but it matched me to my perfect job.

I started at Golden Gate School of Law in July 2003, as the Associate Dean of the Tax LLM program and as an Associate Professor in the law school. The graduate tax program at GGU has been a fixture in San Francisco for over 25 years, and it is my honor to be its current director. I teach both JD and LLM tax classes, and I have been teaching 1L Property as well. Early on, I was lucky to catch that same enthusiasm for tax law that Judge Swift had, and it has been a pleasure for me to pass that on to unsuspecting students here at Golden Gate.

December 2, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 25, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Katherine T. Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)

B.A. 1978, Florida
J.D. 1984, UCLA
LL.M. (Tax) 1989, NYU
LL.M. (Corporate Law) 1990, NYU

My father used to say that I had to become a lawyer because, in his entire life, he had been beaten in an argument by only three people, one of whom was a child – me. My route to law school was indirect, however. In college, I participated on an intercollegiate speech team, but later majored in psychology. In my senior year at the University of Florida, I worked on several experiments in the areas of physiological psychology and cognitive psychology. My psychology professors understandably assumed that I would continue on to graduate school in psychology, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after college. A wide range of public policy issues intrigued me. Also, I was interested in nutrition and exercise physiology, took 30 hours of dance classes, and was a member of the University Dance Company. I knew that I would attend graduate school, but was unsure about what type of graduate school I wanted to attend. Psychology graduate school, law school, and business school all were in the running. I even toyed with the idea of becoming a nutritionist or physical therapist. I thought that some work experience might help me decide which professional path to take and I wanted to see a bit of the world before applying to graduate school.

After I graduated from college, I moved to Montauk, New York and became the fitness director at an exclusive resort spa. I taught 10 exercise classes a day and did private training sessions with spa guests, most of whom struggled mightily with their weight. The job was rewarding and produced significant psychic income (who wouldn’t enjoy starting each day with a 7 a.m. “Beach Walk”?), but paid only a pittance. Eventually, I tired of living as a pauper and joined American Airlines, in the pursuit of greater adventure, better pay, and employer-provided health insurance. I supervised a group of 40 adventurous, fun-loving flight attendants at La Guardia Airport. When the airline industry took a turn for the worse, I decided to head back to school. Having narrowed the graduate school decision to psychology graduate school and law school, I took the GRE and LSAT. When I scored significantly higher on the LSAT than on the GRE, I decided to follow my natural intellectual strengths and applied to law school -- at which point my dad said “I told you so.”

I headed west to UCLA School of Law, lured by the promise of warm winters and a relatively inexpensive education at a law school with a great reputation. My UCLA law school buddy, Nancy, and I decided that we must endure the dreaded federal income tax class if we hoped to avoid committing malpractice as lawyers. We enrolled in Mike Asimow’s tax class in the fall of our second year. From the beginning of the term, we were hooked. Mike is an intense, energetic, and enthusiastic teacher. During our tax class, he sometimes beat his chest, like Tarzan, while shouting: “That’s like saying to the Commissioner: [thump, thump, thump] AUDIT ME!!!” Nancy and I discovered, to our delight, that the application of tax law often produces numerical answers, a thing unheard of in the first-year “there-are-no-right-answers” curriculum. Class assignments felt like doing puzzles. Years later, I still like to solve those puzzles.

The L.A. law firm in which I practiced accommodated my interest in tax and tax partner Bob Boffa (a graduate of the NYU Tax LL.M. program and recipient of the Dana Latham Award for service to the L.A. tax community) was my capable mentor. My tax practice involved an interesting and eclectic mix of transactional work and controversy work.

After four years of law firm practice in L.A., I moved to New York City and enrolled in the NYU Tax LL.M. program full-time. I loved being back in school and enrolled in the NYU Corporate Law LL.M. program immediately after I graduated from the Tax LL.M. program. Until the final term of my second LL.M. degree program, it never occurred to me that I could be a law professor. Irene Dorzback, Assistant Dean for Career Services at NYU, was chatting with me about my prior law firm experience and asked me to talk about my favorite aspects of practice. I confided that, aside from the puzzle-solving aspect of tax practice, what I most enjoyed about working in a firm were all of the non-billable activities, such as working on articles with Bob, mentoring summer associates, participating on the firm’s hiring committee, and so on. Irene said that I should consider a career in law teaching and suggested that I apply for an Acting Assistant Professor position at NYU, which I did immediately. When NYU hired me, my career in law teaching was underway. I benefited in many ways from beginning my teaching career in the midst of the legendary NYU tax faculty.

After two years of teaching various Tax LL.M. courses at NYU, I moved to a tenure-track position at Saint Louis University School of Law. At SLU, I communed with the renowned health law faculty and the intellectually engaged group of young, untenured professors SLU had recently hired. The environment at SLU was collegial and supportive. I taught tax as a first-year subject, which was a new and rewarding experience.

My tax colleagues (Ellen Aprill, Ted Seto, Jenny Kowal, Joe Sliskovich, and Dean Weiner) are bright, energetic, and collegial. We work well together as a group and all contribute to the success of our J.D. and Tax LL.M. programs. We also encourage and support each other’s scholarship and enjoy participating in the vibrant tax policy community in the greater Los Angeles area.

Several of my articles have focused on corporate tax issues, but my scholarship recently has taken off in new directions. The first article I wrote after receiving tenure included poetry and focused on the controversial topic of medical expense deductions for fertility treatment costs. More recently, I have developed new scholarly interests in budget policy and public health policy. My most recent article, Deficits and the Dividend Tax Cut: Tax Policy as the Handmaiden of Budget Policy, is forthcoming in 41 Ga. L. Rev ___ (2006). I have presented my current work-in-progress, Normative Justifications for Food Excise Taxes, at the UCLA School of Law and the UCLA Medical School Center for Human Nutrition. This project incorporates several areas of long-standing interest to me, including tax policy, behavioral economics, and nutrition. I have spoken twice at the Public Health Advocacy Institute’s annual conferences on Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic and PHAI has invited me to speak again at this year’s conference in November.

[Editor's note: Katie also is a co-author of the wonderful Federal income Tax: Examples and Explanations (Aspen, 4th ed. 2005), which I enthusiastically recommend to my Tax I students each year.]

On a personal note, my husband, Peter Gardiner, and I have been married 17 years. Peter works in finance, so our house runs on East Coast time, despite the fact that we live on the West Coast. Peter and I share an appreciation for a wide variety of films, including foreign classics by Bergman and Kurosawa, period dramas, indie films, documentaries, and some mainstream escapist entertainment. As a confirmed “foodie,” I enjoy shopping at LA’s specialty food and restaurant stores (e.g., Surfas Restaurant Supply and Bay Cities Italian Deli) and the organic Farmers’ Market near my home. My family tells anyone who will listen that I am a world-class baker. (My current favorite dessert is a Scharffenberger chocolate cake with a chocolate ganache.) I am pressed into baking service for any event that arguably could be described as a special occasion. I also study myth and fairy tales and lately have been reading the nonfiction works of Marie-Louise von Franz. My nine-year-old son, Andrew, and I share an interest in mythic fantasy (literature and film), including The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and the Japanese anime films of Hayao Miyazaki.

November 25, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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March 31, 2007

March 17, 2007

March 10, 2007

March 3, 2007

February 24, 2007

February 17, 2007

February 10, 2007

February 3, 2007

January 27, 2007

January 20, 2007

January 13, 2007

January 6, 2007

December 30, 2006

December 23, 2006

December 16, 2006

December 9, 2006

December 2, 2006

November 25, 2006