Tax Prof Spotlight: Terry Turnipseed

Saturday, October 2, 2004

This week's Tax Prof Spotlight of Terry Turnipseed (Syracuse) continues our series of profiles of folks starting their careers this fall as tenure-track tax professors at American law schools. We hope the profiles will help introduce our newest tax colleagues to the academic tax community.

I’m an accidental Tax Professor.

I took a two-credit estate & gift tax class my very last semester in law school because it was the only class offered in a particular time slot I had to fill. It turned out to be the most interesting class to me – for some reason it really clicked. But, it was too late to take any related courses.

Before coming to law school, I had worked in the nuclear energy policy field, both in the government and in the private sector. (I have two relevant graduate degrees from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in Nuclear Engineering.) So, after graduation from law school, I worked for a year doing nuclear energy law, which I did not particularly enjoy. I remembered how much I had enjoyed my estate & gift tax class and made the bold move to jettison energy law, and go back to school to get a Tax LL.M. from Georgetown with an emphasis in estate planning. I haven’t looked back.

I went to work for the National Tax Office of Deloitte & Touche in Washington working directly for the national head of estate planning. After a few years there, I went across the street to Covington & Burling, where I worked with high net worth individuals developing and implementing complex tax planning strategies for more than $1 billion in assets. [Editor's note: $1 billion? Times sure have changed since I was in practice!] I also represented a number of large trust beneficiaries with fiduciary issues and gained expertise in international estate planning, including asset protection.

After a while, I realized that what I enjoyed about my job were the seminars I had taught, the articles I had published, and mentoring the younger associates. I also realized that I was ready for something more meaningful than being a billable hour number on a firm’s roster.

I feel fortunate to have landed a tenure-track position with Syracuse. I am teaching Estate & Gift Taxation, Estate Planning, Decedent’s Estates and first-year Property. Having grown up in a university town with my Mother teaching at the university level, I feel like I’m home again.

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, particularly for our series on new tax professors. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.