TaxProf Blog: Tax Prof Spotlight

November 18, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Jonathan Barry Forman (Oklahoma)

B.S. 1973, Northwestern
M,A. (Psychology) 1975, Iowa
J.D. 1978, Michigan
M,A. (Economics) 1983, George Washington

Although I’m from Cleveland, I was always a westerner at heart, and now I get to live where the buffalo roam. In college, I studied psychology, thought about economic justice, and went to lots of antiwar demonstrations. I almost went to law school next, but the first time I went to a law library, I fell asleep. So, instead, I went to graduate school in physiological psychology – yep, running rats. Soon, however, I got interested in the rights of mental patients, and I went to law school to become a civil rights lawyer.

Thanks to Professor L. Hart Wright, I fell in love with tax law. I also took my first economics class in law school, and I still remember when Professor Peter Steiner nicknamed me “Robin Hood” because I wanted to take from the rich and give to the poor.

After law school, I clerked for Trial Judge Robert J. Yock on the U.S. Court of Claims and then tried tax cases for the Justice Department. In the evenings I got a master’s degree in economics and taught tax law at Antioch School of Law. After Justice, I served as tax counsel to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and since 1985 I have been at the University of Oklahoma

I usually teach individual income tax, corporate tax, and pension law; but I have also taught wealth transfer tax, tax policy, tax procedure, elder law, and poverty law classes. Most of my research focuses on how taxes influence individual decisions about work and retirement, and my new book —Making America Work (Urban Institute Press, 2006) — explains how tax, transfer, and regulatory reforms could both increase the economic rewards for work and promote greater economic justice.

I have been the Alfred P. Murrah Professor of Law at Oklahoma since 2005, and I am Vice Chair of the board of trustees of the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System. Over the years, I have also been active in the American Bar Association, the American Tax Policy Institute, the Association of American Law Professors, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. I have also lectured around the world, testified before Congress, and served on numerous federal and state advisory committees.

In addition, to my scholarly publications, I have a monthly column in the Journal Record business newspaper of Oklahoma City, and I have published op-eds in Barron’s, the Dallas Morning News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Washington Times, the Daily Oklahoman, Pensions & Investments, and Tax Notes. My wife and I have two teenagers, and we all like to travel and camp. We are also birdwatchers, and I have a collection of almost 2,000 bird postcards.

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.

November 18, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 11, 2006

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For over 30 years, the University of Florida Graduate Tax Program has been one of the nation's leading programs for the advanced study of tax law. Among the country's 30 graduate tax programs, Florida has by far the largest number of full-time faculty and is the only school to offer three advanced tax degrees:

Over the past twelve weeks, we have profiled the Florida Graduate Tax Faculty. Here is the full listing, in case you missed any of the profiles. Next week, we will resume our regular spotlight series on individual Tax Profs.

November 11, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 4, 2006

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Graduate tax students assist in the publication of the Florida Tax Review, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed tax journals in the country. In this 12-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile the Florida Graduate Tax Faculty. We conclude the series with profiles of Florida's two visiting tax faculty.

Kristin Balding Gutting earned her B.S. (Accounting, 1997) from Valparaiso, J.D. (2000) from Saint Louis, and Tax LL.M. (2000) from 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 taxation.

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 2005-2006 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 – 2007 school year. This fall I am teaching Federal Individual Income Taxation and Federal Tax Research. In the spring I look forward to teaching Partnership Taxation and advising several Graduate Tax students on their tax papers.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

November 4, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 28, 2006

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Gregg Polsky is visiting Florida this year from Minnesota:

I grew up in South Florida playing tennis—a lot of tennis. I’d estimate about 300 days a year between the ages of 10 and 22. Although I became pretty good at the game, playing competitive junior tennis in South Florida is quite a humbling experience. When I was a senior in high school, the player that was then the #1 ranked junior tennis player in the world was seeded third in the district tournament! My modest claim to tennis fame occurred when my doubles partner and I won the Florida state high school doubles championship (prior winners include Jim Courier) in my senior year. I attribute this accomplishment mainly (exclusively?) to my luck in having a truly gifted doubles partner (Brian Stanton), who later became an NCAA All-American at FSU. My decision about where to attend college was driven mainly by tennis. When my college career was over, I stopped playing tennis completely and swore that I’d never pick up a racket again.

Having given up tennis, I took a renewed interest in academics when I started law school at the University of Florida. I found that I really enjoyed learning and thinking about legal issues and problems. I also learned that I strangely loved tax law. This led me to enter the terrific LL.M. program at Florida and, upon graduation from the LL.M. program, to work in the tax department of the Miami office of White & Case, where I learned a tremendous amount about the real-world practice of tax law in only a few years.

I am now at the University of Minnesota Law School. I feel extremely fortunate to be at this great law school despite my nontraditional law teaching background. Ironically, in the Twin Cities I recently started playing tennis again after a ten year hiatus. This year, I am back in Gainesville, teaching at the University of Florida. Though I very much miss my friends and colleagues in the Twin Cities, it’s been nice being much closer to my family and my wife Rina’s family. And it’s great to play outdoor tennis in late autumn!

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

October 28, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 21, 2006

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A native of Acadiana, Steven J. Willis joined the Florida faculty in 1981, having taught previously at NYU. He earned his B.A. (1974) and J.D. (1977) from LSU, and his tax LL.M. (1979) from NYU.

Steven teaches tax courses in both the J.D. program and the Graduate Tax Program. He is married to Vickey Broussard, with whom he has one son, Scott Willis, and one daughter, Annie Willis.

His recent publications include:

Federal Tax Accounting (LexisNexis Graduate Tax Series, 2006) (with Michael B. Lang (Chapman) & Elliott Manning (Miami))
The Tax Law of Charities and Other Exempt Organizations: Cases, Materials, Questions, and Activities (Thomson-West, 2006) (with David A. Brennen (Georgia), Darryll K. Jones (Pittsburgh) & Beverly I. Moran (Vanderbilt))
Show Me the Numbers, Please, 93 Tax Notes 1321 (2001)
It's Time For Schlude to Go, 93 Tax Notes 127 (2001)

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

October 21, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 14, 2006

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David M. Richardson's freshman year of college was spent at the University of Virginia where I became interested in Physics. That interest, bolstered somewhat by the fact that my high school sweetheart, Regina, was at Smith College, resulted in my transfer to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. After graduating in 1961, I headed to the University of Florida for a graduate degree in Physics. On the way, Regina, who had also just graduated, and I got married by a Justice of the Peace in Georgia.

A second language was needed for a graduate degree and after my first year as a “Gator”, we went to Munich to study German. While there I began to think that law, possibly patent law, might be interesting and I applied to, and was accepted at, Columbia Law School. So, in the summer of 1962, we boarded the SS United States, with our newborn son, and traveled to New York City.

In my second year at Columbia, I had the good fortune to take the basic income tax course from Dean William Warren. Although we studied the rules, what made his course interesting to me was his emphasis on the underlying policy. During the following summer, I worked in the offices of Roberts & Holland in New York, on a PLI monograph that Sidney Roberts and Dean Warren were writing on U.S. Taxation of Foreign Corporations and Nonresident Aliens.

After graduating from law school in 1966, we moved to Miami, with our then three year old son, our two year old daughter and our second son, who was then one year old. I had received two offers, one from the largest law firm in town for $7,500 a year and the other from a tax boutique for $7,800 a year. As you might imagine, with a wife and three children to support and a mortgage to pay, the extra $5.77 a week was a strong inducement to take the higher offer. The senior partner in that firm was Hugh Culverhouse. Although he didn’t offer me an interest in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers when he acquired that franchise, he later created the Hugh F. Culverhouse Eminent Scholar Chair in Taxation at the University of Florida College of Law That Chair is now occupied by one of our most eminent scholars, Larry Lokken.

After three years at the Culverhouse firm, we moved to Princeton, New Jersey while I worked on an LL.M. in taxation at NYU. Not long after we returned from Princeton, I accepted Phil Heckerling’s invitation to become an adjunct professor at the University of Miami and teach a tax law. That experience, which lasted five years, was both more work and more fun than I had anticipated.

After four more years with the Culverhouse firm, I joined Roberts & Holland and opened the firm’s Miami office. This led to a confrontation with The Florida Bar. The Bar opposed “interstate firms” and we, and the other New York firm that opened up an office at the same time, wound up before the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Bar, which was represented during oral argument by its immediate past president, current president and president elect, explained to the Court that the Bar was concerned about the unlawful practice of law by persons not admitted to practice in Florida. The real reason, of course, was fear of competition. With the help of an unsolicited, very strong statement by former ABA President Chesterfield Smith, in opposition to establishing a “closed shop” in Florida, the Court rejected the Bar’s proposed ban on interstate firms. Many out-of-state firms now have offices in Florida, and the Bar seems to be prospering.

Eight years later, Monte Jackel, who had joined the Miami office, and I left Roberts & Holland and became the tax department of a Miami firm comprised mostly of U.S. trained Cuban lawyers. We did a lot of work for Central and South American clients. Two years later, during a conversation with Professor Jack Foreland about the Florida Bar Tax Certification Program, which I then chaired, Jack told me that the University of Florida Law School was looking for a Director for its Tax Program. On a whim, and at his suggestion, I applied the next day - which was the cut-off day for applications. A few weeks later, after a visit to Gainesville, I was offered, and accepted the job. In July of 1984 we moved to Gainesville and I again became a Gator. The worst thing that happened as a result of the move was that we forgot to tell our oldest son, who was then studying in Moscow, about my new job and that we were moving. When he got back to Miami, he had to call friends of ours to find out where we were. It took several years to convince him that we weren’t trying to hide from him.

For the last several years, I have served on the Board of Editors of the LexisNexis Graduate Tax Series. A number of years ago, Paul Caron, the Series Editor, recognized the lack of course materials designed specifically for graduate tax programs. Paul and I and the other Board members - Ellen Aprill, Elliott Manning and Philip Postlewaite - spent about two years working out the concept and negotiating with LexisNexis (which has strongly supported the project). Last year, Jerry Borison, Steve Johnson and I published the first book in the Series on civil tax procedure. Two other books in the Series have since been published and five or six more are under contract.

Now, twenty-two years after becoming a Gator for the second time, I plan to retire after this semester. I have been extremely fortunate, in both my practice of law and as a teacher, to have worked with and learned from some extraordinarily talented and dedicated tax lawyers. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

October 14, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 7, 2006

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Martin J. McMahon, Jr. is the Clarence J. TeSelle Professor of Law at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the Graduate Tax Program, although neither he nor anyone else is quite sure how he ended up there. He is a 1971 graduate of Rutgers College, where he majored in narcolepsy and minored in economics, in which his principal focus was socialist and communist economic systems. Since his senior thesis — researched in part in Russian-language Soviet economic journals, which was difficult since Marty didn’t read Russian all that well — predicted, based on the Soviet economic journal articles, that the Soviet centrally planned economic system would eventually give way to a more market-oriented system, he didn’t see any future as a communist economist. (Nevertheless, some people, particularly Ira Shepard, continue to this day to call him a “commie” after reading his various articles on progressive taxation.) So Marty started looking for something else to do.

When he discovered that any decent Ph.D. program in economics required a lot more calculus than the mathophobic young Marty was capable of mastering, he hired someone much smarter than he was to take the LSAT, and the resulting score got him admitted to Boston College Law School, from which he graduated in 1974. While in law school Marty spent most of his time playing racquetball, but in between matches took a few tax classes with Paul McDaniel, who introduced him to tax expenditure analysis. Marty and tax law experienced love at first sight, and ever since they have been inseparable. Tax expenditure analysis revealed government investment in business after business as far as the eye could see! As far as Marty was concerned the U.S. was a socialist country after all. Nevertheless, even socialists have to eat and pay off educational loans, so after graduating from B.C. Law School, Marty went to Nashua, New Hampshire to practice law doing business and estate planning work from 1974 to 1979.

It didn’t take too long for Marty to figure out that he was listening to the beat of a different drummer than most tax practitioners in private practice, as well as, as they say on kindergarten report cards, “does not play well with others.” One of the partners for whom he did a lot of work kept asking Marty to “show me the rule that says he [the client] can’t deduct that expenditure” and “where’s the specific rule that says that the client has to include that receipt in gross income.” Marty’s incessant response was “you’ve got it backwards — expenditures aren’t deductible unless you find the rule that says they are, and receipts must be included unless you find the rule that says they aren’t.” After several years of countless incorporations, shareholder buy-sell agreements, recapitalizations of family corporations, wills, inter vivos pour-over A/B trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, Crummy trusts, not to mention fruitlessly explaining endless oil and gas, cattle feeding, equipment leasing, and movie tax shelter prospectuses to a long queue of doctor, dentist and airline pilot clients, and other types also pathologically addicted to tax avoidance, Marty developed an exit strategy. One night a week, for two and a half years, Marty slept through evening classes as a part-time student in the Boston University Law School Graduate Tax Program, from which he purchased an LL.M. in taxation in 1979. This paper credential fooled the University of Kentucky College of Law into thinking that he actually knew something about tax law and enabled him to retire from practice to the gentrified life of being a law professor in the fall of 1979.

After settling in Lexington, Kentucky, which he thought was a genteel, quiet, charming Southern city where he would spend the rest of his life attending the horse races, snacking on sandwiches of country ham on beaten biscuits, and sipping mint juleps, Marty discovered that they really did expect him to write bunches of law review articles to get tenure and keep his job. Thus, Marty set about churning out a series of potboiler law review articles about taxation — none comparing, however, with John Grisham’s book The Firm, because the law reviews kept editing out the gratuitous sex scenes — including one published in the N.Y.U. Law Review in 1981 that suggested the cockamamy idea of taxing kid’s income at their parents’ rates. (He still has, side-by-side in a file folder letters from Stanley Surrey, dated Feb. 16, 1982, stating “as the world is presently turning I would not be so hopeful of movement in the direction you so clearly analyze,” and one on Department of Treasury letterhead from some guy named Gene Steuerle, dated June 14,1982 stating “[y]our article on the aggregation of income of children and parents came to my attention recently. ... ”) Marty likes to think that the N.Y.U piece, along with a couple of others about things like corporate reorganizations and natural resources taxation, got him tenure, but it's widely rumored that he really got tenure by jogging with the dean every day, keeping two paces behind the dean, and commenting on how fast the pace was, no matter how slow the pace really was, and by hanging out at Keeneland race course with the dean studying the Daily Racing Form. While he was at UK, many people — mostly his faculty colleagues — suggested that he should leave and go elsewhere. On several occasions the dean and his faculty colleagues at Kentucky shipped him off elsewhere to teach for a while, and he visited at the University of Virginia in 1982-1983 and at Florida in 1991. (Amazingly enough, Florida took him back again in 1997!)

To get revenge on his UK colleagues, in the mid-1980s he went to work as a Professor-in-Residence at the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, where he suggested that the entire UK faculty be audited. Because little revenue was raised from the audits of law school professors that he suggested, however, he was relegated to tasks like helping to promulgate the first guidance on something called the ‘Kiddie Tax,” or something like that, which was enacted in 1986, working on devising the interest tracing rules in Treas. Reg. §1.163-8T, and reviewing the first set of temporary and proposed regulations under the § 469 passive activity loss rules. In fact, Marty’s very last act as Professor-in-Residence was to spend three hours with the Chief Counsel himself explaining to him in such a confused and disjointed presentation the proposed rules in a tentative signature package of temporary § 469 regulations that the Chief Counsel refused to release the regulations for months after Marty left (and presumably only after someone who was more capable explained a substantially revised version of the regulations to the Chief Counsel more coherently than Marty could).

After returning to UK, he eventually worked his way up to being the Laramie Leatherman Professor of Law. He probably couldn’t have gotten that position except the donor earmarked (oh my, is that a “naughty word” these days) the endowed professorship for a full professor teaching taxation and Marty happened to be the only faculty member who fit that description. Nevertheless, according to rumor, in the mid-90’s a new dean there got so tired of Marty rescheduling classes to go bass fishing — he kept driving down to Florida to go fishing with his buddy David Richardson — that the dean told Marty to go someplace where the fishing was better and gave Florida a glowing, if imaginative, recommendation regarding Marty’s teaching credentials. As a result UF squandered a faculty slot on hm in 1997. (Only a week after Marty announced his departure, Rick Pitino resigned as UK basketball coach and moved to Boston. Whether there is a connection or not is anyone’s guess.) Because he now spends so much time fishing and floating in his pool, when not using his season tickets to football, basketball, and baseball — GO GATORS! — instead of writing, Marty has been stuck at the University of Florida ever since.

To satisfy the lust for money of the bursars of multiple universities, and to mollify, and sometimes even keep cheerful, his two sons, one or the other or both of whom seem to have been a full-time college, graduate, or — gasp! — law student, every year for over a decade, Marty moonlights as a book author. He has ridden on Boris Bittker's coattails by coauthoring three editions of a treatise, Federal Income Taxation of Individuals, with this Titan of Taxation. (The story of how this gig evolved from Bittker dialing a wrong number and getting McMahon on the phone has already been chronicled on TaxProf..) Because Marty is no longer willing to read, let alone try to understand, the “Annual Tax Change Act” (or is it “Semi-Annual’) that has become in vogue this decade, Larry Zelenak pulled Marty’s fat out of the fire by joining as a co-author on the treatise with the most recent edition. When Marty ran out of ideas for new law review articles in the late 1980s and was looking for something to do to convince the dean that he was still working, Marty’s law school mentors, Paul McDaniel and Hugh Ault, felt sorry for him and let him coauthor multiple editions of four casebooks covering basic income tax, corporate tax, partnership tax, and taxation of business organizations. So he didn’t have to work too hard, Marty also conned them into also taking on board as another co-author his old co-Professor-in-Residence and beer drinking buddy, Dan Simmons. (No kidding, you should have seen the looks in the D.C. bars back in 1986 and 1987 when over beers, Marty and Dan would pull out of their briefcases their annotated copies of The Tax Reform Act of 1986 and start debating the nuances of the language of the new statutory provisions between swigs of beer.) Although he much prefers writing casebooks (thereby generating royalty income to pay for his kid’s law school tuition and car insurance), academia being academia, and the President of the University of Florida having dreams that UF will soon become a “Top-10 Public,” in order to get raises sufficient not to fall too far behind inflation, Marty still has to write a occasional law review article about something, but he tries to keep them simple and co-authored, for example, the Current Developments series in the Florida Tax Review co-authored with Ira Shepard. As a result, he doesn’t really get to go fishing quite as much as he hoped to when he retired to Florida.

All of those articles that nobody actually reads also superficially appear to have gotten him elected to the ALI, but most people consider that to be a case of mistaken identity; they probably meant to elect that guy with the same name who wrote all those A.L.R. annotations. At a conference quite a few years ago, he said something so long winded and confusing that it was mistaken for profundity, causing one of the prominent tax lawyers in attendance to nominate him for fellowship in the American College of Tax Counsel. Since his scant royalties are devoured by subsidizing support of his college graduate, but needy, sons, one now at Boalt Hall (“No, no,” he screams, “I will never, never, become a tax lawyer; it’s a tree-hugger’s life me.”) and the other an art conservator for the State of New Mexico (do you know what art conservators get paid? — it’s definitely not the same question as asking “Do you know what investment bankers get paid?”), Marty’s generally been willing to go anywhere for a mini-vacation paid for by a CLE sponsor. Over the years he has found a surprising number of suckers to subsidize his thinly disguised vacation travel. On occasion, he’s even cozied up to foreign tax professors who were visiting at UF, and after treating them to enough dinners, wangled gigs at places like Cambridge (no not on the Charles, on the Cam) and Westfälische Wilhems-Universität Münster. (No, Marty doesn’t speak German; although it is one of the four languages that he has unsuccessfully attempted to learn, but how hard is it to say “Bier und Wurst, bitte.”) But, please don’t tell the IRS about these trips. Marty suspects the quality of the opinion letters he gave himself concluding that the travel is a working condition fringe benefit might be considered to be as credible as tax shelter opinion letters from that firm that sounds like it operates a radio station somewhere west of the Mississippi.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

October 7, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2006

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Paul R. McDaniel is the James J. Freeland Eminent Scholar in Taxation and Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He is entering his fortieth year as a full-time tax professor, tax practitioner, and government tax official.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. After graduating from Harvard in 1961 (a member of what came to be known as the “tax class”), Paul returned to his home in Oklahoma City and joined the Crowe, Dunleavy firm. He was firmly on a track designed to make him a tough litigator. However, after a few extremely difficult and unpleasant trials, he decided that tax law offered the prospect of a less stressful and more interesting way to practice law.

Bruce Johnson was Paul’s tax mentor at the firm. He customarily traveled to D.C. to meet with IRS and Treasury officials. He returned from one such trip in early 1967 and, uncharacteristically, did not talk to Paul about it for about three days. Bruce called him into his office then and told him that Stanley Surrey, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy, had inquired whether he had any tax associates who might be interested in a position in the Tax Legislative Counsel’s office in the Treasury. Sheepishly, Bruce admitted that he told Surrey that did not know of anyone. However, plagued by his conscience he told Paul that he would recommend him to Surrey if he wanted that experience. Paul did, and joined the Treasury TLC staff in April 1967.

With the change of Administrations, Surrey left the Treasury to return to teach at Harvard and appointed Paul and Dan Halperin as Acting Associate Tax Legislative Counsel, pending appointments to be made by the new Treasury officials. Ed Cohen and Jack Nolan were appointed to the top Treasury tax positions. They proposed to make permanent the appointments of Dan and Paul, but following the new Administration’s policy, they were required to get the approval of the Senators from Oklahoma (for Paul) and New York (for Dan). Senator Bellman, from Oklahoma, objected to Paul’s appointment as co-head of the TLC office on the ground that he was an ardent Democrat. Ed and Jack unsuccessfully argued the case with Bellman and passed the matter up to the Secretary’s office. He, too, made no headway and sent the matter over to the White House. Finally, in the summer of 1969, Jack Nolan asked Paul to go to lunch. He advised him that Senator Bellman had told the White House that if Paul was not out of the Treasury by September 1, he would vote against the ABM Treaty, a vote which would have defeated ratification. Needless to say, Paul felt a little outmatched on receiving this information and submitted his resignation. The New York Times, however, picked up the story and gave Paul his fifteen minutes of fame with a front-page exposé of the events.

Paul then joined the staff of Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, who was the third-ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and wanted to take an active role in the Senate consideration of what was to become the Tax Reform Act of 1969. It was a valuable experience and led to a decade of frequent consulting with different Senators, particularly Senator Edward Kennedy.

In 1970 Paul left Washington to join the faculty of the Boston College Law School where he remained for 17 years. In 1987 he left teaching to become a partner at the Boston firm of Hill and Barlow and served as chair of the firm’s tax department.

Then, in 1993, Noel Cunningham, at NYU, called with the news that the faculty had voted to institute a new degree program, the LL.M. in International Taxation, and invited Paul to come to New York to design that program. After three years of planning the first class entered for the 1996-1997 academic year. Paul was the Director of the ITP and subsequently assumed the directorship of the Graduate Tax Program itself.

During his nine years at NYU, Paul maintained his principal home in Massachusetts, commuting each week between Boston and New York. As he has told friends, he became more tired of the commute earlier each year and by the beginning of his ninth year, he was tired of it in August.

Paul returned to BC for two years as an Adjunct Professor. But in December, 2003, Marty McMahon called from Florida to see if he would be interested in discussing the Freeland Chair with the Florida faculty. In late December Paul and his wife, Ginny, were looking out the window on a very, very cold night, with snow up to the windowsills, and asked themselves why they were living there. The decision was made to follow up on Marty’s invitation and Paul accepted Florida’s offer for his present position.

Paul has co-authored eight books and is the author or co-author of nearly sixty articles on taxation. He teaches primarily courses in the new LL.M. in International Taxation program instituted by Florida in 2005. He strongly advises his international students, before taking a position with a firm, to get a commitment that the firm will finance annual trips to the Congresses of the International Fiscal Association, which are held in highly desirable locations around the world. Happily, at the 2006 IFA Congress in Amsterdam, he met several former NYU and Florida students who had taken his advice.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

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

September 23, 2006

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Lokken Lawrence Lokken is the Hugh Culverhouse Eminent Scholar in Taxation at Florida:

Somebody once told me that Erwin Griswold, responding to the question, “What is the best undergraduate major for a student intending on going to law school?,” said that he thought mathematics and music were the best backgrounds for law students. His reasons for this belief are lost to me, but I found it very interesting because my undergraduate majors were music and mathematics. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the path that took me from music and mathematics to tax law is direct and not very long.

The connection with mathematics is not, of course, the one assumed by the tax-averse law student — “You’ve got to be really good with numbers in order to get a decent grade in tax.” Probably, the one link between the three disciplines is that all live in a fairly high level of abstraction, at least as I enjoy them most.

The connection between music and tax may be the richer. Both are very logical, but in each case, the logic is mostly internal. In both cases, the logic is important, even when its existence is not appreciated. I believe, for example, that the sonata form is significant to the experience of all who enjoy listening to a symphony by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, even those who have never heard of the sonata form. Similarly, I believe that every serious student of income taxes understands the essence of the Haig-Simons definition of income, whether or not he or she has ever heard or read a formal statement of the definition. In each case, moreover, understanding the internal logic of the subject helps a person appreciate the significance of deviations from that logic. Just what is it about the first chord in Beethoven’s First Symphony that so outraged critics of his time and is still quite striking to us today? (I am less charmed by Code §162(m).)

Another fortuity also turned out to be important to my development as a tax professor. I was at loose ends over the summer before I entered law school, so I looked at the law school’s summer offerings to see whether there was anything I could take. There was — a course entitled “Accounting for Lawyers,” which was then a required subject. I enrolled. The course was taught by a professor from the accounting school, who was obviously there only because he had done something to offend his department chair grievously. The law students reciprocated his dislike for the course, but although I had no business background of any sort, I liked it. In fact, I liked it better than the tax courses I later took as a law student, which, I then thought and continue to believe, were not well taught. After entering law teaching, I took several more accounting courses, which I found even more enlightening when I could better appreciate the connections between tax law and financial accounting. I believe that ignorance of financial accounting is a significant handicap for a tax student or tax lawyer.

Years ago, I took up golf and found it to be the opposite of tax law — utterly frustrating and unrewarding. Being the dogged sort, I learned this over and over again, but I eventually gave up golf.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

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

September 16, 2006

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David M. Hudson was born in 1946. He received his B.S. degree in 1968 from Wake Forest University, J.D. degree in 1974 from Florida State University, an LL.M. (Taxation) in 1975 from the University of Florida, and an LL.M. in 1980 from the University of London. He picks up the story:

I am presently serving as Editor of the Florida Tax Review. I was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1974. I served as an Assistant Attorney General (Taxation) with the Florida Department of Legal Affairs from 1974 - 76; Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Florida from 1976 - 77; Assistant Professor of Law at Duquesne, 1977 - 78; Deputy General Counsel, Florida Department of Business Regulation, 1978 - 79; Adjunct Professor of Law at Florida State, 1979. At the University of Florida Levin College of Law I was an Assistant Professor of Law from 1980 - 83, an Associate Professor of Law from 1983 - 85 and I have been a Professor of Law since 1985.

I was a visiting Professor at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in the spring of 1986. I have been the Director of the LL.M. in Comparative Law Program at the University of Florida Levin College of Law since 1999. I teach courses on Immigration Law, Federal Income Taxation, and State and Local Taxation and.a seminar in Comparative Law. I am co-author (with Stephen A. Lind) of Black Letter on Federal Income Taxation (9th ed. 2004).

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

September 16, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 9, 2006

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With Aruba as my birthplace, I suppose I had an early sign I'd end up doing tax law, but it took me a good while to figure that out. I enjoyed the one tax class I took in law school, but what I really wanted to do when those three years were up was to see what was west of the Mississippi and work with the then new Vista Volunteer program. And I had some great experiences, working primarily with migrant farmworkers in Oregon. This was during the heyday of Cesar Chavez' movement in California no labor organizing, we couldn't do that and wouldn't have been good at it anyway but those were interesting times for farmworkers. A few more years in Legal Services followed, doing a range of individual casework and participating in some impact litigation. Tax was barely a dot on the horizon at this point.

I wound up deciding to stay on in Oregon -- if you've spent time in the summer or fall in the Willamette Valley and hiked in the Cascades, you'll understand why -- and entered private practice. It was over the next several years in practice that my interest in tax really developed and blossomed. Along the way, I became friendly with a number of folks on the Willamette Law School faculty, who seemed to clearly enjoy what they were doing, with plenty of students and former students of theirs who felt the same way.

I finally decided to go for an LL.M. and spent the next two years at NYU (a bit of the prodigal son returning only an hour, instead of three time zones, away from Connecticut based parents), first as a student and then as a teacher. I remember my pleasure in starting my LL.M. immediately following the passage of major tax legislation -- what great timing, I congratulated myself -- and my surprise at realizing the next year that there was more major tax legislation on the way. I knew, once I started, that I wanted to continue teaching, so I began to search for a permanent position and also began to put a lot of thought into preparing answers for the inevitable questions about a career path that led from practicing poverty law to teaching tax law.

My search for a permanent position was helped considerably when a tax position opened up at Willamette, in my hometown of Salem. It seemed to be Fate, writ large: no need to buy or sell a house, to change licenses, titles, voter registration, to find new doctors, banks, etc. Just head back home. So when Willamette offered, I accepted and returned for several happy years.

During those years, my colleague and co author, Martin Burke, had a good visit at Florida, and wound up introducing Florida and me to each other, and, well, 20 years later, here I still am, enjoying Florida and the Graduate Tax Program immensely. Florida has turned out to be a great place to live and raise a family -- no mountains, maybe, but swimming all year round and my colleagues, students and staff over the years have made the law school a great place to work. We have a group photo taken each spring of our graduating LL.M. class, with our tax faculty and staff, and the 30 or so photos which hang on our walls form a nice pictorial history of the Program. The students in each year's photo always look like they're glad to be here, and year after year, so do we.

And maybe, one of these days, I'll even decide to check out Aruba again and risk testing old memories against today's reality.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

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

September 2, 2006

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Patricia E. Dilley was a late comer to the Tax Prof world, having pursued careers in history teaching and then in government before even going to law school. She has made up for lost time and established herself as an important tax academic, producing major scholarly work in the social security and pension areas while teaching in one of America's leading graduate tax programs.

Pat was raised in Tennessee, but her education is largely Pennsylvanian -- Swarthmore College (B.A. 1973), and then the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., History 1976). She left the Ph.D. program at Penn when it became clear there were no jobs teaching history anywhere in the continental US, and entered government service, in the legislative policy office of the Social Security Administration.

From there, her government career took her to the Office of the Secretary of HHS, where she was the budget examiner for SSA, and then to Capitol Hill in March, 1981, to the staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, where she worked on the Social Security Subcommittee staff until late 1987, serving as Staff Director/Chief Counsel of the Subcommittee from 1985-1987. “I was very lucky to be at Ways and Means during the 1980’s,” Pat says, “because I got to work on all the big Social Security, budget and tax bills – I was there for the tail end of the original omnibus budget bill, Gramm-Latta in 1981, TEFRA in 1982, the 1983 Social Security refinancing bill, the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, the 1984 Social Security disability bill, DEFRA in 1984, the other big budget bills of 1985 and 1986, and of course the 1986 Tax Reform Act, for which I was part of the ‘pension team’.” During that time, she attended Georgetown University Law Center part-time, earning her J.D. degree in 1986 “and without having a nervous break-down!” Pat notes. “I didn’t have many classmates who worked all day, went to class from 5:30 to 8:00 pm and then went back to work.”

Pat left the Hill in 1987 to try private practice, first at Arnold & Porter in D.C., and then at Downs, Rachlin & Martin in Vermont, from 1989-1993, earning her LLM in Taxation from Boston University, also part-time, in 1993 (“I’ve seen enough of Logan Airport to last me a lifetime, commuting to Boston from Burlington once a week for three years,” she says.) Pat finally had enough of time sheets, and began teaching at the then-University of Puget Sound School of Law – now Seattle University School of Law. Pat visited at the University of Florida Graduate Tax Program in 1997, and accepted a permanent offer from Florida in 1998, where she continues to teach income tax, corporate tax and pensions and deferred compensation in the J.D. and LL.M. programs.

Pat has published a number of works in disparate areas of tax and benefit law, covering a wide range of subjects from entitlement in Social Security to bankruptcy and pensions to self-employment taxes. Her publications include:

Hope We Die Before We Get Old: The Attack on Retirement, 12 Elder L.J. 245 (2004)

Employee Stock Ownership After ENRON: Proceedings of the 2003 AALS Employee Benefits Section Meeting, Panel Remarks, 7 Employee Rts. & Emp. Pol'y J. 213 (2003)

Leverage, Linkage and Leakage: Problems with the Private Pension System and How They Should Inform the Social Security Debate, 58 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1369 (2002) (with Norman Stein)

Taking Public Rights Private: The Rhetoric and Reality of Social Security Privatization, 41 B.C. L. Rev. 975 (2000)

Breaking the Glass Slipper - Reflections on the Self-Employment Tax, 54 Tax Law. 65 (2000)

Hidden in Plain View: The Pension Shield Against Creditors, 74 Ind. L.J. 355 (1999)

The Evolution of Entitlement: Retirement Income and the Problem of Integrating Private Pensions and Social Security, 30 Loy.L.A. L. Rev. 1063 (1997)

Pat is a frequent speaker at AALS and ABA functions, and is interviewed regularly in the mainstream media. She notes, “I felt I had finally achieved true success in my doctor brother’s eyes when he called to say he’d heard me being interviewed by Nina Totenberg on Morning Edition a couple of years ago – now, that’s celebrity!” She also does consulting and expert witness work, mainly in the area of the treatment of pension plans in bankruptcy proceedings, which she refers to as “the Bermuda Triangle of bankruptcy law.” Pat recently became co-editor of the on-line Social Science Research Network journal, Social Security, Pensions and Retirement Income.

“My scholarship and my teaching are still grounded in my experiences writing tax and Social Security law on the Hill, and indeed from executive branch in SSA and HHS before I went to Ways and Means,” Pat says. “I remember the process of developing good law as intensely collaborative, and I try to convey that to my students as they struggle to understand the statute and its operation in the real world. I have very fond memories of working with Ward Hussey, Larry Filson, John Buckley and others at the House Legislative Counsel’s office, trying to write statutory language that did exactly what we intended, no more and no less. Of course, we didn’t always achieve the level of precision we would have liked, given the time pressures we were under.” Pat particularly remembers the month the staff was given in August, 1986, to draft the final version of theTax Reform Act of 1986 – “I had just finished taking the bar exam, and returned to work to a day and night process of trying to get the drafting done on the pension provisions – even with 10 or more people working more than full time on perfecting those provisions, mistakes were bound to happen. That probably explains how we managed to essentially repeal the estate tax with an ESOP provision, something that was quickly corrected in the next session of Congress!”

She tries to convey a sense of this process to her tax students, as a way of impressing on them the importance of paying attention to every word in the statute and in regulations. “I feel very strongly that we have a responsibility to our students, and to the profession of law, to prepare young lawyers to really be professionals, to understand what it means to hold the lives and fortunes of their clients in their hands. In tax, in particular, I feel so lucky to be a part of the Florida tax program, where we get graduate students full time for a year and subject them, and ourselves, to a kind of immersion program in tax, so that they’re really prepared to be tax lawyers when they emerge. It’s very rewarding to hear back from them years later about how they are using every day what they learned from us.”

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

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

August 26, 2006

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Dennis A. Calfee grew up in a small town in southeastern Washington State, Connell, where his father was the town’s sole pharmacist and sole Republican. He picks up the story:

My interest in tax was first perked by Professor Daniel Brajcich and advanced by Professor Gary Randall at Gonzaga University. Both of these professors were superb classroom teachers and exemplary individuals both personally and professionally who had a positive influence on countless students, including yours truly. After a clerkship on the Washington State Court of Appeals and some time with Uncle Sam I decided to get a graduate degree in taxation. While working for the Old National Bank in their trust department during law school I relied heavily on two books: Federal Income Taxation of Estates and Beneficiaries, which had three co-authors two of whom were Professors at Florida: Richard B. Stephens and James J. Freeland; and Federal Estate and Gift Taxation, which had three co-authors, two of whom again were Florida professors: Richard B. Stephens and Steven A. Lind.

The year I had the opportunity to further my education and apply to a Graduate Tax Program I discovered that the College of Law at the University of Florida was beginning an LL.M. in Taxation program. It was my lucky day, for thereafter I had the opportunity to learn tax from Stephens, Freeland, Lind, Lokken and Miller. Each was a gifted classroom teacher with his own unique style. Looking back on that initial experience I think that one of the best things about my LL.M. education was the opportunity to interact with each of these individuals and observe how each approached the internal revenue code and the education of students. I was in tax heaven!

As my LL.M. year closed I was asked if I would like to teach one year as an interim tax professor. I was elated at the prospect of teaching at the College of Law. I worked all summer preparing my notes for one of the classes I was to teach in the fall quarter. I went to class the first day and promptly fell down the last three steps into a pit classroom. Once at the podium, I discovered that I could not speak because my mouth was full of cotton, at least that is how it felt. Then in the first 45 minutes of my first hour of class I consumed all the notes for the semester. I remember thinking that if this is what it takes to teach, I could not do it. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the semester reviewing the material covered in the first 45 minutes of class. After the first year, I was afforded the opportunity to teach for one more year. Thirty-one years later I am looking forward to my 32nd year of teaching tax courses at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida. There has never been a dull moment.

Just imagine each day going to "work" to interact with Brauner, Dilley, Friel, Gutting, Hudson, Lokken, McMahon, McDaniel, Miller, Oberst, Polsky, Richardson and Willis, and that is without even getting on the phone where Professor Lind is always willing to take my questions. Imagine the intellectual stimulation and satisfaction achieved by working with Steve Lind and Dick Stephens on the Federal Estate and Gift Taxation treatise. Imagine the pride in representing Florida, accompanied by your wife and your three children, throughout the world in places like Taipei, Leiden, Montpellier and Beijing. Imagine being the Faculty Advisor to the Florida Law Review. Imagine service with the Athletic Association at the University of Florida and seeing first hand the management of an athletic program by Jeremy Foley and his staff. Imagine the opportunity to meet, learn from and make friends with talented students and alums each an every day. WOW! Pinch me, am I living a dream? I am.

For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:

Yariv Brauner

August 26, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 19, 2006

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Yariv Brauner joins the University of Florida this fall. He will teach primarily in Florida’s International Tax Graduate Tax Programs together with Professors Paul McDaniel and Larry Lokken. He came to the United States in 1997 to take the NYU LL.M. in International Taxation and enjoy New York City’s East Village.

Originally from Israel, Yariv grew up in the Galilee, spent a long time in the Israeli Defense Forces and went to law school at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

After receiving his LL.M. from NYU, Yariv joined Ernst & Young New York City’s international tax practice at the peak of the high tech boom, where he was involved in tax planning for both large and start-up clients, primarily involving technology transfers and international restructurings.

In 2000, Yariv was called by his mentor, Paul McDaniel, to teach at NYU as an acting assistant professor in the international tax program while continuing to consult with E&Y. He spent a wonderful three years teaching a variety of tax courses at NYU, including Fundamentals of U.S. Individual and Business Taxation, Comparative Tax Policy, Corporate Tax, Advanced Corporate Tax Problems (International), International Tax, International Tax Policy, International Business Transactions, Tax Procedure, and Comparative Jurisprudence: Taxation. At the same time he completed his doctoral work at NYU on cross-border M&A, receiving the J.S.D. May 2003. In 2003 he joined the faculty at Northwestern, where he taught in the Graduate Tax Program. In 2004 he joined the Arizona State University College of Law’s faculty.

Yariv has written several tax articles (both in Hebrew and English) and has participated in several International Tax seminars, lecturing in Israel, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, China, Switzerland and the United States.

Yariv focuses his scholarship on the merits of international coordination of tax policies, following Professor Avi-Yonah’s lead in the field. His current projects include article on valuation of intangibles, the (unjustifiable) corporate tax, and on international fairness.

August 19, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 12, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 F. Philip Manns, Jr. (Liberty)

B.S. 1982, Virginia
J.D. 1987, Maryland

I became a tax lawyer, because that’s the field engineers chose when they went to law school in 1984. Now engineers in law school choose patent law, but that field was not rescued from its moribund state until the early 1990s when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit invigorated patent law (and not coincidentally intellectual property became the mainstay of the U.S. economy).

I graduated from college with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and as I worked for two years as an engineer, I noticed that the really interesting issues always were referred to lawyers. Engineers are a collegial bunch, working in teams to solve problems, with very little individual credit or blame. However, because we had contracts with suppliers, blame became relevant when problems arose. At that point, the engineers scattered, uninterested in nontechnical questions like fault, but I remained interested in them.

Off to law school I went, convinced I’d become a trial lawyer in the small town in which I grew up outside of Baltimore. However, at the University of Maryland, tax was a required third-semester course. Like virtually every law student taking his or her first tax class, my expectations were low. [And that is one of the great virtues of teaching tax, students’ expectations are so low that it is easy to surpass them.]

In my income tax class, Bob Keller opened my eyes to the majesty of tax law. He and Dan Goldberg then shepherded me through corporate tax, advanced corporate tax, and partnership tax. In my summers, I clerked at the tax departments of large firms in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

After law school, I served a one year clerkship with Judge Frank Murnaghan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He was a grand, renaissance man, constantly judging and teaching the law as a seamless web. I hope to make that come alive in the minds of my students. To be a good lawyer, especially a tax lawyer, one must have a thorough understanding of all parts of the law, because tax consequences derive from those other areas of the law. And that is why tax is such an intellectual feast.

Following my clerkship, I practiced as a tax associate with the Atlanta office of King & Spalding for three years, and joined the California Western law faculty in 1991. [Philip joined the Liberty faculty in 2006.]

My latest research and writing interests demonstrate how an interest in tax law takes one out into the web of the law. I taught, in income tax class, Davis v. United States, 495 U.S. 472 (1990), which held that parents of religious missionaries could not deduct as charitable contributions payments they made to their missionary sons at the direction of, and in the amount specified by, the church, because the payments were not “to or for the use of” (in the sense of “in trust for”) the church. I was surprised that no Religion Clause argument was made in the case. I decided to figure out why not, and that lead me to chart (in decidedly tax lawyer fashion) the Religion Clauses along a spectrum of governmental assistance, including tax expenditures. The result was Charting the Spectrum of Prohibited and Permitted Aid to Religion, 2001 Utah Law Review 319.

The Supreme Court can neither leave the Religion Clauses alone nor agree on a theory of interpretation for them, so a fertile ground for writing exists. I followed up with Finding the Free Play Between the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, 71 Tenn. L. Rev. 657 (2004). A few months ago, the Court decided two cases regarding the display of the Ten Commandments by governments, and my third article in the area is underway.

In my free time, I attempt to regain the existential pleasures of engineering by doing all my own vehicle maintenance (there is just something about turning a wrench), woodworking, and general house maintenance. That and keeping up with my wife and three children and trying to be active in my church keep me busy.

August 12, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 5, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Christopher M. Pietruszkiewicz (LSU)

B.S. 1989, University of Scranton
J.D. 1992, Loyola
LL.M. (Tax) 1997, Georgetown

I grew up in a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania and, when I go back to visit, I can still sit on the front porch and wave to every second or third car that passes the house. Unfortunately for me, I was born with an abacus, so career choices were very limited – accounting or, well, accounting. Not surprisingly, my degree is in accounting and I even earned a varsity letter in college -- ok, technically I played golf in college.

After law school, I moved to Washington, D.C. and worked as an Attorney Advisor for the U.S. Department of Education for five years, writing legal opinions and working on Department-wide initiatives such as creating an agency-wide ADR program and trying to figure out how to operate the Department with a proposed 50% budget reduction.

I traded in my abacus for a calculator and enrolled in Georgetown’s LL.M. program, finishing a Jesuit school trifecta. I convinced the Department of Justice, Tax Division, to hire me as a Trial Attorney where I litigated everything from $2,000 bankruptcy cases to the validity of the passive activity loss regulations to the constitutionality of campaign finance reform under section 527. I completed my degree 2 ½ year later, juggling class schedules, deposition schedules, and trial calendars and enjoying all (well most) of the work, but certainly all of my colleagues.

While at the Department of Justice, I taught Corporate Tax as an adjunct at George Mason Law School (thank you Leandra Lederman) and continued to try to keep classes and trials on different days. A year later, in 2001, LSU lured me away from the riches of government service for the fame and fortune of academia to teach Income Tax, Corporate Tax, Tax Practice & Procedure, Accounting for Lawyers, and Comparative Tax.

Since 2001, I’ve lectured at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Milan, Italy and Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, France, written a number of law review articles, and co-authored a treatise on corporate reorganizations. In my spare time, I serve as Chair of the Admissions Committee, Chair of the Faculty Scholarship Committee, and an elected member of the Executive Committee.

I was elected President of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools in 2005, an organization consisting of 77 member and affiliate law schools from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. To monitor the balance of power between my former colleagues at the Justice Department and the private tax bar, I’ve become involved in the American Bar Association, Section of Taxation and serve as Chair of the Individual Income Tax Committee, Subcommittee on Deductions, Chair of the Court Procedure and Practice Committee, Tax Lawyer Mentor Program, and the Special Features Editor of the ABA Section of Taxation NewsQuarterly.

My wife, Siobhan, and I met while refereeing a basketball game – first whistle buys the beer. I lost – well I won but lost the bet. We still referee high school and college basketball as a break from the real world and, because there is nothing better than a gym or arena full of fans, half of which don’t care that you exist and the other half politely and calmly telling you that your judgment is seriously impaired. We have two dogs, Elvis and Nora (breeds – unknown; origins – unknown; personalities – definitely) and a ten month old son, Ryan. We don’t dress him up in zebra strips or a pocket protector and there is no truth to the rumor that his first words included 1040 and “3 seconds” – but I can still hope.

August 5, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 29, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Neil H. Buchanan (Rutgers-Newark)

A.B. 1981, Vassar
A.M. (Economics) 1991, Harvard
Ph.D. (Economics) 1996, Harvard
J.D. 2002, Michigan

[Update: Professor Buchanan took a position as Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School, effective January 1, 2007.]

My father was a Presbyterian minister, but I grew up on a steady diet of "Perry Mason" and knew when I was twelve that I wanted to be a lawyer. That was still the plan until my sophomore year at Vassar, when my heart was stolen by a macroeconomic theory class. I loved the math, the policy implications, the sense of dealing with something Very Important. After graduating, I immediately enrolled in the Ph.D. program in economics at Harvard. There, my interests turned toward teaching. I became one of those people who extends his graduate school career because he's having so much fun teaching undergraduate classes. I taught the intro class, seminars, summer school, etc. I even managed to land a teaching position at Berkeley one summer (despite having no prior connections there), which introduced me to the joys of the Bay Area. The next obvious step was to find a teaching position at a liberal arts college. After a one-year visiting stint at Wellesley College, I landed a tenure-track job at Goucher College, near Baltimore.

While at Goucher, I was adopted by two dogs and two cats. Proving that I really have no life, I named the dogs after my two favorite economists, Maynard (John Maynard Keynes) and Violet (Joan Violet Robinson). The cats were already named by the time they took over my house, sparing me from having to find two more economists with interesting middle names. Violet, Maynard, Katie, Murphy, and I thought that we were going to live happily ever after in the mid-Atlantic, but we were wrong. Very wrong.

By that point in my career, I had focused all of my energy on teaching and had not focused on scholarly research. Although teaching was still very fulfilling, I wanted more. I took a position at a policy research think-tank in upstate New York, finally wrote a dissertation (under the generous and invaluable supervision of Benjamin M. Friedman at Harvard, with my good friend Jeff Fuhrer acting as a patient sounding board and de-mystifier of advanced econometrics), then continued my tour of the Seven Sisters colleges by visiting at Barnard College for a year before moving on to another policy research and teaching position at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Whew!!

By then, I had started to do some research and writing in the macroeconomic aspects of tax policy. It was also of some consequence that, after all that moving around, I had filled out an awful lot of tax forms in an awful lot of states. The differences among the states' tax systems intrigued me, causing me to think in some very concrete ways about the policy consequences of different tax systems. (Given my scholarly interests, it's also probably not a minor point that I had been able to pay my college tuition with Social Security survivor's benefits. I would be a staunch defender of the Social Security system in any event, but there's no doubt that we are all to significant degrees the products of our personal histories.)

Starting in 1995, I was invited to attend some feminist legal theory workshops that were organized by Martha Fineman, who was at that point at Columbia Law School. This led to invitations to participate in sessions at Law & Society and at the AALS. Before too long, it occurred to me that I was enjoying my time among legal scholars in ways that I never had among economists. I had always felt like a round inter-disciplinary peg in a square economics hole, and I saw that the interests and methods of legal scholars were very well-suited to my own scholarly approach.

It took some doing, but my new law professor friends (and two old law professor friends, Michael Dorf and Sherry Colb) talked me into going to law school. (The professor at Vassar who taught that macro theory class ended up going to law school, too, by the way.) Was I twelve years old again, watching re-runs of "Perry Mason"--and, by that point, "LA Law" and "Law and Order"? Once again, I loaded my four critters into my little car and moved, this time to Ann Arbor, to become a 40-year-old legal virgin. Having grown up only 45 minutes away near Toledo, this was the best of all possible worlds. Watching my nephews grow up, seeing my mother and siblings much more frequently than had ever been possible, and attending one of the best law schools in the country. What could be better?

I thought that I might become a public defender, or maybe an environmental lawyer. By the end of my first year, though, I missed teaching so much that I realized that I had to return to academia, this time as a law professor. In the meantime, I was lucky enough to be brought on to teach in the economics department at Michigan during my second and third years of law school. I was insanely busy, but it was great. My three years at Michigan were the most exciting and intellectually stimulating time of my life (so far).

In the fall semester of my second year, having been closed out of a course and needing to fill the resulting hole in my schedule, I decided to take Kyle Logue's basic tax class. I thought that I might as well take a course that "every law student should take," since I was otherwise taking as many seminars and academically-oriented courses as I could. At this point, my story--which is so completely unlike the other stories that I have read in the Tax Prof Spotlight series--has the same punch line: I was surprised to find myself hooked on tax. I followed up that course by taking two seminars with Kyle, and I knew that I had to be a tax professor. The Tax Policy Workshop at Michigan began during my third year there, which resulted in my being a student under the tutelage of Kyle, Reuven Avi-Yonah, and Jim Hines. That I had been a classmate of Jim's in grad school and had lived in the same residential house at Harvard as Reuven made being a student in the workshop somewhat surreal, but it was a great way to finish law school.

After law school, I clerked for Judge Robert Henry on the 10th Circuit in Oklahoma City. The clerkship was a great learning experience, and Oklahoma was ... let's just say it gave me a lot of stories to tell. I moved from there to New Jersey to become a law professor at Rutgers-Newark, where I just completed my third year. I have some wonderful colleagues and students at Rutgers. I am also looking forward to teaching at NYU this coming year. Having moved into New York City last year, I am already a regular presence at the great movie theaters in Greenwich Village.

Only one of my critters remains to enliven my life in Manhattan (and unfortunately, he's not getting any younger), but I know that I couldn't have made it through all the changes that I've made in the last thirteen years without all four of them. On the human side, I've been very impressed by the collegiality of law professors in general, and tax professors in particular. This is a very pleasant way to make a living.

When people see that I have a Ph.D. in economics and am now focusing on tax policy scholarship, they often think that that must have been the plan all along. I smile, cross my fingers, and tell them that, yes, it really was that simple.

July 29, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 22, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Frank J. Doti (Chapman)

B.S. 1966, Illinois
J.D. 1969, Chicago-Kent

Professor Doti is the William P. Foley II Chair in Corporate Law and Taxation, professor of law, and Director of the J.D. Tax Law Emphasis. He has over 35 years of tax law experience, first as an associate attorney with McDermott, Will & Emery, the largest tax law firm in the nation. Next he was vice president and director of taxes for the multinational Leo Burnett advertising agency. He has taught tax law for a quarter century and developed the first U.S. Tax Court clinical education program west of Denver, Colorado. Professor Doti founded and directs Chapman’s J.D. Tax Law Emphasis program.

Professor Doti has published numerous works in the tax law field, is a member of the ABA Committee on Teaching Taxation, and is an editor of The Tax Lawyer. His CD set for law students on federal income tax law is part of Westlaw's Distinguished Professor Series. The California State Bar Board of Legal Specialization has certified Professor Doti as a tax law specialist. Professor Doti also teaches Contracts law and in 2004 published his Contract Law Outlines & Flowcharts, a study aid which is available in law school bookstores nationwide.

July 22, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Andrew Pike (American)

B.A. 1972, Swarthmore
J.D. 1976, Pennsylvania

Unlike many professors highlighted in the Taxprof Spotlight, I was a tax geek early on. Before my first year at Penn Law, my career goal was to work in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy!

As background, I majored in economics at Swarthmore College and, after graduation, I worked as a research assistant to the late Joseph Pechman of the Brookings Institution. There, I helped Dr. Pechman analyze proposed changes to the tax laws, with a primary focus on the magnitude and distributional consequences of proposed legislative changes to the tax laws. I was hooked, and tax law became my likely career specialty. This was reinforced at Penn Law, where I had the additional good fortune to study with Danny Halperin and Al Warren.

Following law school, I clerked for two years at the United States Tax Court for the late Judge Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. and then spent two years as an associate of Cohen and Uretz, a small tax boutique firm.

I then moved to the Treasury Department’s Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel. In my four years at TLC, I focused on the usual tax issues that one encounters in practice: the tax treatment of life insurance and insurance companies; the R’n’D tax credit; the arbitrage restrictions on state and local bonds; consolidated returns; the parsonage allowance; and, of course, the parameters of the excise tax on artificial fish bait. As I was approaching the end of my tenure at Treasury, a tax position opened up at American University’s law school. I started teaching at AU in 1984, and I have been happily ensconced here ever since.

While in academia, I have taken advantage of our Washington location to serve as a Special Counsel to the Internal Revenue Service and to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. I also traveled extensively to several republics of the former Soviet Union, where I provided assistance concerning the reform of the tax laws and the systems of tax administration in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. I also assisted in drafting proposed tax laws for the governments of Moldova, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. I viewed these experiences as a quasi Peace Corps experience for a middle-aged tax professor. I also spent 11 years moonlighting in a second career – coaching both of my daughters’ soccer teams!

At the law school, I have taught a broad range of tax courses, including Federal Personal Income Taxation, Federal Income Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders, Comparative Taxation, Federal Estate and Gift Taxation, Pension Law, Tax Policy and the Tax Litigation Clinic. I became one of the school’s academic deans in 1997. Notwithstanding the responsibilities of this position, I have continued to relish the joy of introducing the joy of tax law and policy to new generations of law students. In April, I received the University’s award for Outstanding Teaching by a Full-time Member of the University faculty.

At present, I am working on a short article discussing certain lessons learned from the travails of our former University President. In addition, I am working on a piece to be presented next February at a symposium on tax issues affecting low income taxpayers to be held in honor of my late and dear colleague, Janet Spragens.

July 15, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 8, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Diana L. Leyden (Connecticut)

B.A. 1978, Union College
J.D. 1982, Connecticut
LL.M. (Tax) 1984, Georgetown

Diana Leyden is an Associate Clinical Professor at Connecticut and the director of its Tax Clinic, a low income taxpayer clinic. In addition to teaching the Tax Clinic program, Diana has taught federal income tax and corporate tax.

The road to law school and tax was filled with serendipity. After completing a college thesis applying the work of George Katona in the field of behavioral economics to the Soviet Union’s planned economy and predicting the downfall of the planned economy, she was asked to continue in a masters program to do further research. But, she decided she had had enough of academia and declined. Then, unemployed, she found a job as the first paralegal hired by a Waterbury, Connecticut firm (Carmody & Torrance) and started working with two wonderful, mentoring attorneys in their trusts and estate practice. At their elbows, she learned about the estate and gifts taxes and was smitten with tax law.

When she entered the University of Connecticut School of Law she knew she wanted to concentrate in tax law. She was challenged by Professor Richard Pomp and Professor Lester Snyder to apply for a clerkship at the United States Tax Court. Clerking for Judge Herbert Chabot at the Tax Court she honed her statutory interpretation skills and came to appreciate Gilbert and Sullivan.

For the next fifteen years, Diana’s tax practice was enriched by private practice at Steptoe & Johnson (Washington, D.C.) and Day, Berry & Howard (Boston), and government work as a hearing officer and manager at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and a staff attorney in the legal division of the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services. Most of her work concentrated in corporate income tax and sales tax. However, it made her realize the tremendous divide between tax advice for the wealthy and the poor.

As she began exploring a proposal to her alma mater to start a tax clinic, RRA 98 was passed creating grants for low income taxpayer clinics. In 1999, she wrote the first grant for the Law School’s tax clinic, was hired and has been the Director since its inception.

An active participant in the ABA Tax Section, including the past chair of the Low Income Taxpayer Committee and a current vice chair of the Pro Bono Committee, Diana has been able to feed her passion for advocating for increased pro bono work by tax attorneys. One of her most treasured moment was being nominated by her students, and receiving, the ABA Tax Section 2005 Pro Bono Award. She is currently working on a casebook for Low Income Taxpayer Clinics and a popular book on the case stories of her former clients.

When she is not advocating for her clients, training the IRS, or pursuing FOIA requests against the IRS, she is a wife to Philip Sussler, her husband of 21 years who she met in law school, the mother to two teenage daughters, one of whom wants to pursue a career in movie and theatre costume design, and the other a career as a journalist, and the owner of an adopted, very neurotic Bishon Frise. Does the fact that neither of her daughters wants to be attorneys upset her? “No. Two attorneys in the family are enough.”

July 8, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 1, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Stephen B. Cohen (Georgetown)

A.B. 1967, Amherst
J.D. 1971, Yale

Stephen Cohen has led a double professional life, engaged on the one hand in political and foreign policy issues, and on the other, as an academic tax lawyer. In 1968, the year after graduating from Amherst, he worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, doing a variety of jobs including speechwriting, political advertising, press relations, and staging mass rallies. Law school initially consisted of continuing political work for the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War and the National Citizens Committee Concerned About the Anti-Ballistic Missile System, until the second semester of his second year, when he fell for Tax with Marvin Chirelstein, whom he describes as “the greatest classroom teacher I ever had.”

Stephen then taught law school for six years, moving from Rutgers, to Wisconsin, to Stanford, and back to Wisconsin. After Carter was elected President in 1976, he joined the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., working on arms control issues. After a year in Policy Planning, he spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, concentrating on U.S policy toward Iran, the Philippines, and Zaire.

After leaving the State Department in 1980, he wrote about U.S. foreign policy for The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and began regular trips to South Africa to report on conditions under apartheid for human rights organizations. He also moved to Georgetown where he has taught federal income taxation for the past 26 years except for a visit at Harvard two years ago.

His favorite book on taxation is Louis Eisenstein's The Ideologies of Taxation, which, he says, conclusively proves the French maxim, "plus ca change, etc." He began his academic career writing about financial theory and taxation but for the past decade his major scholarly interest has been the intersection of tax and civil rights law. He has also written about the flat tax, income inequality, and Thurgood Marshall's tax law opinions, as well as a series of articles for the Green Bag, 2d on tax law oddities, including: Hester Prynne, Lydia Bennet, and Section 306 Stock; Tax Metamorphosis: A Miniscule Contribution to Law and Literature; and The Tax of Physics, The Physics of Tax. His proudest accomplishment, however, was a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the brilliant African-American lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, who was Dean of Howard Law School and architect of the NAACP's litigation strategy in the 1930s and 1940s

July 1, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 William H. Lyons (Nebraska)

B.A. 1969, Colby College
J.D. 1973, Boston College

I joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska College of Law in 1981. My path to law school teaching was somewhat different than the traditional path of working for a large firm in a large metropolitan area for a few years with, perhaps, an additional year or two as a judicial clerk. I practiced in Bangor, Maine with the law firm of Vafiades, Brountas & Kominsky, where I was one of seven lawyers. I stayed at the firm for eight years, the last two years as a partner. I owe a great debt to my former partner, Nick Brountas, a wonderful mentor who should have been a law school professor.

During the 1987-88 academic year, I worked as a Professor-in-Residence to the Office of the Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C. That year was a mountain top experience, providing insights, opportunities, and friendships that continue to this day. I’m sad that the Professor-in-Residence program ended because it was very valuable both for the participants and the IRS.

It was during my year in the Chief Counsel’s Office that I first became interested in bankruptcy taxation, which is now the focus of much of my professional work. Professor Fran Hill and I are writing a textbook on bankruptcy taxation for LexisNexis's new Graduate Tax Series, and I’ve written and spoken on that subject regularly.

Twice I’ve had the opportunity to teach in the tax LL.M. program at the University of Leiden’s International Tax Center in Holland. The program offers a three-part introduction to the U.S. income tax system each year. I’ve taught the segment on U.S. individual income taxation. Although I teach the classes in English, which is a second or third language for most of the students, the students are engaged and class discussions are wonderful.

Currently, I teach Individual Income Taxation, Partnership Taxation, Estate Planning, and Wills & Trusts. In past years I have taught Business Planning, Corporate Taxation, Estate Planning Problems, Legal Research and Writing, Tax Policy, and Tax Policy Seminar.

I’m a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel and am serving my second three year term as a Regent of ACTC. I am a member of the A Tax Section, Chair of the Teaching Taxation Committee’s Subcommittee on Important Developments, a past Chair of the Tax Section's Committee on Individual Income Taxation, and am active in the Committees on Bankruptcy & Workouts, Low Income Taxpayers, and Teaching Taxation. From 1982 through 1985 I was an articles editor for The Tax Lawyer. I also served as Co-Vice Chair of that Section's I.R.C. Section 108 Real Estate and Partnership Task Force. I’m the faculty advisor to the College of Law's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Program. I also supervise the tax cases in our Civil Clinical Program.

One of my non-professional interests is amateur radio, sometimes called “ham radio.” My current call sign, assigned by the FCC, is KCØHMJ. I hold an Extra Class license, which is the highest level amateur radio license. There are at least two other tax professors who have amateur radio licenses. I’d love to meet other tax professors who either hold amateur radio licenses or are interested in amateur radio.

My other nonprofessional interests are bicycle touring, science fiction, historical geology, the current Boston American League Baseball Club and the former Boston National League Baseball Club. I’m a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). I’ve compiled materials on minor league baseball in Lincoln, Nebraska and my home town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts and am writing a history of baseball in Fitchburg.

June 24, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Allison Christians (Wisconsin)

B.A. 1991, Calvin College
J.D. 1999, Columbia
LL.M. (Tax) 2003, NYU

I owe my passion for tax law to “Marvelous” Marvin Chirelstein, who was a teacher and mentor to me while I was a student at Columbia. His acerbic wit and lack of patience for the bombastic were treasures in the classroom. His straightforward, pragmatic approach to the tax law, epitomized in the “Little Blue Book,” was an indispensable aid to me, first in learning about tax as a student and now in teaching tax to the next generation. I was shocked by my stage fright on the first day I walked into the classroom to teach federal income taxation. Now, having taught the course a few times, I am less shocked by the stage fright but still anxious that I somehow find a way to reach the students with even a fraction of the impact that Marvin had on me.

erFollowing law school, I practiced in tax first at Debevoise & Plimpton and later at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, spending most of my time climbing the steep learning curve of technical tax practice and pursuing an LLM in tax at NYU in what little time remained in the week. Prior to law school, I had been interested in the relationship between law and legal systems and distribution of wealth and power in society. My experiences at Columbia and in practice demonstrated to me that the next step in my career should be to move beyond immediate problem-solving to systemic analysis.

Looking to become an academic, I was delighted to have the opportunity to join the faculty at Northwestern as a Visiting Assistant Professor in its LLM tax program. The change in salary: enormous. The value of the experience: priceless. My colleagues and mentors at Northwestern jump-started my writing by reading mostly-terrible first drafts, finding the salvageable parts, and setting me in new directions to shape and enhance my scholarship, including giving me the opportunity to travel twice to Africa to investigate first-hand how tax systems operate in developing economies and to begin building an invaluable network of colleagues around the world. My Northwestern colleagues and mentors also jump-started my teaching by giving me the opportunity to teach the foundational tax courses as well as courses in my particular areas of interest, international tax and tax treaties.

Following my two-year experience at Northwestern, I joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin. I again feel so delighted to have landed in such a dynamic and supportive environment. My colleagues and mentors here are enthusiastic about the tax law in action and their support for my teaching, research, and personal well-being has been fantastic. In my first year, I taught federal income taxation and international taxation. This coming academic year, I will add a seminar in tax policy to my repertoire. I am spending the summer working on a number of research projects, including an article on tax aspects of the foreign policy power, a study of the transformative power of tax reform on countries that receive development assistance, and a casebook on international tax that is part of the Graduate Tax Series published by LexisNexis.

There is one pursuit that I enjoyed in my pre-law school days and that seems to have vanished from my life: throwing pots (on a wheel, not at the wall). I try to find time for it here and there, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Now if I could just find a connection between ceramics and taxation, it would be the perfect summer.

June 17, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Bruce A. McGovern (South Texas)

B.A. 1984, Columbia
J.D. 1989, Fordham
LL.M. (Tax) 1996, Florida

In my Federal Income Tax class, I always tell the students on the first day that many tax lawyers, and even tax professors, were once law students who thought they would have little interest in tax. I am one of those people.

I grew up in Portland, Maine, an old seacoast city for which I still retain great fondness. I left Portland to attend college in New York City. I spent my freshman year at the New School for Social Research. It was a wonderful year that, to say the least, had the effect of expanding and radically altering my point of view. I transferred for my sophomore year to Columbia, where I studied religion. During my years at Columbia I met the woman who is now my wife, Fabienne. Upon graduating, I considered either entering the Episcopal ministry or pursuing a Ph.D. in religion to become a college professor. Ultimately, I decided to attend law school at Fordham.

At Fordham, I studied Federal Income Tax with Donald Sharpe, a wonderful teacher whose enthusiasm and sense of humor and made the subject very interesting. Although I enjoyed the course, I never seriously considererd tax as a career path. I thought I would become a litigator or perhaps a corporate lawyer.

After leaving Fordham, I spent a year clerking for Judge Thomas Meskill on the U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. During that year my wife and I decided to seek positions in Washington, DC, and I interviewed with several firms there, including Covington & Burling. During the interview I was asked what courses I had most enjoyed in law school, and I responded that I had really enjoyed tax. When I arrived at the firm for my first day, I was told that I would spend one-half of my time doing civil litigation and one-half working with the tax group. I thought: “What have I gotten myself into? I’ve had only the basic Federal Income Tax class.” I quickly discovered, however, that I loved the tax work. Six months later, at my request, I began working full-time with the tax group. It was a tremendous group of people with whom to work. I learned an immense amount not only about substantive tax law, but also about underlying policy concerns and the process by which tax law is made in Washington. My work at the firm included both controversy work (primarily administrative appeals) and traditional tax planning for large corporate clients.

During my fifth year at Covington, I decided to explore something I had considered since my days as a law student: teaching law school. I took a leave of absence from the firm and enrolled in the graduate tax program at the University of Florida. I did this to broaden my knowledge of tax and also to gauge my interest in teaching. I never looked back. After earning my LL.M., I spent a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida. My two years at Florida were a tremendous learning experience. The faculty members were extraordinarily talented and very supportive as I sought a permanent teaching position.

I subsequently accepted a tenure-track position at South Texas College of Law in Houston. At South Texas, I teach in the areas of business organizations and tax. I teach the traditional state-law business organizations courses (Corporations and Agency & Partnership) as well as Federal Income Tax, Partnership & Subchapter S Tax, and Corporate Tax. It is a wonderful combination of courses that allows me to examine business organizations from the perspective of both state law and federal tax law. My scholarship tends to focus on the intersection of these two areas, such as the implications of state-law fiduciary duties for corporations filing consolidated tax returns.

This is now my ninth year at South Texas. I spent the spring 2006 semester as a visitor at Loyola Chicago, where I taught Corporate & Partnership Tax and International Tax.

In my free time (such as it is), I enjoy reading novels, watching episodes of “Law & Order,” and attending plays with my wife. Until recently, I was an avid runner. About the only running I manage to do now is chasing after our two sons, who are ages four and two. The boys have brought a lot of joy to our lives. In the summer, we usually spend a few weeks in Maine. I now enjoy walking (or running) with my sons along the same old waterfront streets that I knew as a boy.

June 10, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 3, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan)

B.A. 1983, Hebrew University
A.M. 1984, Harvard
Ph.D. 1986. Harvard
J.D. 1989, Harvard

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah is the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and Director of the International Tax LLM Program and the Michigan-Tsinghua Exchange Program at the University of Michigan Law School. He teaches the basic course on taxation and courses on international taxation, corporate taxation, multinational enterprises and the law, and the origins and development of the corporate form. He has published numerous articles on domestic and international tax issues, and is the author of U.S. International Taxation: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 2d ed. 2005) (with Brauner & Ring), Amortization of Intangibles (1994), The Attribution Rules (1996), co-author of Collapsible Corporations (1995) and Transfer Pricing: Judicial Strategy and Outcomes (1995), and co-editor of Taxation of Financial Instruments (Clark, Boardman, Callaghan, 1996).

Prof. Avi-Yonah graduated summa cum laude from the Hebrew University in 1983, received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 1986, and received a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1989. From 1989 to 1993, Prof. Avi-Yonah practiced tax law in Boston and New York, specializing in the international tax aspects of mergers and acquisitions. From 1994 to 2000 he was Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has served as consultant to the U.S. Treasury and the OECD on tax competition issues, and has been a member of the executive committee of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section and of the Advisory Board of Tax Management, Inc. He is currently a member of the Steering Group of the OECD International Network for Tax Research and Vice Chair of the ABA Tax Section VAT Committee. Prof. Avi-Yonah is fluent in English and Hebrew, has conversational and reading knowledge of French and German, and can read Italian, Spanish and Arabic.

June 3, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Reginald Mombrun (Florida A&M)

B.S. 1985, Boston University
J.D. 1988, North Carolina Central
LL.M. (Taxation) 1989, Florida

My story into tax is not unlike the many tax profiles that I have read over the past two years. The only major twist is probably that I hail from Haiti, the second country in the Americas to achieve independence. Unfortunately, this fact has remained our peak achievement.

My parents settled in Boston, Massachusetts after migrating from Haiti. I graduated from Boston University with a degree in Business Administration and was debating between law school or getting an M.B.A. When I looked at sample questions for the GRE and the LSAT, I was fascinated by the LSAT questions, so I decided to try law school.

While in law school, I decided very early on that I was going to specialize in taxation--the major reason being that we had some extraordinarily gifted budding trial lawyers and I did not wish to go against them in a court of law. When I took my first tax class with Prof. Walter Nunnallle, I was completely hooked. This was the first class I had taken in law school that seemed to demand your complete attention. Additionally, Prof. Nunnallee's enthusiasm for tax law was infectious. After law school, I was fortunate to be accepted at the University of Florida's LL.M. program in taxation, where I graduated in 1989. The one year I spent there was the most challenging academic year of my life. They worked us to near exhaustion (some of us, past exhaustion) and we loved every minute of it. This was the first time that I was around so many people totally committed to tax law.

After tax school, I worked at the IRS and was fortunate to work under Eric Solomon, when he was head of the corporate division of the national office (Eric is now Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (Regulatory Affairs) and has recently been nominated to the position of Assistant Secretary for tax policy. Eric's passion for tax law infected us all at the office. I would like to think that I learned a thing or two from him. There are those who would disagree but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I spent 14 years at the IRS during which time I was promoted to an assistant manager position and wrote many regulations, revenue rulings, procedures etc.. on corporate reorganizations, consolidated returns and other topics. On the side, I also wrote articles for Tax Notes, the Journal of Corporate Taxation, and other journals.

In 2003, while visiting a friend in Florida, the topic of law school teaching came up. That friend asked me if I ever thought about law school teaching and I confessed that I had not really thought about it. A few conversations later, I was filling out my application. I was voted on the faculty of the FAMU College of Law in 2004 and I have been there for the past two years.

It has been a rewarding experience. I now can devote a lot more time to writing. As a result (shameless plug), I recently published my first book (A Complete Introduction to Corporate Taxation (Carolina Academic Press, 2006) (with Gail Levin Richmond (Nova)). I am also presenting a paper on the repeal of the estate tax [Let's Protect Our Economy and Democracy from Paris Hilton: The Case for Keeping the Estate Tax] during the summer at the Law and Society tax panels. I also have other grand plans that will culminate, I am sure, with saving the world. To me, that is the beauty of teaching, it allows you to dream again. Practicing law is ... well... too practical.

May 27, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 20, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 David M. Hasen (Michigan)

B.A. 1984, Reed College
Ph.D. 1993. Harvard
J.D. 1996, Yale

I am one of those people who “fell” into tax law. After college I entered a Ph.D. program in political science, planning for a teaching career. My main interest was political theory. By the time I completed the program, however, there were few teaching jobs, and prospects in political science seemed dim. I therefore took what seemed like the default option and went to law school. At the time I was considering both a law teaching career and law practice.

I took the introductory federal income tax course as a 2L, but only because I believed that a basic knowledge of tax law was important for a lawyer starting out; it was not a course that I thought I would enjoy. In fact I was pretty anxious about it. I was not at all sure I would be able to deal with all the numbers I expected or to navigate the dense Code language that, as one of my classmates once noted, “never seems to get past the optic nerve.”

But, as is not surprising given where I am now, I took an immediate liking to the subject, and by the end of the semester I concluded that it was probably the area for me. I’m sure that having Reed Shuldiner as my professor (visiting from Penn that semester) is part of what made it so interesting. Beyond that, like many of our cohort, I enjoy the challenge of fitting the pieces of tax puzzles together. There is something gratifying about referencing and cross-referencing the various relevant provisions to come up with the answer that is “right” in at least a technical sense. In addition, the policy issues are similar to many of those I had studied in graduate school, so moving into tax was in some ways like going back to my old stomping grounds, only with an added practical dimension that has made the subject alive for me in new ways.

After graduating and clerking for a year, I worked in San Francisco in the tax departments of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The practice at Orrick was quite varied. It included corporate transactions, tax controversies, the taxation of financial products and a fair amount of non-profit tax work. At Wilson it was full immersion in Subchapter C. The combination gave me a broad if basic background in a variety of areas, and a reasonably deep knowledge of corporate tax. Both have served me well.

After several years of practice I went on the law teaching market and was hired by the University of Michigan, in 2002. Most of my teaching has been standard tax courses – the basic course, corporate tax, and a couple of tax policy seminars – and I’ve enjoyed them tremendously. Both my time at Michigan and as a visitor at Hastings College of the Law in the fall of 2005 have made me feel truly blessed to have this job.

I have benefited greatly from the support of my Michigan tax colleagues, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Tsilla Dagan (now in Israel), Doug Kahn, and Kyle Logue, and of my colleagues at Hastings, especially Stephen Lind and Leo Martinez. Apart from the sage advice they have given me about teaching and research, they have each, in different ways, helped me to see how being a tax professor offers opportunities for service to students, colleagues, the bar, and those under-served by the legal system. I consider these opportunities both a privilege and a challenge, and I look forward to expanding my service in the future, especially to those who are economically disadvantaged.

My family and friends, and especially my wife, Diane Eisenberg, have been extremely supportive of me in my rather tortuous career path. A special thanks, however, goes to my father, Joel Hasen, who himself practiced tax law for many years but never pushed me into the area. I stumbled in all on my own!

May 20, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 13, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Bridget J. Crawford (Pace)

B.A. 1991, Yale
J.D. 1996, Penn

I am an Associate Professor at Pace Law School where I teach Federal Income Tax, Estate & Gift Tax and Feminist Legal Theory. For the Fall 2006 semester, I will be a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where I will be teaching Wills, Trusts & Estates, too.

I love teaching, studying and writing about tax because it is the subject that I have to work at the most to understand the least. I entered law teaching after more than six years as an associate in the Trusts & Estates department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP in New York.

My practice was concerned mostly with estate and tax planning for high net worth individuals. I also did a fair amount of work for tax exempt organizations and financial institutions. I loved my law practice and had the good fortune to work with some of the profession's most gifted tax lawyers, including Jonathan Blattmachr, Carolyn Clark, Madeline Rivlin, Georgiana Slade and Jim Sligar. I remember that one of my colleagues had hanging in her office an old cartoon from the New Yorker whose caption (loosely paraphrased) read, "The law yields its secrets only after an expensive struggle." At the time, I thought of this as an appropriately justified dig at Wall Street lawyers' high billing rates. In retrospect, it also sums up nicely why I stayed in law practice as long as I did: the more I learned about the tax law, the harder I realized I needed to work to get the Code to yield its secrets. The Code has a complex elegance and, of course, it is the rare hypothetical that can be as challenging as a real client's problem. I received a tremendous education at Milbank.

Unfortunately, clients cannot and should not pay for a lawyer to scratch her or his intellectual itches. Luckily now that I have transitioned to the academy, I've been able to do that through my scholarship. My first two articles have been about estate and gift tax issues and the ways in which certain tax rules reinforce traditional notions of gender and the family. I have explored the estate and gift tax marital deduction in One Flesh, Two Taxpayers: A New Approach to Wealth Transfer Taxation, 6 Fla. Tax Rev. 757 (2004) and the estate tax definitions of family in The Profits and Perils of Kinship: Conflicting Meanings of Family in Estate Tax Law, 3 Pitt. Tax Rev. (2005). I have had lots of support from the TaxProf community and have met great colleagues all over the country.

My teaching career has gotten off to a running start. I am now in my third year of teaching. In a stroke of beginner's luck, my first class of students voted me best teacher. I half-jokingly attribute that to low expectations. At my school, tax is a required class which most students think will be absolutely horrible. When it turns out to be half-way decent, my Pace TaxProf colleague, Ron Jensen, and I look great!

May 13, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 6, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Calvin H. Johnson (Texas)

B.A. 1966, Columbia
J.D. 1971, Stanford

My new book, Righteous Anger at the Wicked States: The Meaning of the Founders' Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2005) has been great fun. The Constitution was once a weapon in a hard-fought war and its weapon-like characteristics provide its meaning. I started the book with a theory that the Constitution was a tax document, a pro-tax document to get the Revolutionary War debts paid. But Hamilton made it too easy once he became Secretary of the Treasury. The tax part could have been acheived without the radical nationalizing changes the Constitution effected. Anger at the states provided the necessary, indeed the primary driving force, both to get over some serious hurdles and to keep the movement going. I have presented the book now to student or faculty groups at Yale, Northwestern, Penn, Harvard, Texas and Columbia Law Schools and on C-Span2 Book TV. I was able to write this book only because of the new digital archives. I threw out my net into the digital archives over and over again and I just reported my catch. Try it: Do a search for "direct tax" or "slavery" in Elliot's Records or in Letters of the Delegates here.

In the Constitutional law area, my recent articles include:

Fixing the Constitutional Absurdity of the Apportionment of Direct Tax, 21 Const. Comm. 2 (2004)

Homage to Clio: the Historical Continuity from the Articles of Confederation into the Constitution, 20 Const. Comm. 463 (2004)

The Panda's Thumb: The Modest and Mercantilist Orginal Meaning of the Commerce Clause, 13 Wm. & Mary Bill of Rights J. 1 (2004)

The Dubious Enumerated Power Doctrine should be out in Constitutional Commentary soon; it argues that the section 8 powers of Congress were written to be illustrative not exhaustive.

I will give a lecture in May, in the Supreme Court's chambers, praising the dissenters in Pollock v. Farmers Trust (1896). The lecture will say that the Pollock Court would not have declared the income tax unconstitutional if they had been conservatives who respected doctrinal continuity or who based law on a sound understanding of the original history. Looking at the requirement that direct tax be apportioned among the states counting slaves at three-fifths is the tax problem that got me into the digital archives and the whole of the constitutional stuff.

I became a tax lawyer because of Professor Wayne Barnett at Stanford Law School and because of the Paul, Weiss tax department. I was a Philosophy major at Columbia, and I am sure I looked down my nose at anything I knew of accounting or tax. Wayne Barnett, however, in the first tax course was a great rationalist who built wonderful, elaborate systems to show why Duberstein and Clay Brown needed to be decided for the government. The course was known as "great cases I have lost" in the halls of the law school. If tax could provoke that much fury it must be worth something.

I then went off to the Paul Weiss tax department for the summer and they were brilliant. The weekly tax meetings were like the analysis of a Bobby Fisher chess game, complicated but elegant. Largely incomprehensible to a second year law student, of course, but the fairest most fascinating arguments I had heard.

I spent two years in the Paul Weiss tax department and loved the work. I spent two years at the Treasury Department, Office of Tax Legislative Counsel, negotiating tax legislation, regulations and revenue rulings, for God and Country. I started teaching tax at Rutgers Law School in downtown Newark and moved to Texas Law School in 1981.

Words are actions and my tax writing is almost always trying to accomplish something. I do a lot of expert testimony these days against tax shelters. I testified before the U.S. Senate hearings investigating the U.S. tax shelter industry and then published Tales from the KPMG’s Skunk Works: The Basis-Shift or Defective-Redemption Shelter, 108 Tax Notes 431 (2005).

For years, tax shelters were my primary subject, including my tenure pieces and lots of Tax Notes pieces:

Inefficiency Does Not Drive Out Inequity: Market Equilibrium & Tax Shelters, 71 Tax Notes 377 (1996)

What’s a Tax Shelter?, 68 Tax Notes 879 (1995)

Play Money Basis: When is Nonrecourse Liability a Valid Cost?, 11 Va. Tax Rev. 631(1992)

The Front End of the Crane Rule, 47 Tax Notes 593 (1990)

Why Have Anti-Tax Shelter Legislation?, 67 Tex. L. Rev. 591 (1989)

Financial Impact of the 1986 Tax Reform Act on Real Estate: A View from the Spreadsheets, 36 Tax Notes 309 (1987)

Silk Purses from a Sow’s Ear: Cost Free Liabilities Under the Income Tax, 3 Am. J. Tax Pol'y 231 (1984)

A New Way to Look at the Tax Shelter Problem, 23 Tax Notes 765 (1984)

Tax Shelter Gain: The Mismatch of Debt and Supply Side Depreciation, 61 Tex. L. Rev. 1013 (1983). (This piece, I am told, had some influence on the Treasury to call for cutting back on the 1981 version of ACRS. Ira claims that Financial Impact of the 1986 Tax Reform Act destroyed the S&L industry, but I am avoiding credit.)

I have been involved in three Supreme Court cases on briefs or briefs with a thin veneer called "article":

Thor Power Tool Co. said that tax would not follow accounting. The clerks tell me my brief influenced that outcome. The Thor Power Tool Decision and Unrealized Inventory Losses, 26 Tax Notes 1259 (1980). GAAP Tax, 83 Tax Notes 425 (1999) still claims I did good.

I was cited by the Supreme Court in INDOPCO for The Expenditures Incurred by the Target Corporation in an Acquisitive Reorganization are Dividends to the Shareholders: (Pssst, Don’t Tell the Supreme Court), 53 Tax Notes 463 (1991), for the proposition that capitalization was important. The Supreme Court, however, dropped the subtitle of the piece. I tried to defend the holding of INDOPCO in Capitalization After the Government’s Big Win in INDOPCO, 63 Tax Notes 1323 (1994), and Snarling for the Cameras: Hostility and Takeover Expense Deductions, 76 Tax Notes 689 (1997). I regretted the great case's passing when the Treasury destroyed INDOPCO disloyally to its mission: Destroying Tax Base: The Proposed INDOPCO Capitalization Regulations, 99 Tax Notes 1381 (2003).

I tried very hard to prevent Congress from passing §197 by getting the Supreme Court to decide Newark Morning Star Ledger right, but I could not get through the filters, and the Court got it wrong, so Congress did too. In truth, a newspaper does not lose any invested capital as customers turn over. The Mass Asset Rule Reflects Income and Amortization Does Not, 56 Tax Notes 629 (1992). For the campaign, see:

Component Depreciation for the Purchase of Businesses, 58 Tax Notes 983 (1993)

Once More Into the Mass Assets, 58 Tax Notes 369 (1993)

The Mass Asset Rule is Not the Blob that Ate Los Angeles, 57 Tax Notes 1602 (1992)

Sowing Mass Confusion, 57 Tax Notes 1087 (1992)

The Argument over Newark Morning Ledger, 57 Tax Notes 1090 (1992)

Newark Morning Ledger: Intangibles are Not Amortizable, 57 Tax Notes 691 (1992)

Effective Tax Rates on High-Goodwill Takeovers Under House and Senate Bills, 60 Tax Notes 531 (1993)

Amortization of Intangibles: Impact of Seller Tax, 59 Tax Notes 285 (1993)

Thor Power seduced me into accounting. I now teach and and write in it, and I have testified before FASB and Congress on accounting, for the reason that I have never had a day of accounting training. I have spent a lot of time warning the world about the awfulness of stock options:

The Disloyalty of Stock and Stock Option Compensation, 11 Conn. Ins. L.J. 1333 (2005)

Stock and Stock-Option Compensation: A Bad Idea, 51 Canadian Tax J. 1259 (2003)

Stealing the Company With Free Stock Options: The Furor Over Accounting Standards, 65 Tax Notes 479 (1994) (Part I)

Stealing the Company With Free Stock Options: The Furor Over Accounting Standards, 65 Tax Notes 1149 (1994) (Part II)

Stock Options Aren’t “Free” Compensation, L.A. Times, at B7 (April 8, 1994)

I testified before FASB trying to get the accountants to follow the deep wisdom of tax law on stock options. I testified before Congress against pooling method of accounting for mergers. The Illegitimate "Earned" Requirement in Tax and Nontax Accounting, 50 Tax L. Rev. 373 (1995), tried to get accountants to take retainers into income. In Accounting in Favor of Investors, 19 Cardozo L. Rev. 637 (1997), I corrected Warren Buffet on his bad accounting. With some accounting training, I could be dangerous.

I have had at least one notable failure. I was chairman for two years of the ABA Tax Section's Tax Structure and Simplication Committee, trying very hard to make the tax law simpler.

Simplification: Replace the Personal Exemptions Phaseout Bubble, 77 Tax Notes 1403 (1997)

Simplification: Replacement of the Section 68 Limitation on Itemized Deductions, 78 Tax Notes 89 (1998)

The Tax Law has not become simpler, notwithstanding the effort. Turns out simplification is always second, second to whatever else is under consideration.

I started publishing in Tax Notes, and loving it, when it was a mimeo sheet "published " out of Tom Field's narrow basement. Treasury on Fringe Benefits: To Tax or Not to Tax, 4 Tax Notes 3 (1976). Thirty years later, I still am using Tax Notes to set the world right. Tax Incentives are Always the Wrong Way to Go, 111 Tax Notes 90 (2006). Tax Notes collects the audience that needs to hear tax arguments. It is a shame indeed that tax professors kill trees in publishing in nontax journals.

I have tried to stop or shape pending legislation via Tax Notes in:

Depreciation Policy During Carnival: The New 50 Percent Bonus Depreciation, 100 Tax Notes 712 (2003)

The Bush 35 Percent Flat Tax on Distributions from Public Corporations, 98 Tax Notes 1881 (2003)

The Private Advantage of Money-Losing Investments under Cut-Rate Capital Gains, 55 Tax Notes 1125 (1992)

The Consumption of Capital Gain, 55 Tax Notes 957 (1992)

Seventeen Culls from Capital Gains, 48 Tax Notes 1285 (1990)

Three Errors in the “Neutral Cost Recovery System” Proposal, 67 Tax Notes 1229 (1995), opposed a proposal that was in fact defeated, and 50% bonus depreciation has now expired. The Case for Taxing Fringe Benefits, 9 Tax Notes 43 (1979), is a reworking of testimony at Ways and Means hearings on fringe benefits. I tried to shape my tax law, not in connection with current legislation, in Error in the Name of Interest, 30 Tax Notes 451 (1986), and The Undertaxation of Holding Gains, 55 Tax Notes 807 (1992). The Tax Notes people funded my brief in Thor Power.

When you publish in Tax Notes you not only get a receptive tax audience but also responses. Kahn Depreciation and the Minitax Baseline in Accounting for Government Costs, 53 Tax Notes 1523 (1991), is part of a long dialog with Douglas Kahn in which I argued that accelerated depreciation is in fact a tax expenditure that needed to be justified by cost-benefit analysis. Purging out “Pollock”: The Constitutionality of Federal Wealth or Sales Taxes, 97 Tax Notes 1723 (2002), and Barbie Dolls in the Archeological Dig: Professor Johnson Responds [to Erik Jensen, The Constitution Matter in Tax], 100 Tax Notes 832 (2003), are part of a long debate on the meaning of the apportionment of direct tax. Can the IRS be Well-Liked?, 108 Tax Notes 145 (2005), is my review of Charles Rossotti’s Many Unhappy Returns.

Chris Hanna keeps convincing me to participate in the wonderful symposiums on tax policy he organizes for SMU Law Review. A Thermometer for the Tax System: The Overall Health of the Tax System as Measured by Implicit Tax, 56 SMU L. Rev. 13 (2003), talked about what awful shape the tax system is in overall. On my watch, the American tax base has gone to hell. I have just given Chris an essay called Was it Lost? Personal Deductions under Tax Reform, defending the comprehensive tax ideal. Am I the Last Believer? Stock Compensation: The Most Expensive Way to Pay Future Cash, 52 S.M.U. L. Rev. 423 (1999), attacked stock compensation.

All this leaves me with lots of unrelated articles and testimony I am still proud of many years later, and I think I will just list them, by reason of pride:

A Full and Faithful Marriage: The Substantially-All-The-Properties Requirement in a Corporate Reorganization, 50 Tax Law. 319 (1997)

Deferring Tax Losses with an Expanded § 1211, 48 Tax L. Rev. 719 (1993)

The Legitimacy of Basis from a Corporation’s Own Stock, 9 Am. J. Tax Pol'y 155 (1991)

Zarin and the Tax Benefit Rule: Tax Models for Gambling Losses and the Forgiveness of Gambling Debts, 45 Tax L. Rev. 697 (1990)

Soft Money Investing under the Income Tax, 1989 Ill. L. Rev. 1019

Tax Models for Nonprorata Shareholder Contributions, 3 Va. Tax Rev. 81 (1983)

Tax Models for Nonrecourse Employee Liability, 32 Tax L. Rev. 359 (1977) (my first law review article, probably best viewed a training exercise showing off on a quite narrow topic)

My web page has links to text for most of the things I have written.

Columbia shaped me. Everyone at Columbia reads the same great books at the same time for their full freshman year. The core curriculum, called Contemporary Civilization, or just CC, meant we talked about classes all the time and that you get to critique things you dont know anything about. We talked classes talk late into the night in the dorms, over coffee or with much beer to lubricate the conversation. Ideally, tax law and teaching is just a continuation of freshman year arguments on analytic philosophy and the world.

I have a Purple Heart because I served for a tour of duty in the Mekong Delta Vietnam in an infantry reconnaisance platoon. I do think it gives me a Holmesian sense of duty. I was an Eagle Scout, I suspect still. I am a Calvinist in many ways, which means the right name got attached to the right baby.

I have been married for 30 years to a wonderful wife, Maria. We swim 4 miles a week and I try to run another 10 miles a week. Our kids are terrific, except for the vice of being too far away. My son, Calvin (28 year old) works for NYC OMB. Martha (26) is at U.Chicago Medical School. Carolynn (22) just graduated from Carleton College, Minnesota, and Mathew (19) is at Grinnell College, Iowa. Life so far is good, in the working draft.

May 6, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 29, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Nina J. Crimm (St. John's)

B.A. 1972, Washington University
M.B.A. 1979, Tulane
J.D. 1979, Tulane
LL.M. (Tax) 1981, Georgetown

Scrabble and crossword puzzles always fascinated me. Each has interlocking parts. Scrabble requires players to construct new words upon those existing on the board. One is not sure where the word building will lead – but physical connections must be maintained. Crossword puzzles also have word connections. Artful clue phrases hint at words, and resulting words must connect in a defined grid. Each game and puzzle is entertaining; no Scrabble game unfolds exactly as another and no crossword puzzle is exactly alike. No wonder that I was playfully captivated by the artful phrases, clues, and connections of the Internal Revenue Code. When I was introduced to the Code, I believed that if I could spend my life playing its games and puzzles at work, why not?

My introduction to the Code came while I worked to pay my way concurrently through law and graduate business schools. Clerking with a law firm in New Orleans, I was assigned to a partner who concentrated on corporate matters, many of which involved tax issues. I became entranced by the fits (and perceived misfits) of the Code’s provisions and the policies behind the statutes.

Upon graduation from the J.D. and M.B.A. programs, I clerked at the U.S. Tax Court for Judge Irene F. Scott. It was a terrific experience to learn from one of the early “grand dames” of tax law and to be immersed in debate on tax law issues with other law clerks. At the end of my two year clerkship, I went into private practice in Washington, D.C., with a law firm that now no longer exists. Working long hours to ultimately make clients happy was not as satisfying as the ivory tower environment of the Tax Court, and I found that I longed to return there. I was fortunate to have that opportunity. Chief Judge Arthur L. Nims was looking for an attorney/advisor to oversee large cases, and I happily left the law firm for the Tax Court.

Approximately a year later, a former Tax Court clerk, whom I had known when I clerked for Judge Scott, called me to ask whether I’d be interested in teaching tax in the Masters of Tax program at George Washington Graduate School of Business. After interviewing, I was convinced that academia would be the perfect fit for me. It would permit me to spend my life playing the games and puzzles of the Code, write on tax and nonprofit areas of interest, and engage intellectually with students. I spent several years teaching at George Washington, and then moved to New York to take a position as a law professor at St. John’s University School of Law. Aside from several semesters as a visitor at such schools as Arizona State University College of Law, I have been teaching courses in nonprofit organizations, international tax, corporate tax, and individual federal income tax at St. John’s for 19 years. For the most recent 10 years, my scholarship has concentrated on various domestic and international matters involving nonprofit organizations. So, my 20th year of law school teaching is fast approaching, and I plan to continue for some time thereafter to spend my life playing with the Code’s games and puzzles.

April 29, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 22, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Jeffrey L. Kwall (Loyola-Chicago; Visiting at Northwestern)

B.A. 1977, Bucknell
M.B.A. 1981, Penn
J.D. 1981, Penn

I never contemplated a teaching career. After working my way through college, I set my sights on becoming a corporate lawyer in a big Wall Street firm. But the twists and turns of life lead one in unexpected directions.

After spending the summer after my first year of law school at a Philadelphia megafirm, the security of knowing I had a good home if desired allowed me to try something very different during my second summer. I found a mid-size firm in Beverly Hills that had begun as a tax boutique and evolved into a thriving general business practice. What a summer that was! My eyes were opened to the joys of a transactional practice where you did the tax work and executed the transaction in an environment that was nothing short of spectacular. But having spent my entire life in Pennsylvania, I wasn’t ready to give up the changing seasons so I spent my third year of law school searching for that Beverly Hills practice in an eastern (relatively speaking) locale. That search took me to many cities, one of which was Chicago, a place that I had never before seen but instantly felt like home.

I practiced full-time for three years at a mid-size Chicago firm that, much like the Beverly Hills firm, had begun as a tax boutique. I worked under a brilliant mentor; a meticulous practitioner with the best judgment of any lawyer I have ever known. The firm did sophisticated tax work but, due to its size, rarely encountered the same issue twice. The focus in those days was on quality of work and I was afforded the luxury of taking the time needed to develop the expertise to handle each new matter. I spent weeks at a time with triangular mergers, tiered partnerships, cancellation of indebtedness, corporate penalty taxes, controlled foreign corporations, DISCs – unbelievable intellectual stimulation tempered by the nuts and bolts of actually executing transactions.

As luck would have it, a sudden opportunity arose in the spring of 1984 to join the full-time faculty at Loyola, Chicago and, after much soul searching, I decided to take it. Looking back, it was the best decision I made in my life (I should say the second-best decision, in case my wife happens to read this). To hedge my bets, I retained an of-counsel relationship with my old firm for more than 20 years during which time I continued to reap the benefits of real world practice.

Teaching all these years at Loyola has been a great pleasure, in large part due to my tax colleagues Anne-Marie Rhodes and Christian Johnson, outstanding teachers who remain as enthusiastic and excited about tax as ever and whom I am privileged to regard as my friends. The three of us worked for years as a team, with the encouragement and support of our former Dean Nina Appel, to develop a J.D. tax curriculum with great depth that students flock to in increasing numbers. In recent years, we have enjoyed enrollments of 70-80 in Corporate & Partnership Tax, 30-40 in Advanced Corporate Tax and 50-60 in Estate & Gift Tax. In each year, we have conferred Tax Certificates on 25-30 graduating J.D.s who complete five specified tax courses while satisfying a stringent GPA requirement.

I have followed a broad research agenda over the years, focusing on corporate tax reform as well as pervasive common-law issues (most recently, the open-transaction doctrine and the step-transaction doctrine). My greatest satisfaction, however, stems from the consolidated corporate and partnership tax casebook that I began writing after the repeal of General Utilities rule, the third edition of which was published by Foundation Press last year. Developing a book to teach corporate and partnership tax on a comparative basis enabled me to draw on my teaching, writing and practice experiences over the years and truly represents who I am as a professional. I have enjoyed adapting the book over the past decade to meet the constantly changing business tax landscape while attempting to meet the challenge of maintaining a cohesive work as the tax law becomes increasingly complicated and unprincipled.

In recent years, I have explored interests outside the tax area – teaching the first-year course in real property from a planning perspective and serving as a co-author on a leading property casebook. I have also developed a law school course in financial planning and have written in that field. One of the challenges I hope to respond to in the near future is the critical need for augmenting the financial sophistication of professionals in all disciplines.

I am thoroughly enjoying my visit at Northwestern Law School this semester. The Northwestern tax faculty has been warm and welcoming and the weeks have flown. It has been refreshing to be a part of Northwestern’s fine tax program.

Finally, I am extremely blessed with a wonderful wife of 25 years, Roberta (an accomplished intellectual property professor at DePaul Law School), and three beautiful daughters who have given me the greatest joys (along with some of the greatest challenges) of my life. I’ll save my philosophy on raising teenage daughters for another day.

April 22, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 15, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Carolyn L. Dessin (Akron)

B.M. Ed. 1978, Temple
M.M. 1980, Westminster Choir College
J.D. 1987, Villanova

My road to teaching tax law was definitely not direct. I started out as a musician who wanted to teach and conduct, and received a Bachelor of Music Education degree in voice from Temple University. I went on to receive a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Westminster Choir College, where I studied with Joseph Flummerfelt. I became a music teacher in the Colonial School District in suburban Philadelphia and a Director of Music in several Philadelphia area churches. Many public schools were suffering reductions in force during that time, and I kept getting “RIF”fed at the end of each school year and hired back in the following year for a more and more part-time position. Like most musicians, I also taught private piano students and played weddings and bar mitzvahs.

When I got tired of being a semi-employed starving musician, I decided that I needed to find another teaching discipline. Law interested me, although I knew virtually nothing about it and had never met a lawyer. I took the LSAT and headed off to Villanova. I thought that teaching criminal law would be interesting, so I clerked for a county judge sitting on criminal cases after first year. That experience taught me that I NEVER wanted to be involved with criminal law again, so I was looking for another area of interest in the Fall of my second year of Law School.

I was lucky enough to have James Maule for Income Tax, and I was hooked! I have to confess to some prior interest in tax. I remember reading the instructions for the 1040 and thinking that the intricacy of the tax system was a lot like counterpoint – both require working creatively within a set of fairly rigid rules to attain a goal. But Jim Maule really peaked my interest in tax and gave a lot a good advice about becoming a law teacher.

After graduation, I clerked for the Collins J. Seitz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and practiced in the Personal Law Section (Estate Planning) of the Philadelphia office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. I started teaching at Widener, then did a two-year visit at Idaho teaching Jack Miller’s classes while he was Dean there, and am currently a tenured Associate Professor of Law at Akron, teaching in the areas of Taxation, Estate Planning and Elder Law. My scholarship is primarily in the area of Elder Law.

I couldn’t give up music, and I’ve been an Alto with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus since 2000. I’m currently serving as the Chair of the Chorus Operating Committee and an ex officio member of the Orchestra Board of Trustees. We toured to Switzerland and England with the Orchestra last Summer.

My favorite recreational activity is kayaking. I spend my summers at my cabin in Wyoming paddling and hiking. I’m single and have two enthusiastic Labrador Retrievers, Alta and Targhee who share my adventures.

April 15, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 8, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Theodore P. Seto (Loyola-L.A.)

B.A. 1973, Harvard
J.D. 1976, Harvard

Early in my career, defending a class action sex discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a Fortune 500 company, I was prepping the company’s VP for Customer Service. I began with the standard questions, including “Tell me about your background.” His answer shaped the way I’ve since thought about my life: “I decided long ago that I wanted to try as many different things as possible, and that I would therefore never hold any job for more than 5 years.” He had been in the OSS (predecessor to the CIA), a ward boss for the Republican Party, a road laborer, editor of two women’s magazines – and that was only the beginning. “Wow!,” I thought, “I’d hate to be your wife.”

I’ve never had his courage; I’m addicted to a regular paycheck. My resume reports only four jobs, all in law: clerk for Judge Walter Mansfield on the Second Circuit, associate at Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston, associate, then partner, at Drinker Biddle & Reath in Philadelphia, and associate professor, then professor, at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. But those four jobs have allowed me to try lots of different things and post (perhaps) dubious achievements in lots of different areas.

The dubious achievements began at law school where, as executive editor of the law review, I completely rewrote the Bluebook, converting it from an inexpensive ($1) booklet you could keep in your back pocket into the massive reference work that gathers dust on your shelf today.

At Foley, I was given a choice between defending asbestosis cases and defending employment discrimination cases. I chose the latter. (I still count the 200+ page Proposed Findings of Fact I wrote in the case with which I began this bio as one of the best pieces of legal work I’ve ever done. We won. Dubious achievement?) Perhaps as consolation, I was allowed to head up plaintiff’s pro bono legal team in the Massachusetts school finance case, Webby v. Dukakis, technically decided in plaintiffs’ favor a decade later sub nom. McDuffy v. Secretary, 415 Mass. 545 (1993), but still seeking a remedy a quarter of a century later sub nom. Hancock v. Driscoll, No. 02-2978 (Mass. Sup. Ct.).

Unfortunately, I discovered that Perry Mason did not realistically depict the day-to-day life of a litigator. After three years, I switched to corporate law – which I didn’t like any better. So I took the GRE and began gearing up for a Ph.D. in Economics. Still addicted to that paycheck, however, I decided to make one last stab at law. Yup, I switched to tax. Much to my surprise, I found that I really enjoyed it.

When my then-wife was admitted to Temple’s Ph.D. program in clinical psych, I moved to the tax department at Drinker Biddle & Reath in Philadelphia. There my co-workers – ultimately my partners – included Hank Gutman and Eric Solomon. (I was a lesser light.) Dubious achievements continued. I blessed countless tax shelters. I wrote and signed the unqualified opinions, later validated in Rev. Rul. 90-27, 1990-1 C.B. 50, that made possible the first adjustable rate preferred and dutch auction rate preferred issuances. (The result was a flood of hybrid equity issuances in the 1990’s.) I also authored taxpayer’s briefs before the Third Circuit in Zarin v. Commissioner. (If you haven’t yet heard, we won.) In the meantime, a real achievement – my first child Kira, born in 1985.

Finally, in 1991, I found nirvana, a/k/a law teaching. I sweated bullets to produce my first two articles, but they placed well enough to get me tenure. Then I went off to Paris for a semester to figure out what to do with my new-found freedom.

Paris was good for me. I decided that I was really interested in two things: (1) where our values come from, and (2) the deep structure of our tax system. I developed an evolutionary model of values and began spinning out relatively short papers exploring its implications. I also helped found Loyola’s graduate tax program, with Ellen Aprill’s help pushing the concept past the Strategic Planning Committee, the faculty, the trustees, and finally the ABA. In five short years, we’ve built our program to the point where it’s ranked #9 in the country, with six full-time tax faculty members and some of the best adjuncts anywhere.

I also got remarried and began a second family. I proposed to my wife Sande Buhai on the Paris Metro; twins Samantha and Genevieve were born in 2002.

Recently, I’ve been working on a series of papers on how our tax system works. My tenure articles focused on that most fascinating of all topics – accounting. A forthcoming paper co-authored with Sande explores, among other things, tax base theory. Another looks at the related party rules. Another reconceptualizes the problem of defining the international boundaries of our tax system. Yet another offers my take on Zarin. (Yes, I saved all the files.) I’ve also founded a Center for Interdisciplinary and Comparative Jurisprudence, whose primary function to date has been to offer courses to Loyola faculty on philosophy, economics, and other law-related disciplines.

And that (I hope) is the beginning of my story. More to come. I doubt I will ever join the CIA, become a ward boss for any political party, or edit Cosmo. But thus far life is unfolding nicely.

April 8, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 1, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Walter D. Schwidetzky (Baltimore)

B.A. 1974, Denver
J.D. & M.B.A. 1978, Denver
LL.M. (Tax) 1984, Denver

I backed into academics, though in retrospect I should have realized from the outset that I was destined for the academic life. My paternal grandmother had three children. Each child had one son, and one of her children also had two daughters. All of the sons and one of the daughters are professors, in two countries, in (depending on how one is counting) three or four different areas. If I had known I was going to end up as a professor, I probably would have found a way to complete my higher education at more than one institution.

Not only did I back into academics, I also backed into tax. I was practicing law as a business lawyer in Denver, Colorado and got tired of constantly having to consult others for tax advice. Finally, I went to the University of Denver Graduate Tax Program and got an LL.M. in Taxation.

By the time I was finishing the LL.M., I had been practicing law for five years. I realized that it was not a labor of love. I was not particularly enjoying it and, while I was succeeding, did not feel it was the optimal match for my talents. As I considered alternatives, my genetic predisposition for academics came to the fore, and I went through the AALS meat market. In 1985, I was fortunate enough to land a job at the University of Baltimore. It is a move I have never looked back on with regret. Indeed, I can honestly say that hardly a day goes by when I don’t experience a moment of gratitude for having found my way into academics. I try to keep my good fortune high in my consciousness and not take my job for granted.

The University of Baltimore has a graduate tax program that admits both lawyers and accountants (indeed, I was the director for 10 years). I teach both at the J.D. and graduate tax levels. Almost from the beginning, my specialty has been partnership taxation and that has been the primary focus of my scholarship. For fun, I have on occasion delved into other areas. My first article as a professor was on the pool of capital doctrine, a consequence of having written many oil and gas tax opinions as a lawyer. It is one of my more cited articles. I have written a bit in the estate and gift tax area. I also penned two pieces comparing German and US taxation.

Recently, I coauthored a partnership taxation text for the LexisNexis Graduate Tax Series (with Richard Lipton, Paul Carman, and Chuck Fassler). I have always been a skeptic of using casebooks to teach taxation. Cases are a rather inefficient method for conveying information. Teaching students by the case method makes sense to me in the first year of law school, but not much after that. I use the problem method in class. It was nice to work on a book that was in alignment with my teaching method. The book contains no case excerpts, but does contain numerous problems.

My father was German and came to the US after World War II. He was part of the Peenemunde rocket team. (My sister played ping pong with Werner von Braun). When I was 12 we moved from San Diego, CA to Germany—talk about culture shock. We lived in Germany for four and one-half years. I mostly went to German schools. It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect the time in Germany had on me (mostly for the better). I remain fluent in German and am close to the part of my family that lives in Germany. I travel there once a year or so.

The University of Baltimore has a remarkable number of German speakers, five in all. One was born in Bavaria. Another was in the same German boarding school system (but not the same school) as I was. Indeed, we were probably no more than a few hundred feet apart at one point around 40 years ago. At my encouragement, we have developed a German Law Initiative and hope to develop a sister school relationship with a German University.

I am a long-term student of Theravada Buddhism. There are actually a few of us lurking in the law school ranks (and I am not the only one teaching tax). I help lead a local meditation group and once in a great while lead a meditation retreat. Of my paternal grandmother’s five grandchildren, four have found their way to eastern religions (only three of the four are professors, however—the other one is obviously a black sheep).

It is hard to believe that I have now been teaching for over 20 years. It has been a very rewarding career, one that I continue to enjoy. I don’t plan to go out with my boots on, but I suspect I will stay in the game for many years to come.

April 1, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 25, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Gregory Germain (Syracuse)

J.D. 1985, Hastings
LL.M. (Tax) 2001, Florida

I enrolled in law school intending to become a tax lawyer. I don’t know why I wanted to be a tax lawyer. I had no experience with the subject. I think it was because I liked money, and thought that tax law had something to do with it. As with many law students, however, circumstances took me in an entirely different direction.

I got a summer job after my first year of law school at the largest bankruptcy law firm in San Francisco. It was 1983, and the bankruptcy system was in a state of shambles. The Supreme Court had recently ruled the entire bankruptcy system unconstitutional because it vested bankruptcy judges, who did not have the Article III guarantees of life tenure or undiminishable salaries, with broad subject matter jurisdiction over matters only related to bankruptcy. Because of the enormous volume of bankruptcy cases (more bankruptcy cases are filed each year than all other federal court cases combined), the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of staying its ruling several times, allowing the unconstitutional system to continue in the hope that Congress would soon fix the jurisdictional problem. Finally, after Congress repeatedly failed to act, the Supreme Court pulled the plug on the entire system. An emergency rule was slapped together to keep the bankruptcy courts open while more permanent measures could be worked out. It was a very interesting time to be involved in bankruptcy, and I was hooked. I took every commercial law course offered by my law school, and spent part of my third law school year as a judicial extern for the Chief Bankruptcy Judge in San Francisco, Judge Lloyd King, who later became the sole bankruptcy judge in Hawaii. I ended up taking only one tax class in law school, Tax I, from a young professor named Stephen Lind.

Following graduation, I worked for one year as a bankruptcy litigation associate at a large Los Angeles law firm, Latham & Watkins. My arrival at the firm coincided with the firm’s annual retreat held at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel. I attended the retreat knowing almost no one. At dinner the first night I saw an elderly gentlemen sitting by himself at the back of the room, and decided to introduce myself and join him. It was the managing partner of the law firm, who proceeded to question me about my background and qualifications for the next hour and a half. No wonder he dined alone. The dinner left me with an important lesson, however. The managing partner asked me why I decided to work at Latham & Watkins. The truth was that I took the job for some combination of money and prestige – those were the only two characteristics separating law firms that I was able to decipher at that point in my life – but rather than admit the truth, I muttered something about the firm’s reputation for quality work. I then asked him what he would look for in a law firm if he were a young associate. He told me that he would look for a firm with a democratic structure that would allow him to have a say in the future direction of the firm.

I don’t remember too much about my year at Latham & Watkins, except that I did little more than work and sleep, and that I was not regularly consulted for my opinion about the firm’s future course

A close law school friend was working at a mid-size San Francisco firm called Landels, Ripley & Diamond. The firm was known for its unusual democratic structure and balanced approach to work. They happened to be looking for a bankruptcy associate, and I fit the bill. Latham’s managing partner’s advice played a major role in my decision to leave the firm and join Landels. It was the best decision I ever made. I worked at Landels as a bankruptcy litigator for the next 14 years, and greatly enjoyed it. The work was challenging and ever changing, and my colleagues remain some of my closest friends.

The seeds for a mid-life crisis were planted in 1998, when I received a telephone call from a large mortgage servicing company client asking me to take over a case that was set for trial in 60 days. The case involved a routine foreclosure of a $100,000 home mortgage. The foreclosure process began after the borrower refused to pay for federally mandated flood insurance. After a nine month exchange of letters, and further monetary defaults, the servicing company foreclosed, the property was sold to a third-party bidder, and the homeowner was evicted from the premises. Prior to the eviction, the homeowner had sued to forestall foreclosure, and had demanded discovery. The homeowner’s suit failed to forestall foreclosure, but when the discovery came due shortly after the foreclosure, my client learned that a mistake had been made – the flood insurance policy that formed the initial basis for the foreclosure had, through a clerical error, never been purchased. Oops. The judge at the mandatory settlement conference held shortly after the error was discovered awarded the homeowners $8 million in punitive damages. I was asked to take over the case shortly after the entry of the award. Although I had little experience defending tort cases, and no experience handling jury trials, I took the case. After all, I thought, how different could a jury trial be from litigating before a bankruptcy judge?

For the next year and a half, I worked on this case almost full-time, obtaining numerous trial extensions, the appointment of a discovery referee, and several awards of discovery sanctions. I took eight full weeks of videotaped depositions, and filed summary judgment motions with thousands of pages of exhibits (which were denied, I think, without having been read). At a final settlement conference before trial, my client franticly bid against itself in an effort to settle the case, offering to pay (in addition to repurchasing the house and restoring the borrower’s tenancy) a $1 million windfall. The plaintiff (despite the best efforts of her lawyer and the settlement conference judge) refused to settle, believing or hoping, as she told the jury on the first day of trial, that “even one, two or three hundred million” would not compensate her for the distress she suffered as a result of the foreclosure.

The two months following the failed settlement conference were certainly the busiest of my life. We hired a jury consultant and conducted several mock trials behind one-way glass to develop our legal strategy. I put together the video snippets from the depositions to be used in cross-examination (a very time consuming task). The case took four weeks to try before a San Jose jury. While the result was a complete victory for the client (and a fully paid legal bill for my firm), the process left me exhausted. I returned from the trial to my neglected bankruptcy practice, which would remain slow for several months due to a booming economy that was in the last throes of the technology bubble.

It seemed to me at the time that a heavier dose of transactional work might nicely supplement my bankruptcy practice by making it less dependent on the business cycle. I decided learn tax law, and approached my former tax professor, Stephen Lind (who I had not seen in nearly 20 years), for advice about where to take part-time tax courses in San Francisco. Professor Lind suggested I instead take a year off and get an LLM degree from the University of Florida. That sounded good to me. My family was willing to go on a one year adventure (well, at least my then one year old daughter didn’t interpose any objections), so I took a leave of absence from my law firm, we sold our house in California, packed up our belongings, and headed for Gainesville, Florida. I intended to return to practice after tax school, and hoped (for selfish reasons) that the housing bubble would finally burst during my absence. So much for my timing – the “housing bubble” continued its growth unabated, although I understand that it now (six years later) finally shows some signs of slowing.

Several weeks before we were scheduled to leave for Florida, a group of seven key partners decided to leave my law firm, causing a panic for the door. As I was departing for Florida, my law firm ceased to exist as an operating entity. During my last weeks in California, I was appointed to the partnership’s committee to help steer my law firm through bankruptcy and liquidation. I am happy to say that through careful planning, hard work, and a bit of good fortune, my old firm was able to pay all its creditors in full, with interest, and helped spawn a successful successor firm.

The first person I met at the University of Florida was Professor Marty McMahon, who kindly offered me a job as his research assistant. I turned down the job because I was busy working on the wind-down of my law firm, but I would be greatly influenced as a student by Marty McMahon’s love of tax and teaching. He was both a great example and mentor to me, and helped point me in the direction of academics. Marty McMahon is a model of what a great teacher and scholar should be. I also met Gregg Polsky, who, as the visiting assistant professor, was in the process of interviewing for teaching jobs. Gregg was generous in sharing with me his experience through the bewildering AALS recruitment process, and the even more bewildering world of academics. Following in Marty McMahon’s footsteps, Gregg is well on his way to becoming a respected tax scholar, teacher and mentor. I spent a very enjoyable year in Gainesville, Florida, learning the language of tax law.

I applied for Tax Court judicial clerkships during my first semester at Florida. I decided however to withdraw from the process because I did not wish to devote two years to a Tax Court clerkship. Instead, I decided to return to practice and to go through the AALS recruitment process the following year. I called each of the judge’s secretaries to withdraw from the interviewing process, but Judge Renato Beghe’s secretary called me back to say that he would be willing to consider me for a one year clerkship, and that I should send a writing sample if interested. Because Judge Beghe had recently written an important opinion on equitable recoupment in tax law, I decided to send him a brief I had written several years earlier concerning equitable recoupment in bankruptcy. I learned later that he liked both my brief and the bit of extra thought that went into the selection.

I arrived at Judge Beghe’s chambers for an 8:30 a.m. interview, before the secretaries and clerks. I was greeted by a man in his 60’s who said “you must be Greg, come on in.” He did not introduce himself, but I initially assumed it was Judge Beghe. However, I was quickly confused when the man repeatedly referred to “Judge Beghe’s recent opinion” on one topic or another. Who was I speaking to? Was this his clerk? I somehow managed to maintain my composure during the interview, and was fortunately not called upon to speak much. When I was let out of the interview, I said to the secretaries “Who was that?” They all laughed when I explained that I had been confused by Judge Beghe’s penchant for referring to himself in the third person. Fortunately, the interview went fine (despite my confusion), and I was offered and accepted the job over lunch.

I spent nine months following graduation learning the unusual procedures of the Tax Court, writing draft options, and discussing the law with Judge Beghe and my fellow clerks. Judge Beghe is a true intellectual, as interested in discussing Dante and Aristotle as he is in discussing the definition of income. He has a near photographic memory. I found it very intimidating when, during a discussion of some tax issue, he would jump up, grab a 20 year old volume from the tax reporters, and open the book to the precise page of an obscure Tax Court case containing a discussion of the issue we were considering. He was a practicing lawyer on Wall Street at the age of 21, a partner in two major New York firms, and was a leader of the New York tax bar before being appointed to the Tax Court. Now in his mid-sixties, he still has a child-like twinkle in his eyes, an open and inquisitive mind, and enjoys a good debate. He is a great judge, and I am glad to call him a friend.

Following the AALS recruitment conference, I accepted a wonderful opportunity to teach at the Syracuse University College of Law. The school has allowed me to teach a wide variety of upper-division business law classes, including Tax I (Personal), Tax II (corporate and partnership), Business Bankruptcy, Corporations/Business Associations and Commercial Transactions. As a native Californian, I was apprehensive about living in the snowiest city in the United States. I didn’t even own a heavy coat. But the adjustment has been easier than I expected. I enjoy the distinct seasons. As I look out from my window at the four feet of snow on the ground, I recall the line for Lawrence of Arabia, who loved the desert because “it’s clean.” Well, at least until the snow starts melting. I cannot believe that it has been six years since I left behind my law practice in California. It’s been a great adventure.

March 25, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 18, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Henry M. Ordower (St. Louis)

A.B. 1967, Washington University
M.A. 1970, Chicago
J.D. 1975, Chicago

“On a dark and stormy night” in March, 1972, I concluded that it was time to abandon the Ph.D. work in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures I had pursued for five years and change to a field offering opportunities for employment and the ability to provide for our two sons. Our third son joined the group during my final year in law school, while my wife Ilene was in the middle of her MBA program at the University of Chicago. With ABD (all but dissertation) in hand, I applied to a couple of law schools. The University of Chicago admitted me. Knowing a degree from the U of C might open the door to law teaching, I put aside the Ph.D. work that still drew me in order to develop myself in law. Twenty-six years later in December 1998, while serving as vice president and general counsel and to an emerging markets, hedge fund manager (on a leave from SLU Law after more than twenty years teaching), Ilene and I, following a rough crossing of the Drake passage, stepped from a zodiac onto Antarctica, our seventh continent (six by the European view). By then all our boys were finished with college and establishing themselves in their careers. Life and tax law indeed have been great to me.

Although I still tell people who ask about the relationship between Scandinavian languages and tax that there is no language quite so foreign as the Internal Revenue Code, it was possibly Walter Blum’s classes in tax that defined my future. I sought to emulate his Socratic mastery and to make my way in his area of expertise. After receiving my law degree in 1975, I took a large firm job in Chicago, but the University of Chicago soon arranged a leave of absence for me to fill-in as a Bigelow Fellow and Instructor when the scheduled Bigelow did not show for the start of the 1975-76 academic year. As luck would have it, my office was next to Walter’s for the year. I worked part time for the firm while I was a Bigelow, then a year full time. Saint Louis University offered me a teaching position for fall 1977 and I have hung around there ever since. With a grandparent and other family in St. Louis, the move was a good choice for the boys and us.

Tax, family, travel have been my passions, languages my principal hobby. Tax has offered enormous intellectual stimulation. I consulted regularly in order to stay in touch with developments in practice and to support my travel habit. I try to keep up my languages both with visits to other countries and reading fiction in each language. As to travel, with kids in tow, we spent every school vacation driving around the United States, Iceland, the Soviet Union, most of Europe, parts of Asia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and South America. Of the Soviet Union, the boys commented that the U.S. had nothing to fear from such an undeveloped, poor, and chaotic place. When the boys stopped traveling with us, Ilene and I continued and have visited over one hundred countries and 49 states – I have never been to Oklahoma, but I’ve been to heavenly Bhutan. Travel now takes a back seat to our four grandchildren, all in the New York City area, where we spend every free moment.

My publication focus has been a bit eclectic – the flexibility of teaching is wonderful – from law and literature to transactional legal ethics to estate planning to technical tax matters. Most recently, I have begun to shift focus to comparative tax law but have been distracted lately by the need to write something about hedge funds (soon out of the way). I am the general reporter for the tax section of the 17th quadrennial Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in the Netherlands this July since I designed the project that examines the intersections of taxation and constitutional law. For the past several years, I have been a co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at SLU, doing a fair amount of lecturing overseas and developing exchange relationships. I taught a couple of times in Germany for five or six weeks and will again this coming summer, and once in China.

I have no regrets, although I must confess that I have looked wistfully at a tenured faculty member of a major law school whose publications involve the Icelandic family saga (the area of my uncompleted dissertation). Who would have thought that I might have captured tenure in law teaching without really changing fields? Oh well, tax law is more fun and less bloody, and there probably would not have been much consulting work in Icelandic literature.

March 18, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Mark W. Cochran (St. Mary's)

A.B.J. 1977, Georgia
J.D. 1980, Vanderbilt
L.L.M. (Tax) 1981, Florida

Teaching is the only career I’ve ever considered, other than astronaut, professional athlete, fifth Beatle, Pulitzer winning journalist, and high powered attorney. How I ended up teaching federal tax law rather than history or algebra, on the other hand, requires a bit of explanation.

By the time I started high school, Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon and the Beatles were in the process of breaking up. My football career had peaked in eighth grade, when I saw action in one game and almost made a tackle. Having come to grips with my lack of athletic ability, I volunteered as a photographer for the high school newspaper. I demonstrated some talent for photography and ultimately for writing as well, with a particular flair for satire. At the time, I fancied myself as a the next Art Buchwald or Margaret Bourke-White. My senior year I was editor in chief of the newspaper, and this led me to major in Journalism at the University of Georgia. My choice was solidified the summer before I started college, when the Watergate hearings took center stage and two reporters named Woodward and Bernstein became national heroes.

The idea of law school had never occurred to me until I covered a felony trial as an assignment for a newswriting class. I was surprised to discover that the trial had little to do with impassioned Perry Mason speeches and a lot to do with technical, theoretical matters. Oddly enough, that appealed to me quite a bit, and graduate education seemed more attractive than getting a real job. As I neared graduation from college, I had narrowed the possibilities to law school or a Ph.D. program in History. Law school became the first choice when I ran into one of my young history professors moonlighting at a gas station.

I chose Vanderbilt Law School primarily because of its location. I was interested in copyright and entertainment law, and I was too naive to realize that the bulk of that work was done in New York and Los Angeles. Nevertheless, Nashville was a pleasant city, Vanderbilt was a great law school, and my attention soon was diverted from the music industry. During my second year, I took a part time clerking job with a boutique firm that specialized in federal taxation. I took the job because I needed the money, but I quickly realized I had found my niche. Federal tax law offered in abundance the technical, theoretical qualities that originally attracted me to law. The next logical step, and a way to postpone getting a real job for at least one more year, was an LL.M. in Taxation. I decided on the University of Florida, in part because of the affordable tuition and agreeable climate and in part because I had enjoyed the Freeland, Lind and Stephens casebook. Jack Freeland and Steve Lind were even better in person than in print, and their colleagues were equally talented and dedicated. The outstanding faculty, together with a capable, cohesive, and motivated student body, made the Florida tax program a transcendent educational experience.

Flat broke but graduate tax degree in hand, I returned to Nashville to practice with Boult, Cummings, Conners & Berry, a thriving general practice firm where I got a steady and varied diet of tax, including corporate, partnership, estate planning and probate, executive compensation, tax exempt organizations, and tax controversy work. I even got the chance to work with a few music industry notables, which proved to be a disappointment. (I’ll never forget explaining an estate plan to a well known entertainer whose body language betrayed a combination of contempt and utter boredom.) When the firm decided to launch an in-house newsletter, I returned to my journalistic roots and volunteered to write a monthly column. My lampoons of law firm life delighted my colleagues but probably hastened my departure from the firm. After four productive, educational, and sometimes entertaining years, I entered the AALS faculty appointments process and ended up at St. Mary’s, where I remain 20 years later. Along the way, I’ve spent a semester at Vermont Law School as a visiting professor and a year at the IRS Chief Counsel’s Office as Professor in Residence.

I regularly teach basic Federal Income Taxation and a course called Taxation of Business Entities, which covers Subchapters C, K, and S. For the past five years, I have had the humbling experience of teaching first year Contracts in addition to the two tax courses. I have also taught Law and Economics and Conflict of Laws, the latter of which was my favorite course in law school and is my favorite course to teach. I have taught a variation of Conflicts called Transnational Litigation for our summer program in Innsbruck, Austria, and I currently serve as Co-Director of that program. I have a hard time believing I get paid to spend July in the Alps.

I have been married to Paula, a registered nurse, for 23 years, and we have two teenage sons. I do the cooking, Paula does the yard work, and the boys watch television. Truth be told, I watch with them if it’s college football, Spurs basketball, or a major golf tournament. (Sometimes we have to turn up the volume to drown out the lawn mower.) I also practice the guitar once in a while, just in case Paul and Ringo decide to start another band.

March 11, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 4, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Jeffrey G. Sherman (Chicago-Kent)

A.B. 1968, Harvard
J.D. 1972, Harvard

An English actor (possibly David Garrick) is said to have been visited on his deathbed by a friend, who complimented the actor on the calmness and gallantry with which he was facing his coming end. The actor replied, “Dying is easy. Farce is hard.” I think of those words as I sit down to write this profile: talking about myself is easy; writing about myself is hard.

I haven’t done much nonscholarly writing since my last year in law school, when I was the lyricist for the law school show, an original musical that the students presented each year. Our show concerned three law students who ran away from law school to join the circus. One of the songs I wrote was called, “One Ball.” It was about an incompetent juggler who could juggle only one ball at a time, and I can’t be blamed if you thought the song was about something else.

I graduated from law school intending to specialize in trusts and estates, thanks to the dazzling classroom performance of the late A. James Casner, who taught both property and estate planning. “I want to be just like him when I grow up,” I thought to myself. Estates law, with its ancient pedigree and its English associations, appealed to my antiquarianism and my passionate Anglophilia, so it seemed like the ideal specialty for me, and the strength of Casner’s intellectual commitment to the subject convinced me that a professional life might profitably be spent grappling with powers of appointment and fiduciary duties.

Life in private practice revealed what ought to have been clear to me back in law school: estate planning involves as much tax law as property law. Fortunately, I discovered that I loved tax law, too. Tax law was to me like an exquisitely complex machine that could be made to do all sorts of wonderful things if only one could find the right lever to pull or the right button to push. To find flexibility within an apparently rigid system was an almost intoxicating challenge.

When ERISA was enacted in 1974, I discovered that same challenge in employee benefits law, which had also become part of my practice. And a year later, I jumped at the chance to work in the United States Treasury Department, the Office of the Tax Legislative Counsel, laboring over new regulations that were to become the foundation of a new legal specialty. In ERISA, Congress effectively delegated to the Treasury Department the power to write a great deal of law, so being at Treasury at that time was like being present at the creation. I suppose I went there expecting to find a bunch of people exulting in their power, but instead I found people with a clear understanding of the limits of their authority and a fierce determination to stay within them.

From there, it was on to law school teaching, and I’ve been at it for more than a quarter of a century. I just love it. Nothing is more gratifying than seeing a student’s facial expression change from one of bafflement to one of comprehension because of something I’ve said or done. And despite my length of service and despite the number of times I’ve taught my courses, every year I continue to experience that oddly pleasurable embarrassment of having a student of mine correct some mistake I’ve made in class. In addition to teaching estates and trusts, gift and estate tax, and employee benefits law, I’ve begun teaching Law and Literature, which is about as far removed from tax law as one can get. It gives me a chance to revel in ambiguity instead of struggling to avoid it, and it gives me a chance to interact with students whom I might not otherwise see in my courses. Not everyone sees tax law as something exquisite.

March 4, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Nancy S. Abramowitz (American)

B.S. 1972, Cornell
J.D. 1975, Georgetown

I began my career more than thirty years ago as a law clerk to Judge Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. of the U.S. Tax Court. From there I moved on to private practice at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. I practiced tax and employee benefits at the firm and was an associate (1977-82) and a partner 1982-1991). With three children on the home front, I left the firm although I spent a couple of years continuing to work from home on several large continuing matters. My practice experience was diverse: international and domestic; transactional, controversy and legislative work. I also had the opportunity to do benefits work from both management and labor union perspectives. My pro bono time was generally spent training and then volunteering in our local court’s and federal district court’s earliest efforts at court-annexed alternative dispute resolution.

I have been teaching for about 10 years now. I began at AU law school working with Janet Spragens at the school’s low-income taxpayer clinic. I soon began teaching Pensions and Benefits Law and Contracts as well. I have also had the pleasure of teaching Externship Seminars at the school as well as International Economic Law in several of our summer abroad programs.

I truly enjoy every minute of teaching—both clinical and classroom. The law school environment is rich with unlimited opportunities to delve into many different areas of interest. I have spent the past couple of years working with the school’s first year “integrated curriculum” which has first year faculty working together to present supplemental programs crossing strict doctrinal lines.

My children are now out of the nest. The eldest, after a tour of duty teaching high school science with Teach for America, went on to graduate studies in public health and is presently working at the CDC in Atlanta. Number two child is a law student and number three child is a history major in undergraduate school—although she spent the past summer at DC Superior Court working with an advocacy group for victims of domestic violence.

My husband (of almost 33 years) has been in private practice for the long haul, although he has been teaching Bankruptcy Law as an adjunct at Georgetown for the past 12 years or so.

Spare time these days is devoted to volunteer ADR and work on the boards of several nonprofits including the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund for Chamber Music at the Kennedy Center, the ACLU of the national capital area, and coordinating the Academic Advisory Board’s work on the annual law student writing competition sponsored by the Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship.

Postscript: As you may know, my dear friend and my colleague for the past ten years, Janet Spragens, passed away on February 19 after a long illness. Janet was a beloved (by faculty, staff and students, alike) professor at American University Law School; she was a true trailblazer in the tax clinic movement; she was a valued participant in the tax bar and tax scholarship/policy communities. Most of all, she was a treasured friend with whom one could truly delight in the simplest of life's pleasures-- a good cup of coffee, an afternoon cookie, a well-delivered joke, and a smile that said it all. She will be sorely missed by an army of people from many avenues of life. I know they will join me in cherishing the lessons, the friendship, and the terrific laughs she shared.

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

February 18, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)

B.S. 1968, Clark
M.A. 1971, Assumption
J.D. 1976, Akron
LL.M. (Tax) 1979, George Washington

Like many others, particularly women, I took an indirect route to becoming a lawyer.

A night student in my senior year of college, I worked in the actuarial department of an insurance company, but soon found myself being trained in Fortran and Cobol at “IBM School.” I disliked programming and so, when I graduated, I very happily quit and began teaching dramatics at Lincoln House, a girls club. I then got my master’s degree in English, taught high school English, and had fun directing the junior and senior class plays (“R.U.R.” and “The Bald Soprano”). Having by that time moved from Massachusetts to Ohio, I took the rest of my required Ph.D. classes in English and taught freshman literature at Kent State. Because I was evidently still “finding myself,” I considered taking a one-year leave of absence to try law school. I drove over to the University of Akron, talked to the Associate Dean, applied and began law school that fall. I was one of those people who actually loved law school. Because Ohio tested on Income Tax, Corporate Tax, and Estate and Gift Tax, I took several tax courses and was surprised to do well in them.

After graduating, I became a teaching fellow at GW, completing my LL.M. in Taxation. My favorite courses were Partnership Tax (taught by Mike Sanders) and Tax Policy (taught by Tom Field). My paper on the marriage penalty (The Marriage Penalty: The Working Couple's Dilemma, 47 Fordham L. Rev. 27 (1978)) became my first real law review article (apart from a student piece on Karen Quinlan).

One of my best tax experiences was clerking for Judge Tietjens at the U.S. Tax Court. He was such a wonderful man and mentor; he had also taught high school English, enjoyed crossword puzzles, and had a great sense of humor. During my interview, I couldn’t help but notice that he had pinned a newspaper photo of Gerald Ford onto a tapestry next to a griffin that looked like Ford’s twin—I knew I wanted to clerk for him. Anyway, in my last year clerking on the court, I was pleased to be asked to review the opinions of the Special Trial Judges for the then Chief Judge Tannenwald. It was in that year that I gave birth to my son Alex (appropriately, on Mother’s Day). As for teaching tax law, I was lucky that Jack Lynch, my officemate at GW, remembered me and called me when the University of Baltimore was looking for a tax professor. I have been very happy at UB and have had great colleagues there (Jack Lynch, Walter Schwidetzky, and Fred Brown). I am among those who are extremely grateful and astonished that we are paid for what we do.

For the past ten years, I have written mostly in the areas of estate and gift tax:

Actuarial Tables v. Facts and Circumstances Valuation: Ithaca Trust Re-visited, 38 Real Prop., Probate, & Trust J. 745 (Winter 2004) [blogged here and here]

Contingencies and the Estate Tax, 5 Fla. Tax Rev. 49 (2001)

I think I have cornered the market on QTIP articles:

Solutions to the Sexist QTIP Provisions, 35 ABA Real Prop., Probate, & Trust J. 97 (2000)

The Illogical and Sexist QTIP Provisions: I Just Can’t Say It Ain’t So, 76 N.C. L. Rev. 1597 (1998)

Clack Estate: Adding Insult to Injury, or More Problems with the QTIP Tax Provisions, 6 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Women’s Stud. 201 (1996)

The Marital Deduction QTIP Provisions: Illogical and Degrading to Women, 5 UCLA Women’s Law J. 301 (1995)

I’m currently writing a column (“Estate and Gift Rap”) for Tax Notes. Some recent pieces for the column have included:

Return to Senda: Order Determinative for FLP Discounts, 110 Tax Notes 791 (Feb. 6, 2006) [blogged here]

Donovan and Davis: Two More Lottery Cases, 110 Tax Notes 543 (Jan. 30, 2006) [blogged here]

Kelley: A Green Light for FLPs, 109 Tax Notes 1467 (Dec. 12, 2005) [blogged here]

Duty of Consistency and the Marital Deduction: Horse and Carriage, 108 Tax Notes 1463 (Sept. 19, 2005) [blogged here]

It's Summertime With Iced Tehan a TAM, 108 Tax Notes 603 (Aug. 1, 2005) [blogged here]

Bongard’s Nontax Motive Test: Not Open and Schutt, 107 Tax Notes 1711 (June 27, 2005) [blogged here]

The Final GRAT Regulations: Schott Shot Down, 107 Tax Notes 1175 (May 30, 2005) [blogged here]

How Do D’Ambrosio and Wheeler Fit into the FLP Debate?, 107 Tax Notes 387 (Apr. 18, 2005) [blogged here]

Davis and Whiting: QTIP Income Interests and Intent, 106 Tax Notes 1597 (Mar. 28, 2005) [blogged here]

Now that my two children (I also have a daughter, Amelia) are grown, I am enjoying my visits at Seattle University and at New England School of Law. I am married to Harry Cohen-- an avid chess player, a semi-retired transportation planner, and a great guy.

February 18, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 11, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Roberta F. Mann (Widener)

B.S. 1980, Arizona State
M.B.A. 1982, Arizona State
J.D. 1987, Arizona State
LL.M. (Tax) 1995, Georgetown

Well, I thought this day would never come! Too late to be a new tax professor profile, and not quite mature enough to be a classic. Now I have to find something interesting and original to say about my career path leading to my current position at Widener.

First, I have never been good at career planning. Serendipity is my favored method. It has always worked for me. I went to law school because I was tired of doing monthly production, inventory and sales reports in my first “real” job for a pharmaceutical company. Every month, the same old thing!

Next, I decided to work for the National Office of the IRS Chief Counsel, not because I wanted to be a tax lawyer, but because it was in Washington, D.C. I wanted to move to Washington, D.C., not because it was a great place to start a legal career but because my husband had a job there.

You can’t help learning a lot about tax law at the National Office. I started in the Corporate Tax Division, writing private letter rulings on section 355 business purpose issues. Marty Ginsberg was the counsel for the taxpayer in my first adverse conference. Later, I wrote a couple of regulations under section 382. I enjoyed working for Eric Solomon when he was the Assistant Chief Counsel (Corporate).

Eventually, I came to see the wonder of the tax law as a foreign language, and to rejoice in my growing fluency. I enrolled at Georgetown to broaden my knowledge of tax law. Karl Zeswitz (Corporate and Partnership) and Hal Hicks were among my favorite professors. I met Mona Hymel (University of Arizona) in one of my last classes at Georgetown. She was auditing the class preparing for her new job as a professor. I was about to start my year as IRS visiting professor at UC Davis. I consider Mona to be my first tax colleague. At Davis, Dan Simmons and Bruce Wolk were splendid mentors, encouraging me through our weekly tax faculty meetings at a local Mexican restaurant.

It should come as no surprise to this group that I left my first teaching experience thinking fixedly of a way to get more. I taught at Georgetown as an adjunct for two years, and moved from the IRS to the Joint Committee on Taxation staff. The Joint Committee was a fascinating experience, but I left to join Widener with no regrets. A collegial faculty, friendly students, a location conveniently equidistant to Washington and New York, it’s home.

Somewhere along the way, I lost most of my hobbies and instead took up “causes.” I used to ski and body surf. Now I walk the dog (and the husband) in the Brandywine Creek State Park. I have recently revived an interest in ballet, taking beginning ballet for the umpteenth time, and loving it. Re my “causes.” I am the president of the Board of Trustees of Preservation Delaware, Inc. And, although it doesn’t really feel like a cause, I love the ABA Section of Taxation. I serve as chair of the Individual Income Tax Committee. I was thrilled to be nominated to the American College of Tax Counsel and attended my first meeting last week in San Diego. I write about the impact of tax policy on the environment, and spend entirely too much time worrying about global warming.

February 11, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 4, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Stuart Lazar (Thomas Cooley)

A.B. 1990, Michigan
J.D. 1992, Michigan
LL.M. (Tax) 1996, NYU

In my second year of college, as a young economics major, I faced a choice: pursue a bachelor’s in business administration or go to law school. Obviously, I chose the latter route -- but with the idea that I wanted to pursue a career in “business” law. A class taken the following year -- Tax Accounting -- pushed me towards a career in tax law. It was a decision that I would never look back on.

During my time at Michigan, I was fortunate to study tax law with the “Big Three” (a reference here to the Michigan auto industry) -- Professors Doug Kahn, Jeff Lehman and Patricia White. From them, I learned not only substantive tax law but about my love for the intricacies of the tax code. I also learned two very important things. First, it is not only the what, but the why, that matters (i.e., policy plays an extremely important role) in shaping substantive law. Second, that a great professor could make learning tax law fun.

Upon graduation from Michigan, I returned home to New York to practice tax law as an associate with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and to earn my LL.M. in tax. While the hours at Skadden Arps were sometimes numerous, I was enthralled with the cutting edge tax work that the firm did. My practice at Skadden Arps was mainly corporate transactional, and I learned more than I ever thought possible about Sections 355 and 368 of the Code. I also learned one other important lesson from the head of Skadden’s tax deparment, Matthew Rosen: It is not enough just to know the law and how to apply it, but to be a good tax lawyer you need to be able to explain the law to clients in a manner that brings extremely complex tax concepts down to the level of the non-tax professional. It is something that I hope that I accomplish in every class that I teach.

After a little over four years at Skadden Arps, it was time for me to move on. While I loved tax law, I decided that what I really wanted to do with tax was to teach it -- not practice it. I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Michael Melton (now deceased), who was at the time the Director of the Graduate Tax Program at the Boston University. Professor Melton offered me a job as an adjunct professor teaching corporate taxation in the LL.M. program at BU, an offer that I immediately accepted. I was also fortunate enough to receive an offer to practice law at Edwards & Angell, a firm with offices in Providence and Boston. Thus, I was off to the Northeast.

My practice at Edwards & Angell was more varied than the practice I had at Skadden Arps. It consisted of tax structuring and transactional work; corporate, partnership, individual and estate and gift tax work; and some international, but mainly domestic, taxation. I learned a great deal about collegiality and the importance of working through tax issues with others from my two partners at the firm, Fred Lombardi and Scott Nebergall. During that time, I taught both Corporate Taxation and Corporate Reorganizations at BU and, for one year, was fortunate to teach as an adjunct at Roger Williams in Bristol, Rhode Island. At Roger Williams, I taught a course in tax policy and one dealing with the taxation of business entities.

The five and one-half years that I taught at BU rival all of my others as the best years of my life. Through numerous conversations with Ern Haddad, the current director of BU’s Graduate Tax Program, I learned a lot about what it means to be a good professor and what it takes to have a great tax program. However, after six years in the Northeast and six wonderful summers in Newport, the teaching bug bit harder. At that point, I was fortunate to receive an offer to teach full-time at Thomas Cooley. So again, with great excitement and a little trepidation, I packed my bags and returned to the Midwest.

At Thomas Cooley, I teach classes at both the law school level and in Cooley’s new Graduate Tax Program, where I function as the Assistant Director. Two things about my experiences here at Cooley stand out: the excitement of working in and growing a new program and the depth of intelligent faculty employed by the school. I currently teach or have taught courses in individual taxation (JD and LL.M.), corporate tax (LL.M.) and business planning (LL.M.). I hope to resume teaching courses on the LL.M. level dealing with corporate reorganizations and tax policy, and to add a course in real estate taxation -- which would combine my interest in real estate investing with my love of tax law.

Strange as it may sound, I have recently found that outside of tax law I have an interesting and enjoyable personal life. I am married to a vegan personal chef, and am the father to a couple of wonderful dogs -- Nixon (a Shih Tzu with a personality that rivals the former president) and Noah (a Boston Terrier who combines a life of comfort with an active play life). I continue to miss Newport, but remain active as a member of the board of directors of The Newport International Film Festival. This affords me the ability to sneak back to Rhode Island several times a year, as well as indulges my appetite for good film (which was not satiated or dampened by my failed attempts as the owner of two video stores). In addition, I have recently tried my hand at amateur stand up comedy though, I must admit, that while I find a great deal of humor in the Code and Regulations promulgated thereunder, my comedic routines center away from the world of tax. Finally, of potential interest, I have recently rekindled my interest in creative writing and hope to make significant progress this year on a novel that deals, more than tangentially, on the life of a secret agent/tax lawyer/tax professor (no resemblance to myself should be assumed).

February 4, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Michael Mulroney (Villanova)

B.S.C. 1954, Iowa
J.D. 1959, Harvard

With no intended reflection on those who may follow me in the Spotlight, I can only assume that by asking me to do this one Paul Caron has about reached the bottom of the barrel of candidates for this blog feature who are over the age of 70.

Probably because of the number of appellate cases I’ve argued over the years, and the advice I’ve given to students in moot court competitions, I’m a bit uncomfortable in using the first person to describe myself. But here goes.

I peaked early in my formal education. Just as the Korean War began I graduated first in my Elkader, Iowa high school class of 28–a class rank that I would never again come close to achieving in college or law school. My aunt, the clerk of the local Draft Board, was somewhat apprehensive about the small-town public perception involved in giving me an educational deferment to get an economics degree from the University of Iowa when all the rest of my high school classmates were being sent off to war. However, she was able to rehabilitate herself in her own eyes by shipping me off to basic training (at Camp Caffee, Arkansas then, and maybe still today, the armpit of the universe) the day after college graduation.

Because I had been the only boy in my high school typing class the Army made me a clerk and bundled me off the Germany (not a bad place to fight the Korean War). I was assigned to a truck driving battalion as a school teacher where for two years I taught functionally illiterate sergeants and warrant officers to read and write, multiply and divide, and a bit of American history. It was the most satisfying teaching experience of my life. If only my current Now Generation law students were as motivated as those guys!

I thought I wanted to be a federal banker like my father. But I ran into a couple of other drafted PFCs who had just graduated law school. Enthralled by their anecdotes of intellectual and social derring-do, I decided to give law school a try. I chose Harvard over Columbia and Yale because it was farther from Iowa than the other two. About the only resume’-worthy credential I accumulated from the experience was to follow Ralph Nader as the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Record (“All the News that Fits We Print”). I haven’t followed Ralph since then, however.

I decided to return to my roots and take the bar examination in Iowa. That presented several logistic problems that I thought might put me at a competitive disadvantage on the test. First, at least in those days, they didn’t teach much Iowa law at Harvard. Second, the bar examination questions were written mainly by the faculty of the Iowa law school, where the examination took place, and the last month of the 3L Spring semester was devoted to an informal bar review. And third, the examination started two days after my graduation.

In default of a better alternative, I prepared for the examination by borrowing the Martindale-Hubbell All-States Digest volume from the Social Law Library in Boston and memorized the Iowa chapter on the trip out to Iowa City. I guess it worked because I passed. In those days–and hopefully still--the Iowa bar examination was a manifestly civilized process. The test was given on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning, the examinations were graded in real time, and by early Saturday afternoon you knew whether or not you had passed. Those of us who did had dinner Saturday night with the full bench of the Iowa Supreme Court, and we were sworn in on the spot.

But, in my case there was one slightly unsettling anomaly. The examination was graded pass/fail; the numeric scores were not disclosed. However, presumably in an effort to have a little good fun, the examiners conducted an oral interview of the top two and the bottom two passing candidates. I was one of the four, and to this day I don’t have a clue as to whether I was at the top or the bottom of the array.

Like many law students, then and now, during law school I didn’t have much of an idea about what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I took only two tax courses (Dean Griswold and Stan Surrey). Both of them frightened me badly. In 1957 Dean Griswold, who had teethed on the 1939 Code, taught the entire introductory course by referring exclusively to 1939 Code sections even though the 1954 Code was firmly on foot and covered in detail in the casebook. Needless to say, the CCH translation tables were in considerable demand among his students. And, Surrey was so far ahead of me (and most of the rest of the class) that I was continually hustling to catch up–and probably still am.

At graduation, again like many 3Ls, I simply took the best job offer available without any regard to how many courses in the job’s legal specialty I had in law school. It happened to be Tax Court clerkship, and so I launched a career in tax law that has spanned almost 47 percent of a century (I love to say that) based on only two tax courses. My judge was John Mulroney. Since he was not a close relative nepotism was not involved, but it didn’t hurt a bit that he and my father had gone to law school together.

In fact, neither the judge nor I could ever quite figure out how closely related we were, but John B. Jones, Jr., did. At the end of my stint at the Tax Court I thought it would be nice to work as an appellate attorney for the Justice Department’s Tax Division. John, a once and future tax partner at Covington and Burling, was the Division’s First Assistant and he interviewed me for the job. The first thing he asked when I walked into his office was: “How are you related to Judge Mulroney?” When I confessed that neither of us knew, he pulled a piece of paper out of his wastebasket, and proceeded to determine our common ancestor. His answer: sixth cousins. That was the full extent of the interview.

In my four years in the Appellate Section I briefed and argued about 70 cases in federal circuit courts and drafted a couple of Supreme Court briefs (which Assistant Solicitor General Wayne Barnett, later of Stanford law school, invariably altered beyond recognition). While there I developed a life-long respect for the ability and integrity of the career attorneys in the Tax Division. In my view, Government tax litigation is generally in very competent hands.

I moved from Justice to Lee, Toomey & Kent, a Washington tax specialty firm (now done in by greed), and over a period of about 25 years worked my way up the letterhead. Mostly we were outside tax counsel for Fortune 500 companies, and my areas of interest (I can hardly say “expertise”) were litigation, foreign matters, natural resources, and corporate adjustments. While many think of federal taxation as an arcane and narrow legal specialty, I view it as the last bastion of the general practitioner. In what other area of the law can you: lose a case on a continuing issue six times (including two denials of cert.) and end up having your adversary concede the issue for all time; advise the largest stud farm in Ireland; in a 34-hour non-stop session in your law firm’s conference room form what is now the biggest hard-mineral company in Australia; own the Queen Elizabeth I in your own name (if only for five minutes as a straw man); or help create Viacom? Along the way, in order to avoid D.C. Superior Court appointments to try criminal cases, I did a fair amount of pro bono appellate representation of juvenile losers in the D.C. Court of Appeals.

By about 1986 I began to notice that, although I had practiced tax law for quite awhile, I didn’t seem to be getting better at it any more. So I decided to teach. To test the waters, I arranged to inherit Jim Holden’s tax-professional responsibility adjunct course in the Georgetown graduate tax program (which I continued to teach for about 15 years). Undaunted by the fact that within 10 minutes of the beginning of the very first law class session I had ever taught, a student sitting directly in front of the podium fell fast and noisily asleep, I decided it was fun and so I confidently applied for a full-time berth at each of the 100 top law schools in the country. Much to my discomfiture, I discovered that law schools were not falling all over themselves to hire a mid-50s white male hot-shot Washington tax practitioner–an unfortunate phenomenon I believe continues unabated to this day.

After two years of constant rejection, in 1988 I was able to sweet-talk Villanova into taking me on to run its graduate tax program. At present I ride herd on 240 graduate tax students, about three-dozen instructors–mostly adjuncts who are among the leading Philadelphia area tax practitioners–and administer a curriculum of 49 graduate-level tax courses. The students are both attorneys (LL.M., 65 percent) and CPAs (M.T., 35 percent) which adds a certain administrative gloss: while no distinction is made in the classroom between the two professions, course content must necessarily be tailored to the sometimes-divergent needs of each audience. I like to think that the result is a somewhat more catholic (note the lower-case “c”) approach to substantive course coverage than is present in the monochordant graduate tax programs.

I teach an introductory tax course and professional responsibility in the J.D. program and, over the years, a variety of courses at the graduate level. Since I get to designate course instructors, I assign myself to teach at least one of the required courses so that I am exposed to each of the students who transit the program: this semester I’m doing the tax research and writing offering.

I belong to the ordinary gaggle of bars (Supreme Court, Tax Court, nine circuit courts of appeals, a couple of federal district courts, and so forth), and the tax functions of the usual array of professional organizations (e.g., ABA, D.C. Bar, Federal Bar Association, Iowa Bar, IFA, ACTC, J. Edgar Murdock American Inn of Court (Founding Master), AALS). Probably my most active involvement is with the ABA Tax Section (Publications, Appointments to the Tax Court, Standards of Practice, Court Procedure) and I am the Managing Editor of the Section’s quarterly journal The Tax Lawyer (send me your good articles).

I’ve written two books on tax procedure and international tax (both now mercifully out of print, so no more supplements), about a dozen and half BNA Portfolios, and a small bunch of articles (including the seminal article on the generation-skipping tax ramifications of the Rule Against Perpetuities).

Personal: Ellen, my wife of 46 years and best friend; five children (a Chicago lawyer/publican, a traffic manager for a California-based office supply firm, a movie actor, a movie script writer, and a former Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney who is now a lobbyist and the director of grants for the Philadelphia Zoo); and a black and tan American coon hound who lives with Ellen and me in a very small 200-year-old house a mile from my law school office. (Think Quality of Life: I can go home for lunch, and rush hour lasts 47 seconds on a bad day.)

Hobby: sports car racing. I drive a 1962 Morgan (British sports car) in Sports Car Club of America and vintage races, and a 1926 Morgan in historic competition. Under the banner of my one-man Phlexed Sphincter Racing Team (consider the physiology of the phrase before you begin to snicker) I have competed in about 150 races over almost 20 years, but have never won one. Thus the team motto: “Never Undefeated, see Ecclesiastes 9:11.” [Editor's note:
I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.]

January 28, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 21, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Richard Winchester (Thomas Jefferson)

A.B. 1984, Princeton
J.D. 1992, Yale

A tax professor both by accident and by design, I have unconsciously prepared for this line of work ever since high school.

Unlike many of my classmates at Princeton, I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do when I grew up. I found myself one of the few students admitted to the undergraduate program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, giving me the freedom to take virtually any social science course in the university. The liberal arts course of study equipped me with the strong writing and analytical skills that I now know are indispensable to any legal scholar.

Trained in college to be a generalist, I took a job as a management trainee in the home office of Prudential Insurance. Next, I helped design and manage the credit card program for Chrysler’s consumer finance unit. Thinking the next logical step was to get an MBA, I applied to Stanford Business School. It, wisely, took a pass. But the background in business and finance serves me whenever I need to help students understand a commercial transaction and the tax issues it might raise.

I got interested in practicing law after becoming active in local political circles, where I got to know attorneys for the first time. Yale Law School permitted me to study law in a way that was comparable to the liberal arts program that appealed to me as a college student. Initially thinking I wanted to be a civil rights litigator, I took a heavy dose of courses in constitutional and anti-discrimination law. I also joined the Yale Law & Policy Review, where I served as editor-in-chief. But summer jobs at civil rights law firms made me question whether I was cut out to be a civil rights soldier. Nevertheless, the education and experience helped sensitize me to the social justice implications of tax policy.

I decided to practice tax law a year or two after clerking for Chief Justice Robert N.C. Nix, Jr., of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. That was when I was at the Philadelphia law firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen, whose tax group is largely responsible for the strong reputation the firm enjoys. A few tax assignments permitted me to appreciate the critical role that tax attorneys play in structuring virtually every commercial transaction. In addition, despite having taken only one tax course in law school, I seemed to have a natural aptitude for the technical rules, which I enjoyed applying in creative and constructive ways.

I moved from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, to work for the tax and employee benefits firm then known as Groom & Nordberg, where I got my first exposure to international tax planning. That experience advising insurance and financial services clients prepared me to do international tax and structured finance work at Burt, Staples & Maner. I left that seven-attorney tax boutique to join megafirm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where I advised both domestic and foreign clients as an international tax attorney in its national tax office. The extended exposure to foreign tax systems helped sharpen my ability to function as a tax scholar who must think critically about U.S. tax law and policy.

The idea of teaching entered my mind after I left PwC. As part of a solo consulting practice, I did some writing and contract teaching. Energized by the work, I applied for faculty positions through the AALS recruitment process and accepted the job I now hold at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. My teaching load includes federal income tax, corporate and partnership tax, and international tax. Each course stimulates me in a different way. I am also completing a research project on employment taxes, an area I have discovered to be a rich source of issues for scholarly study. I can’t imagine being any happier than I am now.

I play the piano whenever most people would watch TV, a legacy of growing up in New Orleans with two professional musicians as parents. Taught in the classical style by my mother, I began studying the instrument around the same time I learned my ABC’s. I can remember winning a city-wide competition at least once. There were also a few tournaments whose participants included now famous Harry Connick, Jr. (I can’t recall ever beating him.) My interest in playing music blossomed after I started college, when I had a roommate who adorned our dorm suite with an upright. Now I have a baby grand of my own occupying a space that most guys would reserve for a big screen TV. I’ve been trying to learn the elements of jazz, using Oscar Peterson as my model.

I also amuse myself by swimming. I took on the sport after college as a way to pass the time (before I got my own piano). But it quickly became a competitive endeavor, driving me to enter ocean swims wherever I could find them. At first, my conquests were confined to races in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Now that I live in California, I have begun to test the waters of the Pacific. The waves are bigger and the water is cooler. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.

January 21, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 14, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Joel S. Newman (Wake Forest)

A.B. 1968, Brown
J.D. 1971, Chicago

In college, I wanted to be a city planner, so I thought I’d get a master’s in public administration, city planning, something like that. Then I discovered that most of the folks who were really making a difference in urban renewal were lawyers, so I went to law school instead. While I was at it, I spent two summers working with the redevelopment agency in New York City. I reached two conclusions: 1) that the problems of large cities (especially New York) were insoluble, and I didn’t want to spend my life butting my head against a wall; and 2) that the property and urban renewal courses I took in law school were really boring (I didn’t especially like the tax courses either, but I loved Professor Wally Blum). However, by that point, I was halfway through law school, so I thought I might as well stick it out.

I spent two years in a New York firm—most of it on one antitrust case. Then I spent three years in a midsized firm in Minneapolis. I did some tax work in Minneapolis, and actually liked it. The rest is history.

I’ve been at Wake Forest since 1976, but I’ve also visited at Florida, Notre Dame, North Carolina and Hawaii, and taught on a Fulbright in China. I teach tax and professional responsibility. Although I’ve written a casebook and a number of traditional law review articles, most of my writing is short pieces for Tax Notes. In some ways, I prefer to be a political reporter, teasing out the gossip on why tax laws are the way they are. There’s legislative history, and then there’s what really happened.

Jane and I have been married for 35 years. We have two children—Bryce, 31, and Becky, 27. I owe Jane a ton, first, because she enriches my life so much. Second, because she and I bet against each other frequently, and I usually lose.

I play a number of musical instruments, including clarinet, saxophone, and guitar. I also own a Chinese gong, for ritual occasions. I play jazz with a couple of groups in town, and classical music with a clarinet ensemble on campus. I’ve arranged a couple of doo-wop pieces for the clarinet ensemble, which the group will perform this spring. Also, bored by the drippy music coming out of the carillon on the Wake campus, I wrote out a version of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for carillon. So far, it’s been played twice. The carillon player (a student of mine) has not been fired yet.

January 14, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 7, 2006

Spotlight_1_1 Joni Larson (Thomas Cooley)

J.D. 1989, Montana
LL.M. 1990, Florida

Larson

Teaching is not something you usually envision one of the quietest students in the class doing. Or litigation either. But, that is where my path from law school has led me.

After graduating from the University of Montana School of Law I traveled to the University of Florida to earn my LL.M. in Taxation. After that, a position at the United States Tax Court clerking for Judge Irene Scott gave me an insider’s perspective on tax litigation. While I hadn’t had any interest in litigation during law school, a unique set of circumstances led me to accept a job as a tax litigator in Austin, Texas, for the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel.

It was a fantastic job and one I would never have imagined myself doing when I started law school. The office was headed by a very outspoken and somewhat controversial attorney and was known for not settling cases; I learned a tremendous amount about tax and was able to try more cases in the three years I was there than many attorneys try in their entire careers. From there I did a short stint in private practice in Washington state before returning to the Office of Chief Counsel, this time in Washington, D.C. I worked for the Passthroughs and Special Industries Branch of the Field Service Division and then in the National Office of the Small Business/Self-Employed Division.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that I loved teaching. I had done some adjunct teaching throughout my career and when a fulltime position came open at Cooley Law School, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I love to watch the students go from dreading tax (fear of the unknown?) to both loving the logic behind the system and realizing that they can, in fact, understand tax. In addition, I have the opportunity to teach Partnership Tax and Federal Tax Research in the LL.M. program. Through this program I have an opportunity to work with students who have a passion for and desire to learn tax.

I truly love to write. Every few years I try to update my article on the rules of evidence in the Tax Court. In between updates I have written on a variety of topics, mostly procedural matters, even though my primary area of interest is partnership tax. I am hoping to, some day, finalize an article on IRC 704(b).

January 7, 2006 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 31, 2005

Spotlight_1_1 Nancy A. McLaughlin (Utah)

B.S. 1987, University of Massachusetts
J.D. 1990, University of Virginia

After graduating from the University of Massachusetts with an honors degree in psychology and having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa and appointed a Phi Kappa Phi math scholar, I left my home state to attend law school in lovely Charlottesville, Virginia. It was there that I met my husband (a Virginia native, whose family was alarmed at the prospect of his marrying a Yankee) and discovered my affinity for tax law.

I spent my first years after law school working in the tax department of Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in corporate and international tax. At that firm, in between REMIC and REIT deals, I helped the Australian syndicate that won $28 million in the Virginia lottery avoid U.S. taxation of the winnings. I eventually moved back to Charlottesville to join the estate planning department of the McGuireWoods law firm, where I was able to combine my interests in tax law, the outdoors, and land conservation by helping landowners both protect their land and accomplish their income and estate tax planning objectives through the conveyance of conservation easements. I also had the pleasure of teaching Estate & Gift Tax as an adjunct at the University of Virginia Law School (thanks, in large part, to Robert Danforth (Washington & Lee), who encouraged me to pursue a career in teaching), and it was that teaching experience and my desire to influence environmental policy through my writing that led me to seek a permanent teaching position.

I joined the faculty at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2000, where I have been able to successfully combine my interests in tax law and environmental policy. I teach Federal Income Tax, Trusts & Estates, Estate Planning, and Private Land Conservation, and soon will teach Property and the Federal Income Tax course from an environmental perspective. I am a member of the faculty of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the College of Law, which hosts annual workshops, conferences and symposia that address a variety of natural resource and environmental issues. My expertise in private land conservation and the use of tax and other financial incentives to promote land conservation adds an important dimension to the Stegner Center as the federal government, state and local governments, and the nonprofit sector are increasingly relying on voluntary (versus regulatory) measures to accomplish land protection goals. In March of 2005, I organized and spoke at the Stegner Center’s 10th Annual Symposium, Private Property and Nature Conservation: Land Ownership in the 21st Century, which aired to a sold-out audience of over 250 people from around the country.

This past year I was invited to speak about conservation easements, the appropriate use of tax and other financial incentives to promote land conservation, and private land conservation issues in general at a variety of both academic and nonacademic venues around the country, including the Conference of State Planning Directors in the West; the Land Trust Alliance’s National and Southwest Conferences; the Certificate Program in Environmental and Land Use Law at Florida State University College of Law; the Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite; the 13th Biennial Natural Resources Law Teachers’ Institute; and a Roundtable on Conservation Easement Reform at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I have been asked to serve as a member of the policy group on easement amendments formed by the Land Trust Alliance, which is the umbrella organization for the nation’s land trusts, and as an advisory board member to Vital Ground, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to protect grizzly bear habitat on privately-owned land. I continue to serve as a member of the board of trustees of Utah Open Lands, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to protect land throughout the state of Utah, and as an associate editor for probate and trust for the ABA's Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal, which helps me keep abreast of the latest developments in probate and trust law.

I was pleased to note that the Senate Finance Committee cited to one of my articles regarding the difficult issue of conservation easement valuation in its June 2005 report on The Nature Conservancy and the federal tax incentives offered to easement donors (so my goal of influencing policy seems like it might just be attainable). I was also happy to receive the 2005 American Agricultural Law Association’s Professional Scholarship Award for my article Rethinking the Perpetual Nature of Conservation Easements, 29 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 421 (2005), and the Probate & Property Editors’ 2004 Excellence in Writing Award for my article Questionable Conservation Easement Donations, 18 Prob. & Prop. 40 (2004).

The Tanner Humanities Center has awarded me a one-semester in-residence research fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year, which I will combine with a one-semester sabbatical to take a year’s leave from teaching. I plan to use the leave time to complete a book entitled Conservation Easements: An Experiment in Land Preservation. The book will explore the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of our attitudes in this country toward land use and private property ownership; how those attitudes led to the prominence of the conservation easement as a private land protection tool; and how those attitudes may be evolving in response to the public/private co-ownership of property that results from conservation easement conveyances. The book will also examine the laws and policies undergirding the use of conservation easements (including federal tax laws), and offer much-needed guidance as to how such laws and policies should be interpreted and shaped to ensure that conservation easements are able to deliver the long-term public benefit they promise.

When not teaching, researching, or writing, I enjoy exploring the backcountry with my husband, James, and our 170lb Pyrenean Mastiff, Toso. We are often fortunate to catch a glimpse of the diverse wildlife that inhabits the more remote parts of this country—and I am extraordinarily lucky to be able to devote my professional energies to protecting what I find precious.

December 31, 2005 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- Ira Shepard

The University of Hoston Law Center has a long history of strong tax teaching and scholarship. UH has a well-regarded graduate tax program, anchored by four tenured and tenure track tax faculty and supported by a prestigious group of adjunct faculty drawn from Houston's leading law firms.

We conclude our profiles of Houston's tax faculty this week by shining the spotlight on Ira B. Shepard:

A.B. 1958, Harvard
J.D. 1964, Harvard

The one thing I learned very early in life was to seek out competent people. I have always surrounded myself with colleagues who were more capable than I. This is exemplified by my current tax colleagues, Bill Streng and Johnny Rex Buckles, whose biographies bracket mine (in alphabetical order) on these three successive Saturdays, and by my new colleague, Christine L. Agnew, whose biography appeared earlier this fall.

I have been the Special Advisor to the Southern Federal Tax Institute since 1974. I chaired the Continuing Legal Education and Research Committee of the American Bar Association Tax Section and the planning committee for the University of Texas Tax Conference, and, most importantly, I have been president of the Wednesday Tax Forum (a tax group that regularly meets in Houston on Tuesdays, which first hears my monthly recent developments presentations). I currently sit on the board of the (Houston) International Tax Forum and the council of the Houston Bar Association Tax Section. I am a fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel and a former notary public.

I have spoken for the past 25 years on recent tax developments at various tax institutes, including the University of Denver Tax Institute, the University of Texas Tax Conference, University of North Carolina Tax Institute, the American Institute on Federal Taxation, the Southern Federal Tax Institute, the Tennessee Federal Tax Institute, the Virginia Tax Conference, the New Mexico Tax Conference, the New Mexico Tax Institute, the New Mexico Tax Symposium, the Alabama Tax Conference, the Kentucky Tax Institute, the Lewis & Clark Tax Institute, the Ohio Tax Institute, the Columbus Tax Institute, The West Texas Tax Institute, the Tulane Tax Institute, the NYU Tax Institute, the Hawaii Tax Institute and the William and Mary Tax Conference, as well as at programs sponsored by Tax Executives Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, the Houston Bar Association Tax Section, the Austin Tax Forum, the Austin Chapter of the Texas Society of CPAs, the South Carolina State Bar, the University of Houston Law Foundation, ALI-ABA, Practising Law Institute, the Federal Bar Association and various components and constituencies of the IRS.

For the past ten years, my outline has been written jointly with Martin J. McMahon, Jr., Clarence TeSelle Professor of Law at the University of Florida College of Law, another example of a more capable colleague. We began making joint recent developments presentations more than ten years ago at the instigation of Calvin Johnson, who has a perverse sense of humor. Recently, it has been necessary for the two of us to include the following disclaimer in our outline: “Please read this outline at your own risk; we take no responsibility for any misinformation in it, whether occasioned by our advancing ages or our increasing indifference as to whether we get any particular item right.” Despite this disclaimer, the Florida Tax Review has published our outline annually since 2001.

I pretend to know something about legal ethics, having taught a course in Professional Responsibility intermittently since 1975, as well as a course in Tax Ethics since 1999. I use this meager background to speak on various ethical topics to groups gullible enough to invite me, including the Houston Bar Association and its Tax Section, the American Bar Association Tax Section Committee on Closely Held Businesses, the American Petroleum Institute Tax Forum (six times!), Women Attorneys in Tax and Probate (Houston), the American Corporate Counsel Association (Houston Chapter), the Brazoria County Bar Association, Tax Executives Institute (Houston Chapter), South Texas College of Law, the Houston Estate and Financial Forum, the International Fiscal Association (IFA) and the Council on International Tax Education (CITE).

I was born and grew up in the Bronx. After college, I spent three years as a guest of the government, three years in law school, and seven years in a large New York City law firm. I began my teaching career at the University of Georgia Law School in the area of federal taxation. After four years at Georgia, I settled down at the University of Houston Law Center in 1975 and have remained there ever since. In 1983, I married Rosemary Thomas DuPree, a student in the first class I taught at UH. We both had long childless first marriages. We have two children, Mark (born 1986) and Hannah (born 1990). The children are the delights of our lives. Mark attends college in New England and Hannah is an athletic and sociable high school freshman. Mark’s college tuition is largely paid from my social security and I plan to pay Hannah’s college tuition from my required minimum distributions.

For prior Houston tax faculty profiles, see:

December 17, 2005 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- William Streng

The University of Hoston Law Center has a long history of strong tax teaching and scholarship. UH has a well-regarded graduate tax program, anchored by five tenured and tenure track tax faculty and supported by a prestigious group of adjunct faculty drawn from Houston's leading law firms.

We continue our profiles of Houston's tax faculty this week by shining the spotlight on William P. Streng:

A.B. 1959, Wartburg College
J.D. 1962, Northwestern

Having practiced tax law in three large law firms, been in three U.S. Government positions (not counting the U.S. Marine Corps!) and having taught in multiple law schools, I could be perceived as a true example of the itinerant professional. However, each step had a natural progression which has been quite rewarding over a now extended tax law academic career. And, for approximately the last 20 years my academic base has been at the University of Houston Law Center.

Although I took some tax courses at Northwestern University School of Law (under Professor Willard Pedrick), my tax law interest really began after law school, as a law clerk to a Sixth Circuit Judge. I had the audacity to suggest to my judge that OID was not appropriately categorized as capital gain and that the Midland-Ross case which he (and two others) were affirming per curiam for the taxpayer would be reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. This did occur, and many OID tax developments have subsequently followed, but in this federal tax case I also learned about perspectives on judicial conservatism at the Federal Court of Appeals level, particularly concerning tax litigation.

My professional tax career really began at a large law firm in Cincinnati working for its senior tax partner, Donald C. Alexander (several years before he became the IRS Commissioner). The time working for him was “interesting” (avoiding other more colorful descriptions), and I (unlike numerous other associates) survived the experience and ended up with a great appreciation for the rigorous tax law education he provided. He helped me obtain a position in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Legislative Counsel, where I experienced a quite different perspective on the evolution of tax law and policy (at a time when these matters were not driven almost exclusively from a political perspective). During that time I had the occasion to work at the Treasury Department for Jack Nolan, a giant among tax practitioners. Interestingly, I now have at the University of Houston Law Center a tax teaching colleague (Christine Agnew) who was among the first John Nolan Fellows (sponsored by the ABA Tax Section). After my Treasury Department experience, a several year interlude as the Deputy General Counsel at the Export-Import Bank of the United States was mostly devoid of tax, although when working on large international loan matters I was significantly exposed to the foreign tax credit complexities of U.S. lending institutions and the taxing systems of other countries.

By almost mere happenstance I came into contact with SMU School of Law representatives, became a professor there, and began to examine tax from the tax law academic perspective. At that time Charlie Galvin, one of the early leading tax law academics, was the SMU Dean, had confidence in me, and encouraged me as I taught many different tax courses to numerous students who have now achieved their own tax renown (in several instances not all to the good). My SMU experience was quite positive, with many fine colleagues and the opportunity to begin to grow as a tax law academic. But, after a few years a head hunter enticed me to join a large law firm in Houston (recently renamed Bracewell & Giuliani) where I continued on my tax education from a quite different perspective. This was a time when individual tax shelters were endemic and caution about the risks of such arrangements were seldom heeded, but clients thereafter reaped the harvest of large tax deficiencies. History now seems to have repeated itself in the corporate tax planning context!

With an opportunity to rejoin the tax law academic community at the University of Houston Law Center in 1985, I did so, although I do continue to maintain a consultative relationship with the law firm (where I am still educated about tax planning matters ranging from complicated corporate acquisitions to the relevance of Circular 230). At numerous intervals I have had the good fortune to enjoy short-term teaching arrangements, both in the United States and in foreign locations: in the United States at Ohio State, NYU (where I really did learn foreign tax when teaching Foreign Tax II to the NYU LL.M. Tax students), Texas and Rice; and, in foreign locations: Stockholm, Sweden, Wellington, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Leiden in The Netherlands, and Yokohama in Japan.

Traditionally, I have been a “jack of all trades,” teaching four tax classes each academic year: Federal Income Tax, Estate Planning, Corporate Tax, and U.S. International Tax. My interest in international taxation (partially from the Eximbank experience) has led me to participate for an extended period in the International Fiscal Association (and its U.S. Council) and in the European Association of Tax Law Professors. My interest in federal corporate taxation has been accentuated by more than twenty years of participation as a co-author with Boris Bittker of the corporate forms volumes (which are complementary to the Bittker & Eustice corporate tax “bible”).

I am increasingly concerned about the future of challenging law students to think seriously about tax policy issues. They can learn the tax code rules (to help explain to their parents and grandparents about eligibility for tax deductions). Perhaps not wanting to risk their inheritances, I am afraid these students are not prepared to challenge those who increasingly believe that almost any tax system is unconscionable, and that the tax burden should be placed elsewhere. The students of Generation Y (or Z?) seem less engaged in discussing important tax issues as: (1) should the income tax system be progressive (and in reality is it really progressive); (2) is the “death tax” really that “evil” (particularly when noting long term tax deferral of accrued gains and tax basis step-up at death); and, (3) does the IRS ever have legitimate tax policy positions. Since most of our law school students in the basic Federal Income Tax class will not become tax attorneys, this opportunity to challenge them to consider how the tax system should best be structured should not be missed, but accomplishing this objective seems increasingly difficult. Fortunately, many of these issues always can be debated with my terrific tax colleagues, Ira Shepard, Johnny Buckles and Christine Agnew.

For prior Houston tax faculty profiles, see:

December 10, 2005 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 3, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- Johnny Rex Buckles

In our just-completed 14-part series of profiles tax professors who have begun their careers at American law schools this fall, we profiled Christine Agnew, a very promising young tax teacher and scholar. Over the next four weeks, we will profile Houston's other tax faculty, beginning this week with Johhny Rex Buckles:

B.S. 1989, Oklahoma State
J.D. 1992, Harvard
M.A. 1999, Dallas Theological Seminary

My career aspirations initially pointed me to other worlds, when at the ripe age of three I declared my desire to become an astronaut. Three or four years later, a much more mature child, I settled for aspiring to the Presidency of the United States. Apparently disillusionment with the political process altered those plans, for after a few more years I decided to become a preacher, and then a carpenter. By my twelfth year, however, I had set my sights on law.

While a better-than-average public education (at least by rural standards) helped prepare my mind for law, the wheat fields and pastures of Northwest Oklahoma sculpted my character for the study and practice of law. Spending fourteen-hour days in summertime on a John Deere tractor, along miles of barbed wire fences in need of repair, and in the midst of obstinate polled Hereford cattle, I learned how to work hard and endure challenges. That work ethic served me well in college, law school, and practice.

At Oklahoma State University I studied accounting -- not because I wanted to be an accountant, but because people told me that being a CPA and having an accounting degree would complement my legal practice nicely. Although I enjoyed financial accounting, I detested my tax accounting course and disavowed any interest in becoming a tax lawyer. Little did I know then that the practice of tax law was nothing like what I was doing in college. But after my first year of law school at Harvard, I worked on a tax legislative history project as a summer associate at a Dallas law firm. I was intrigued by tax law. The next fall, I took my first tax law course with Alvin Warren, and I never looked back. I took seven tax or tax-intensive courses (three with Professor Warren), declared to all law firms with which I interviewed that tax was what I planned to do, and landed a job with Thompson & Knight in Dallas.

The tax section at Thompson & Knight was an incredible training ground for me. I worked under fabulous mentors, including Emily Parker (who recently returned to T&K from her position as Acting Chief Counsel in the Office of Chief Counsel of the IRS). I was involved in significant tax controversies, and assisted clients in many types of tax planning. I eventually devoted the bulk of my practice to exempt organizations, and had the opportunity to represent major private foundations and public charities. While at Thompson & Knight, I also took a rather unusual course. I enrolled part-time in Dallas Theological Seminary and pursued a master of arts in Biblical studies. After four years of balancing practice with classes and homework, I completed my degree and tried to determine the best way to use a law degree and a seminary degree.

I had long been interested in teaching law -- as early as law school. Eventually I decided that the best use of my education, experience and interests would be in academia. I entered the market and received an offer from Houston. I was thrilled to have this incredible opportunity. It seemed a great fit, and time has proven that it is. The faculty here in general are quite supportive, and my senior colleagues in tax law -- Ira Shepard and Bill Streng -- are not only very accomplished, but also extremely gracious and helpful. And my newly appointed (and professionally impressive) junior colleague in tax law-- Christine Agnew -- bears the marks of being yet another tremendous academic peer. Beyond my own law school, I have benefited from the encouragement of other law professors. I am especially grateful to Chicago-Kent’s Evelyn Brody for her interest in (and support of) my scholarship in tax and charity, and to Harvard’s David Westfall for inviting me to collaborate with him in updating his estate planning book.

I consider my job a professional delight. I thoroughly enjoy both teaching and scholarship. Prior to obtaining tenure, I focused my research exclusively on tax and charity. As a newly-tenured associate professor, I am adding law & theology to my research agenda. To date, I have taught the basic tax class, estate planning, exempt organizations, and tax policy. I have also taught trusts & wills, and a law & theology seminar.

My job is all the more satisfying because it gives me added time with my family, a source of great joy and rich blessing. I have a wonderful wife, Tami, and two children, Annie Grace (3 years old) and Rex (born this past August). My baby boy is already more than half of the size of his petite “big” sister, and he appears to be growing even faster than the Treasury regulations.

Although it has been about thirty-five years since I was a little boy dreaming of traveling by spaceship to other worlds, in some sense I spend most of my time in what some people call other worlds. One is the world of tax; the other, the world of the divine. Both are fascinating universes. Tax and theology may not seem a likely pair to some, but as my Dean has said more than once, I deal with the two certainties in life. Or, if you will let me say it a bit more poetically, I work with a revenue code internal, and a revelatory road eternal. And what a privilege it is.

December 3, 2005 in Tax Prof Spotlight | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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December 17, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- Ira Shepard

December 10, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- William Streng

December 3, 2005

Tax Prof Profile: University of Houston -- Johnny Rex Buckles