(audience chattering)
- Good evening, everyone.
If I could just have your attention,
we'll start our program.
Good evening.
Welcome, everyone.
My name is Josh Blank.
I'm a professor at the Law School
and a faculty director of
the Graduate Tax Program.
On behalf of my colleague,
David Rosenbloom,
director of the International Tax Program,
and the other members of the
tax faculty and administration,
I'm delighted to welcome
you to the celebration
of the 70th anniversary of
the Graduate Tax Program
and the 20th anniversary of
the International Tax Program.
We should clap.
(audience applauding)
Yes.
We are thrilled that
so many of our alumni,
our current and former students,
our faculty are here with us tonight
to celebrate these two special milestones.
I'd also like to just take a moment
to thank the other members
of the Planning Committee
on the faculty and in the administration
who helped organize this event,
and just specifically, Daniel Warren,
our assistant in the Graduate Tax Program
who coordinated many
aspects of this program,
and Eric Wittstein from our
Office of Alumni Relations
who helped with this program as well.
For the first decades after the enactment
of the federal income tax in 1913,
tax law was primarily an area
of study for accountants.
It appeared in law school classrooms,
but only as a topic in constitutional law.
When it was founded about 70 years ago,
the NYU Graduate Tax Program
created the first home,
you might even call it haven,
for law students who were interested
(audience chuckling)
in studying tax.
Today, the tax programs at NYU Law School
are as strong as ever,
offering over 50 different
courses each year,
hosting dozens of
conferences and programs,
and attracting the nation's top students
who are passionate and
interested in learning about tax.
The program currently has a total
of approximately 450 students
between all of the different programs:
the full-time, part-time tax LLM program,
the International Tax Program,
Executive LLM in tax program,
and the Masters of Study
in Law in Tax programs.
On a personal note, I can attest
that the tax program at NYU
is a truly special and unique place.
Even though I spent
most of my time at work
as a law firm buried in the
Section 368 regulations,
the highlight of my day
was 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday
when I could hop on the F train
to NYU and join a discussion
led by professors Kenny
Heitner and Len Schmolka
on horizontal double dummy mergers.
(audience laughing)
As a member of the faculty,
I've come to appreciate how
much the tax programs at NYU
are like a family, a family
that really enjoys tax.
Just to illustrate this point,
consider how many members of our faculty
have learned from one another at NYU.
Steve Gardner, who will be
here later this evening,
he's teaching right now,
supervised a Directed Research
project for Victor Zonana.
Victor Zonana taught Tax
I, now called Income Tax,
to Noel Cunningham.
Noel Cunningham taught Taxation
of Property Transactions
to John Steines.
John Steines taught me Section 355
on a substitute lecture
day, but it still counts,
in Corporate Tax II.
(audience laughing)
I taught tax policy to Clint Wallace,
who is one of our acting
assistant professors,
and he's now teaching
students in the program,
some of whom may eventually
teach in the program.
As I'm sure my colleagues will agree,
as a teacher in the tax program,
it's incredibly rewarding
and exciting to see the
evolution of students
who show their first
sign of tax enthusiasm,
whether it's talking
about Section 356 and boot
or non-recourse liabilities
in partnership tax,
as they flourish into
accomplished tax lawyers
who ultimately hold positions
in the nation's top law
and accounting firms,
in-house corporate tax departments,
governments, and legal academia.
So tonight, we gather to
consider the accomplishments
and the contributions
of the NYU tax programs
over the past several decades.
To begin our program, it's
my pleasure to introduce
our tremendous Dean Trevor Morrison,
who is the Eric M. and Laurie
B. Roth Professor of Law
and dean at NYU School of
Law, to say a few words.
Trevor.
(audience applauding)
- Thanks, Josh.
Thanks, Josh, and good
evening to all of you.
I'm really thrilled to
be here to help celebrate
these two important
milestones at the school,
namely the 70th anniversary
of the Graduate Tax Program
and the 20th anniversary of
the International Tax Program.
I should say, by way of
confession at the beginning,
I am not a tax lawyer.
I'm a constitutional lawyer,
which is to say that
the only tax law I know
was participating in an
amicus brief a few years ago,
arguing that the right way to think
about the Affordable Care
Act's individual mandate
was as a tax, of course.
(audience chuckling)
That's about where my
expertise in tax ends,
but not so my appreciation
for this program,
which is really deep and broad.
In my just about three years here,
I've come to see both the
International Tax Program
and the Graduate Tax Program
as true jewels in the
crown at this Law School,
and really gained a number of insights
I feel like I have about these programs.
Both have had major impacts
on the historical evolution
of this school as a leading law school,
not just within the tax field
but helping to position the school
as a leading school nationally
and internationally.
In 1945, one of my predecessors,
Dean Arthur Vanderbilt,
who had the decanal immodesty
to name this building after himself,
(audience laughing)
seized the opportunity then to create
the country's first graduate tax program.
This really was a prescient decision.
I'll quote another of my
predecessors, Russell Niles,
who described the origins
of the tax program
and Dean Vanderbilt's role
in creating it as follows,
and I'm quoting Niles:
"Vanderbilt was not a tax lawyer.
"He did not even find the
study of tax law congenial.
"But, as an imaginative realist,
"he saw before any other law school dean
"what the impact of the
new tax laws would be
"on the post-war world.
"And so, with his usual
audacity and vigor,
"he recruited a tax law
faculty and, with their help,
"set up the most complete
and imaginative offering
"ever made in this field."
That was true then; over 70
years later, it is true today.
The Graduate Tax Program
has maintained its position
as the premier program of its kind.
It is the model, of course,
that many other schools seek to emulate,
but none doing so well as ours here.
Second, I'll note that both tax programs,
both the Graduate Tax Program
and the International Tax Program,
really continue today to enrich
the intellectual life of the Law School
and to serve each as vibrant centers
of debate and discussion
for tax practitioners,
academics, and policymakers alike.
The foundation of the
tax program, of course,
is its strong faculty,
over a dozen full-time faculty members,
over three dozen adjunct faculty members.
The faculty is itself comprised of leaders
in all important debates on tax
law and policy and practice,
both domestically and internationally.
During the last few years,
to think about programs
put on by the Graduate Tax Program
and the International Tax Program,
we've hosted many dynamic
conferences and events
for students and alumni.
Many of you, I'm sure, were in
attendance at some of these,
including a day-long symposium
on Piketty's best-selling
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century,"
featuring Piketty himself;
a public lecture by Jason Furman,
chairman of the White House
Council on Economic Advisers,
titled "Business Tax Reform
and Economic Growth";
weekly roundtable discussions
with leading practitioners
and government officials,
addressing international
tax topics, among others;
and many social events for
students of both programs,
including, amazingly, an
annual tax movie night.
(audience chuckling)
It can't be more frequent
than annual, really,
or we might run out...
(audience laughing)
But it's been tremendous
highlighting the appearance
of tax law in popular culture.
The tax program is also a
source of important innovation,
and this is perhaps not always the way
that everyone thinks of the program,
but it really is a source of innovation
within the Law School in
terms of pedagogical method,
and, in that sense, an innovator
in legal education more broadly,
even beyond this school.
It is really hard to read about
the state of legal education
or higher education today
without seeing mention
of the rising role of
technology in how we teach,
questions of the role of online education
in legal education.
We are a real leader in that space
thanks to the Graduate Tax Program.
We are far beyond merely
exploring online education.
With our Executive LLM in
Tax and our MSL in Taxation,
we're real leaders in online
legal education in that space.
That marks us as important innovators
in legal education generally.
Third and finally, I've learned
that one of the main reasons
that our tax programs are
so strong in these areas
is that we benefit tremendously
from the participation
of our alumni, many of you.
Our alumni support the
Graduate Tax Program
and the International Tax
Program by teaching as adjuncts,
by speaking on panels and at other events
here at the school,
by mentoring our current
students and recent graduates,
and this really is tremendously important
and we're very grateful to those of you
who offer your time this way,
and, of course, through
supporting the activities
of both programs in philanthropic ways
through the Wallace-Lyon-Eustice fund
and the International Tax
Program Practice Council.
In all of these ways, your
support really is indispensable
to the continued success
of these two programs,
so I wanna thank you for that
and I want to say congratulations
to the Graduate Tax Program
and the International Tax Program
on these important two milestones.
Dan Shaviro and a few other
of us were just noting
that the 75th anniversary
is a natural time
to mark the progress of a program,
and so, too, 25th, so I think that means
not later than five years
from now, we should reconvene
to continue to congratulate
(audience chuckling)
all of us on these programs.
But thank you for being here tonight.
(audience applauding)
Thanks very much.
- Thank you very much,
Trevor, for those remarks.
We're honored to have an
esteemed group of speakers,
including current and
former faculty members
and some of our most prominent alumni
who help us celebrate
these two milestones.
I'll just describe the speakers
and what they'll discuss
and then turn the mic over to them.
Carr Ferguson will discuss the origins
of the Graduate Tax Program.
Victor Zonana will describe his experience
as a student and junior
professor in the program
as well as an overview of some
of the distinguished practitioners
who've graduated from it.
John Samuels will discuss
how the Graduate Tax Program
prepared him for high-ranking
positions in government
and leadership of one of the world's
largest in-house
corporate tax departments.
Carlyn McCaffrey will
describe her experience
as one of the first women tax
professors at the Law School.
Noel Cunningham will review
the role of the tax program
in fostering new teachers.
Deborah Schenk will address
the impact of the tax program
on tax scholarship
through the Tax Law Review
and other sources.
And David Rosenbloom will discuss
how the International Tax Program evolved
from the Graduate Tax Program.
At the conclusion of the evening,
we'll honor several individuals
who've made significant
contributions to the tax program
and to the tax profession.
With that, I am pleased
to welcome Carr Ferguson.
I'll also say we've very grateful
that Carr made the trip
cross-country to be here tonight.
Welcome, Carr.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Josh.
Thank you, Trevor, for your good remarks.
Dear colleagues, if I may still refer
to the faculty that way,
although I haven't taught here
for the last two or three years.
Dear friends,
I'm glad we decided to do
this at the 70th anniversary.
I don't know that I
would've made the 75th.
(audience laughing)
But I am very happy to be here tonight,
particularly, thinking about Josh's
link of teaching and students,
to look at the first couple of rows
and see so many of my students who taught,
Carlyn Sundborg, McCaffrey now,
John Samuels, probably one
of my dearest friends ever, and still,
Victor, Noel, both students of mine,
Harvey and Lenny Schmolka are both here.
They were in my class, but I
think I was students of them
more than anything else.
(audience chuckling)
Wonderful students, all.
I'm probably missing a number of you,
but anyway, you know how much love I feel
toward the program.
I guess I'm the first speaker
because I am the relic of the early days
and was asked by Josh to speak about them.
Now, there are a lot of
distinguished personages
and, I suppose, institutions
with less distinguished pasts.
I'm going to speak about our beginnings.
I think that Dean Vanderbilt
probably was right.
He didn't know much about tax,
and he did not really start this program.
Jerry Wallace started this program.
And one cannot speak about
the early days of the program
without talking about the man
we older students and lawyers adore.
Jerry did not have
distinguished beginnings,
except the fact that
he was a pulling guard
on Red Grange's Fighting
Illini football team
in the '20s.
He did very well in school,
went to appropriate places,
after working in the Elgin
Watch Company and making watches
and being discharged from a girls' school
where he tried to teach
geometry unsuccessfully.
But he loved teaching,
and his early days
in the '30s
were spent teaching at
Northwestern Law School
and then at Yale.
He loved Northwestern.
He was from that part of
the world and felt at home.
I think he was less comfortable at Yale.
He loved some of the faculty members.
J. W. Moore was a dear friend
of his, Thurman Arnold.
Others seemed a little stuffy for him.
When the war came, he went into service
but in a civilian capacity.
He was assistant attorney
general clerk's deputy
in the tax division of
the Department of Justice,
and, after the war, joined
Cravath, Swaine & Moore,
where Arthur Vanderbilt found him.
Jerry was a legend by then.
His students, both at
Northwestern and Yale,
whether they became tax lawyers or not,
regarded him, almost to a person, I think,
I was about to say almost to a man,
but in those days, it was almost
the same thing, wasn't it,
as the best teacher they'd had.
That's how he came to
Vanderbilt's attention.
Vanderbilt did have the idea
of a graduate tax program.
There was a need for one.
The law firms found, after
the Second World War,
that the high rates of tax,
the excess profits tax added to it,
had created enormous
confusion among their clients,
which they were not really
intellectually equipped to handle.
And, while they could assign
suffering new associates
to this new field,
everyone felt the need
for a graduate tax program
for young lawyers.
Vanderbilt saw that, found
Jerry, and Jerry was the man
who organized it, broke it into courses,
found the very distinguished tax lawyers
which became his adjunct faculty,
and began to attract students.
I was not one of the first students,
I came 13 years later, but by then,
the program was legendary, coast to coast.
Graduates had begun to infiltrate
the middle ranks
prematurely of tax lawyers
and some were already partners
and in positions of command,
both in practice and in the government.
I think many of us
youngsters at that time,
I had been a trial lawyer
in the Department of Justice
Tax Division for five years,
felt almost compelled to come here.
I was in the class of '59 to '60,
and have been associated
with the school since then,
a visiting professor in '61
and returned to the full-time
faculty in the fall of 1962.
Now,
we think of coming home to this building,
most of us who took the program,
but this is not where the program started.
The tax program Jerry
started was across the square
in one of the old, tall, loft buildings
where the Law School had been
allocated a couple of floors.
That's where Jerry began.
It was only when Vanderbilt
Hall was opened in 1952,
after, I would say, after
Arthur Vanderbilt's short
but explosive deanship,
he was dean from '43 until '48
and then he was off to
other things, but by then,
the enormous number of innovations
Vanderbilt had started,
including the program, were well underway.
The enthusiasm of its graduates
led to the funds that made
this building possible.
So it was here that we found the program
and participated in it.
What did he do?
Jerry believed that clients
were less interested in issues
than they were in answers.
He felt that, while it was all very well
during law school years
to identify issues,
he wanted to build a
program which had answers.
However difficult the strategies were
for finding those answers,
those were the ones he wanted
to employ in the classroom.
He had started, at Northwestern
and then later at Yale,
perfecting, from hypotheticals
he gave in class,
written problems, which
became critical parts
of his assignments,
along with very specific and narrow parts
of the statute, regulations,
cases, rulings, and so forth.
If you were prepared, and
who dared not be prepared
in Jerry Wallace's class,
you learned the law.
You learned how to deal
with the questions.
When the class started
and you were ready to deal
with the first issue which was assigned,
Jerry would immediately
give you a hypothetical
that was 45- to 90-degrees
off what you'd read.
You learned to deal with and cope with
and apply the statute and the regulations
to constantly varying,
shimmering states of facts
that were somewhat different
from what you'd learned.
The result of this at times terrifying
but deeply probing process
was that, over the year,
if you spent at least 12 hours a day,
probably for me it was 14
or 15, being a slow reader,
you learned a lot of tax law.
Not as much as Jerry, who
knew more than anybody,
but enough to go out into practice
and really help people.
Jerry's program succeeded
far beyond anything Vanderbilt
could have imagined.
And it was not long before he needed
some other full-time people.
Adjuncts were fine, but
adjuncts don't have the time
to build class materials,
change them every year
as the law changed, and indeed it did,
decide critically what
needed to be amputated,
and I must say,
the removal of some
wonderfully refined programs
for problems, thinking, for example,
of collapsible corporations,
which I remember Marty Ginsburg thought
was going to be an annuity
for him the rest of his life
and he was
(audience chuckling)
terribly disappointed when
that problem had to go,
and many other areas of
special hobby and interest
had to be thrown out
to be replaced by new stuff every year,
as you all know, as tax lawyers.
One of the things that attracts us
to this crazy, bemusing part of law
is its fluency, its protean nature,
the new places where we find intersections
with the rest of the law.
And so, the problem of building,
tearing down, reconstructing problems,
of learning constantly
the new developments
and trying to apply them
required a full-time faculty.
Jerry's first great ally was Charlie Lyon.
Charlie, like Jerry,
had served in the Department of Justice.
Before that, he had served
as an important prosecutor,
both at the Nuremberg trials
and then later for the King committee,
investigating irregularities in the IRS
and the Department of Justice
that led to the removal
of both the chief counsel
and the assistant attorney
general during Truman's years.
Truman, when he had to remove
his assistant AG for tax,
asked who had found out about all this.
It turned out to be Charlie.
Truman said, "Okay, make Charlie Lyon
"my next assistant attorney
general," and he was.
But Charlie and Jerry,
however different they
were in many respects,
were great friends and shared
a love of this program,
and both understood that its purpose
was to prepare young lawyers to practice.
Fairly soon, Jim Eustice
and I were retained,
to our mutual joy and mutual admiration.
We were joined by several of you here
who became good friends along the way
and several who are not here.
Norman Redlich, I remember with fondness,
and several others who had been attracted
and then recruited to be
part of the tax program
and glanced off, including Edmond Cahn
who was recruited originally
to edit the Tax Law Review
and then found what I'm sure for him
was a higher calling in jurisprudence.
But there were enough of
us who stuck, enjoyed,
were sold on the program
to make it possible
to deal with class sizes of well over 100.
The program, and certainly this was part
of Vanderbilt's original thought,
the program with class sizes of 100
provided enormous financial
leverage for the school.
Charlie Lyon once said
that we were the school's football team.
And indeed we were,
(audience chuckling)
I'm sure, very profitable
for a number of years.
For a while, I wondered how
Jerry Wallace knew so much,
because when I saw him at school
and you saw him at school,
his office was full of students,
there was a glass of Scotch on his table
and on your side of his table as well.
After classes, in the early days,
you would find him
frequenting the Red Witch
or the Aurora down on
Third Street or someplace.
Wherever he was, he was
surrounded by students.
He knew his students,
and when placement time came
toward the end of the year,
Jerry was on the telephone for them,
calling all over the country.
Many of us owe our first
job to Jerry Wallace.
Not to our scintillating
personality but to Jerry.
He was our friend.
When I was able to join the faculty
and become his colleague,
he was my advisor, my confessor,
my foster father.
I think the years I was
blessed to be his colleague
were some of the richest and
most rewarding of my life.
I found out how Jerry knew so much.
He didn't sleep at night.
When he got home, his old
house in Old Greenwich
had four bedrooms on the second floor.
All of them were lined with bookshelves
full of books that had been read.
His desks, and he had partner
desks in every office,
were piled high with
yellowing advance sheets
which had been marked up,
and all of them had the margins cut off.
I don't know why he did that.
Maybe he didn't get enough
scissors play as a boy,
but he loved to clip the margins
off of his advance sheets.
And he remembered everything.
I was at a teachers' conference one winter
with Jerry and an old pal of his
from his Northwestern days, Nat Nathanson.
They fell into an argument
about a small point
in Lincoln's life.
They were both Lincoln
scholars, among other things.
Finally, it grew sufficiently heated.
I was, needless to say,
very quiet during this.
Jerry said, "Well, we
gotta get a telephone
"and settle this."
He had a telephone brought to the desk,
or to our lunch table.
In those days, you could do that.
There were telephones, we
didn't have these things
you hold in your hand these days.
Jerry called Opal Wallace
at home in Old Greenwich
and said, "Opal, go into
Robert's old bedroom
"and turn left, and on the
third shelf down from the top,
"you'll find Brown's 'Life of Lincoln.'
"Open it up to page 43,
"and I want you to read to Nat.
"I've got Nat here."
Nat had known Opal in
their Northwestern days.
Nat and his dear wife,
Leah, and Opal and Jerry
were frolicking youngsters
on that faculty, I found out.
"And read Nat that first sentence."
Opal found it.
He gave the phone to Nat.
Nat listened to it.
Said, "Okay, you won that one, Jerry."
That's some kind of
mind Jerry Wallace had.
He truly had a retentive,
photographic memory,
and one which wasn't simply
a camera's memory but a
great intellect's memory.
I worked with him one week up there
redoing the tax procedure problems.
I would work in the day.
He would get up late afternoon,
play the organ, have a drink.
He had a lovely baritone voice.
He sang as he played.
Then he would go to work.
He would mark up everything
I'd done the day before,
leave me notes which I'd
find the next morning,
detailed, critical, probing notes
which required me first to
respond to what he'd done
before I could go on to the next problem.
He was, in terms of tax
knowledge, without a peer.
But you wouldn't know it around the school
because his time at the
school was for his colleagues,
for his students,
and for the program.
Now, what I have described,
a man and his acolytes, including me,
who put teaching first,
doesn't sound like a very
distinguished beginning
for this program.
This program today, as
Trevor described it,
has so many institutes.
Harvey, you didn't even mention
your wonderful institute
on charitable concerns and matters,
which I think is one of,
truly part of the jewel of this crown.
We had none of that.
And we didn't have a
Career Services Office.
We were the career service office.
But, while its beginnings
may be considerably less distinguished
than what we're doing now,
I don't think you should be
ashamed of its parentage.
We who shared Jerry's work found it,
if not a noble calling,
at least one which the
students appreciated
and which those of us who taught
them took a lot of joy in,
not only then, but we still hold it,
those of us who have survived,
principally because of
the friendships we made
every year with our students.
(audience applauding)
- My name is Victor Zonana.
I am a graduate of the program.
I'm gonna fast-forward 20 years
from the beginnings of the tax program
and take you to the point
where I came into the
tax program as a student.
I was here in 1965, '66,
exactly 50 years ago.
We had a very large class
that year, remember, Carr?
We had 160 students.
And some of you may remember
we had something like the
war in Vietnam going on,
and there were a great number
of students who were here
seeking student deferments.
Many of them did.
In any event,
I came here, I took a number of courses.
Many of them were with Carr.
I took two courses with Carr:
Tax Procedure I and Tax Procedure II.
I don't think I've done
much with tax procedure
over the (chuckling) last several years,
and I certainly remember very little
about several sections of the code
where we spent four weeks studying them.
Four weeks, Carr.
Sections 1311 to 1314,
(audience laughing)
having to do with the mitigation
of the statute of limitations.
It was a thing of beauty.
We peeled the onion,
we really looked at it
and spent countless hours doing it.
In any event, that was my first year,
my year in the Graduate Tax Program.
I had a couple of people that I remember.
Carr was one, Jim Eustice was another one.
It was a young faculty.
They were all in their 30s at the time,
all of you were in your 30s,
and it was wonderful to
begin to interact with you.
There was also an instructor.
We had a writing program,
an instructor program with
writing, research, and taxation,
and that professor that I had,
that instructor that I had
was none other than Steve Gardner.
Steve Gardner had graduated
from the tax program
some six months earlier,
had come back from Florida,
and was supervising a paper that I wrote
which had to be a little extra long
and a little extra detailed
because I had only had
18 credits of tax courses
and I desperately wanted
an LLM in Taxation.
So I negotiated with Jerry,
who was very close to his students,
and he agreed that if
I wrote a decent paper
that was a little longer than usual,
I might get those extra two credits.
I did, Steve agreed
that it was good enough,
and Jerry reviewed it, and
there I was, I had my LLM.
In Taxation.
Carr mentioned how these, the
faculty, Jerry and Charlie,
were really the placement office.
No Career Services back then.
And it was a phone call from Jerry
to somebody at Kaye
Scholer, Norman Sinrich,
and I wound up getting hired.
I was an associate at Kaye
Scholer for three years.
I was doing fine.
I was doing a lot of tax work,
international, domestic, and so forth,
until around eight
months into the practice,
a fifth-year associate decided to leave.
He decided to go to the
Treasury Department.
His name was Danny Halperin.
Danny left, and lo and behold,
I inherited a pension plan practice.
Deferred compensation became my thing.
I did it for two or three years.
It wasn't bad, concentrating.
Carr had told me
you can concentrate in
something, it's okay.
You can move on to something else.
I did it for two, three years,
but I was getting a little tired of it.
So I would drift back to the Law School
every once in a while and I
would talk to Jerry and Charlie
about what life was like,
and they asked me at one point,
somewhere around the spring
of 1968, or spring of '69,
spring of '68, fall of '68,
"What is it that you're
practicing mostly in?"
I said, "Well, I'm doing
a lot of deferred comp."
They thought about it for
a minute and they said,
"Well, how would you like to come back
"and teach a section of deferred comp?"
We had a large number of students
who were taking deferred comp back then.
Very sillily, I said, "Yes,
I will be happy to do that."
Little did I realize that, once I started,
it would take 20 to 30 hours per week
to prepare for two hours,
trying to practice
full-time at the same time.
But nonetheless I did it,
and by then, halfway through the semester,
I was beginning to get interested
in the instructor position
that Steve had had.
So I spoke to Jerry and Charlie again,
and probably Carr at the same time.
They said, well, they would consider it.
I'm going along and into the
eighth week of the semester
or maybe the ninth week of the semester,
and start a class, and the backdoor opens,
and in walks Jerry and
in walks Robert McKay,
then dean of the Law School.
They were auditing me.
They were sitting there.
They sat there for the first hour.
And only the first hour, mercifully.
I don't think the cotton in
my mouth left me at any point.
I was completely flabbergasted
that they were there.
But they stayed.
And then I...
Nothing happened after that.
The following week, I went
to see Jerry and I said, "So?
He said, "I have only one
bit of advice for you."
He said, "Don't wear shoes
that have leather soles
"and leather heels."
I sort of looked totally befuddled.
Didn't know what he was talking about.
But it turns out that
I pace back and forth,
and back then we didn't have
carpeting on the classroom,
on the podiums; we had wooden floors.
Apparently, that staccato of my pacemaking
interrupted what were lucid explanations
of the integration
(audience chuckling)
of pension plans and
social security benefits.
There's somebody in the room
here who remembers that,
and I want you to, you can
talk to him afterwards,
Bob Solomon, and ask him
whether the explanations
were lucid or not.
If he says they were not,
I just wanna remind him
that the statute of limitations
on grades has not expired.
(audience laughing)
It never expires.
In any event, leather soles
and shoes notwithstanding,
within a couple of weeks, I had
an offer to join the faculty
as an instructor, and I was
delighted to do it, I did it.
What was interesting about it
is that I didn't have to
go through any committees,
didn't have to make any presentations.
It was just slam-bang and I was hired,
and that was the end of it,
as an instructor for a two-year period.
The other interesting thing
that instructors may find here,
current instructors may find amusing,
or maybe sad, is that I
was paid $17,500 a year
and I had a $2,500 summer
school teaching stipend.
So that made it $20,000 a year.
At that time, as I was
leaving the law firm,
I was making $19,000.
(audience chuckling)
So imagine today,
being hired on just a
say-so of Jerry Wallace,
and imagine getting a salary
that is the equivalent
of what a third-year associate is making.
That couldn't happen today either.
In any event, I joined the faculty.
My first and second years
teaching were exciting, fun.
I shared an office with somebody
by the name of Bill Hutton.
I know some of you may
remember Bill Hutton.
Bill is now emeritus at Hastings.
We had the office together.
We talked about tax law.
There was a great deal of collegiality
among the tax faculty.
We used to eat lunch very often together.
Carr, Jerry, Jim, Guy Maxfield,
and a whole bunch of others.
There was a particular
restaurant we would go to
by the name of Marta's.
There was something particularly
unique about Marta's,
and that is that there was a copy
of the Internal Revenue Code
that was kept behind the bar.
(audience chuckling)
Because there used to be
disagreements, typically
between Jerry and Charlie,
who wouldn't listen to
Jim who knew everything.
But we would then take out
the code from behind the bar
and go through the sections
and figure it all out.
That was my first year.
I enjoyed the teaching,
everything was just kind of fun.
The one thing that happened
at the end of the year
is that the year ended in turmoil.
I don't know how many of
you remember 1969, '70,
but in May, Cambodia occurred,
the US invaded Cambodia,
we wound up with a lot
of civil disturbances,
and there was this horrible tragedy
that occurred at Kent State.
The faculty at NYU was very
sensitive to these issues,
as were the students,
and the law faculty
decided, by a close vote,
decided to cancel exams in the spring
as a sign of support
for what was going on,
or demonstrating against
what was going on.
There was one person who
was a 2L, Laurie Malman,
who was delighted to (chuckling) hear that
(audience laughing)
exams were being canceled.
So we canceled the exams.
And lo and behold, the New
York Court of Appeals decided
that that just isn't gonna work.
They told us that, unless
we administered exams,
they were not going to allow our students
to sit for the bar.
So that was a mess.
So we wrote a brief, we
filed, and on we went.
We had to give exams.
We sort of gave exams afterwards.
That was the first year.
The second year, I had
another office mate.
Bill had become a full-time
faculty member by then
on academic track, on a tenure track.
My next office mate was Carlyn McCaffrey.
Carlyn was a student, had been
a student in the tax program,
although she hadn't
finished her degree yet.
She had been an instructor.
She was an instructor then
in what was the predecessor
of the Lawyering Program.
But she had met a lot of
people in the tax program
and everybody was impressed
so Carlyn joined us.
We talked a lot about
Tax I and income tax,
but one of the things
that I enjoyed mostly
afterwards with Carlyn, and
that's only in retrospect,
is that she basically educated me
and heightened my sensitivity
to the tax policy issues
related to women, to
children, and to families.
And the one person who
was most happy about that
was my spouse, Mary Linda, who
(chuckling) finally decided
I was coming of age, basically.
In any event, I wanna talk a
little bit about the students
that went through the tax program with me,
at least during the decade of the '70s.
We wound up, I just did a quick count,
we wound up with four tax court judges:
Judge Laro, Judge Wherry, Jim
Halpern, and Juan Vasquez,
all from the classes of 1970s.
They're all on the tax court.
They're still on the tax court.
And they were all students
of mine, which I think,
I find that kind of pleasant.
We also had a large
number of practitioners
who had become relatively famous
or had been prominent in their field:
Hap Shashy, who served as
chief counsel of the IRS;
Barney Phillips, who was
a partner at Skadden;
Kenny Heitner, who is here
someplace, I think, hey, Kenny,
who heads up the, co-heads the
Weil, Gotshal tax department;
Michael Scherer who was
class of '79; Jim Peaslee.
That's among the practitioners
who were students of ours.
We also have some people who
went into the corporate world.
Fred Drasner went to
work for Mort Zuckerman,
the real estate developer,
and became publisher of the Daily News.
I don't know how many
of you remember that.
Joe Parkinson is a very interesting story.
Joe was a student of mine
in class of '71 or '72.
He was an editor of the Tax Law Review,
and was a very calm, very nice guy.
Spent a year here teaching
and then decided he would
go back to Boise, Idaho.
That's where he was from.
And in Boise, Idaho, within a year,
he and three other guys
founded Micron Technology.
He stayed on with Micron
for, I don't know,
10 years, 12 years, and is now
retired doing something else.
And then, of course, there is none other
than John Samuels, who was at Treasury.
I tried to recruit him for the law firm.
That didn't work.
But John went off, obviously, to GE
and revolutionized what
tax practice is like
within corporate tax departments.
And then there are those
who couldn't get away,
who either couldn't get away
or never wanted to go away.
Those are the class of 1975 twins,
Noel Cunningham and Brookes Billman,
who stayed on to the faculty full-time:
Deborah, class of '76,
who stayed on the faculty,
joined the faculty at some later point;
John Steines, class of '78,
who is here with us also.
That's the sum and substance
of all those people.
Now, I stayed for 20 years,
here for 10 years, 11 years,
and then I went off and I did all sorts
of other silly things.
I practiced with law firms,
I practiced with accounting firms.
And then I was very fortunate
to be able to come back
seven years ago, thanks
to Deborah and Noel
who were kind enough to
allow me to come back
and teach on a full-time
basis, albeit as an adjunct.
I'm not on a tenure track.
I'm just an adjunct member of the faculty.
Which is a blessing.
I don't go to faculty meetings.
I don't (laughing) serve on committees.
(audience laughing)
It's all very, very good.
It's all very, very good.
In any event, just two minutes more, Josh.
I wanna talk a little bit
about how the tax program
has changed in the last 20 years versus,
in the last 50 years, where it is today,
from the years when I was
here and what it's like today.
We have, as has been mentioned,
a great number of courses
that are offered in many,
many, many, many disciplines.
Second thing is that
the focus and direction
of the tax program has changed somewhat.
We are much more policy-oriented
than we used to be.
We have tax policy courses.
I taught a tax policy
course with David Bradford
for three years when I
came back from Treasury.
David came back some 10 or 11 years later
to pick it up with Dan and his colloquium.
So we have a great deal
of policy orientation now.
The scholarship that is
produced by the tax faculty
also has changed.
We no longer have the kind of article
that Carr produced on 691,
income in respect of a decedent,
or that Lenny produced on
charitable remainder trust
that took up entire issues
of the Tax Law Review.
Can you imagine an entire
issue of the Tax Law Review
devoted to charitable remainder trust?
You don't see that today.
Now, we talk about capital
inc, taxation of capital.
We talk about income inequality
and things of that nature.
The other thing that has changed
is the instructor program.
It used to be that you came in,
you did something for two
years, and off you went,
or you stayed on the faculty,
as many of us were able to do.
Nowadays, the instructors
are called acting assistant professors
with the moniker of AAP,
which absolutely makes no sense to me.
They stay here for two years.
They don't get back on the faculty here.
They don't stay on the
faculty beyond that.
But they're made ready to
go on to other law schools,
and many of them have
been able to do that,
producing wonderful scholarship articles.
And, under the direction of
Deborah Schenk and Josh Blank
who act as the placement
people, basically,
for these two fellows, or
women, whoever they are.
And finally, finally,
(audience chuckling)
the Graduate Tax Program has
kept up with modern times.
It has moved on, it has moved forward.
We have an International Tax Program,
for 20 years, we've had
one, that David directs now.
We have the online courses
that Josh has mentioned.
And I teach in those
video classes as well.
And then, most importantly,
from the students' perspective
and Josh's direction, basically,
the tax program remains committed
to excellence in teaching.
That's the hallmark.
That's been the hallmark of this program.
It continues to be that.
We continue to be the
highest-ranked graduate tax program
in the country and probably in the world.
So 70 years in, I'm very happy to say
that the state of the
tax program is very good.
I'm happy to be a part of it,
and may it continue forever.
(audience laughing)
So thank you very much.
Delightful.
(audience applauding)
- I'm John Samuels, and I have to say
it's a real pleasure to be here
to follow my great friend and mentor
and teacher, Carr Ferguson,
my great professor, Victor Zonana,
to be followed by my estate planner,
Carlyn McCaffrey,
(audience chuckling)
the best estate planner in,
I think, the whole world.
Like most of you,
I've spent my life laboring
in the world of tax,
which a friend of mine told me made me
about as sharp as a
needle and about as wide,
so I hope that's
(audience chuckling)
not true of you.
I started in law school at
the University of Chicago.
I didn't go to NYU.
I came to a big law firm in
New York, Dewey Ballantine,
it doesn't exist any longer, to do tax.
I said I...
liked tax law in law school
and I like corporate law.
They said, "Tax law?"
They put me into the tax group.
It was love at first sight.
I stayed there, I became a partner.
I left to go to the government.
Jimmy Carter was elected president.
He was gonna reform the tax code
and do away with the three-martini lunch.
We were not very successful,
but neither has any successive
president been successful.
I left the Treasury.
I came back to my old
law firm in New York,
then went to,
like all good lawyers,
hustling clients all the time.
I got a call that GE was looking
for an in-house tax lawyer.
Nobody ever went in-house in those days.
But I thought, "Opportunity
to go hustle a client."
I was successful beyond
my wildest imagination.
I remember still my
interview with Jack Welch,
who got through all of the interviews.
Finally, I thought he
was gonna try to sell me.
I walked into his big corner office,
and he looked at me, said,
"Why do I need a tax lawyer?"
(audience laughing)
He said, "What are you doing here?"
And I thought, "Well, maybe you don't."
I said, "But just imagine
that GE had a partnership
"with Mitsubishi, and if
the partnership agreement
"were 75,000 pages long
and very complicated.
"And if the partnership
agreement said Mitsubishi
"got 40% of the operating profit of GE."
And I said the chairman
of Mitsubishi said,
"Jack, you divide up the profits,
"you put your people on it,
"and we may check you
four or five years later."
I said, "You'd put some very good people
"on that partnership agreement."
He said, "You're damn right I would."
I said, "Well, that's
the relationship you have
"with governments all
around the world with taxes,
"and so you ought to put some good people
"interpreting the code."
At which point, he said,
"When can you start?"
(audience laughing)
So I did start.
I spent 25 years there.
It was a great 25 years.
I'm retired at the end of last year.
I'm still consulting for GE.
I taught at Yale Law School
for the last 10 years.
I'm still teaching at Yale.
I'm running a couple of
groups in Washington,
and I'm gonna start a new
chapter in my tax life
which you can probably
read about next week.
I can't talk about it tonight.
So I, like you, live in the tax world.
But I would not be here
without this program.
I'm pretty confident of that.
I know, and I think there are
at least two inflection points
in my career that the program helped me.
At first, after I had been,
I said I took a couple of courses
at University of Chicago Law School.
They, like Yale, don't
teach you what the law is.
They teach you what it should be.
Although I had a great
professor there, Wally Blum.
I came to New York, this big
law firm in the tax group,
and I thought I knew the tax law
until I went to the first tax lunch.
The tax department met.
These partners would bring
all the associates in.
I felt like I was not even
not in a foreign country
but on another planet.
They were speaking a language,
codes, sections, this, that.
And then they would go around the table
and ask each of the young associates
what they were working on,
what they thought about it.
I tell you, the sweat started
to pour down my forehead,
and it did indeed for the
first six months I was there
'cause these damn tax lunches occurred
once a month, every month.
I realized I better learn the tax law.
(audience chuckling)
Somebody told me about the program at NYU.
I enrolled at night.
I started right away with Tax III,
was then the Corporate course.
Then the giants were walking
the halls, as Carr said.
Jerry Wallace, Charlie
Lyon, the great Jim Eustice,
the great Carr Ferguson, Harvey Dale,
the young guns, Bill Hutton,
Victor Zonana, Noel Cunningham,
the spectacular adjunct, Steve Gardner,
who has taught me partnerships
and also taught me how
to be self-confident.
(audience laughing)
He's a terrific lawyer.
How to be a great lawyer.
It was really magical.
And I learned not just the tax law.
I learned a lot about judgment.
Jerry Wallace, I could spend a lot of time
telling great Jerry Wallace
stories, but Carr did that.
But great people.
And I learned the law.
Tax law is different
than other disciplines.
You really do need to learn the law.
There's a body of law you need to learn.
It's a good thing.
Economists call it high barriers to entry.
But once you have learned the law,
you have something that people
can't take away from you.
It really helps me to keep
going to the tax lunches.
Soon, I began even to
look forward to them.
Believe that or not.
The second place in my career
where the program was really influential
was after I'd been an associate
about three or four years
and I'd been in the tax program.
I was working with the
chairman of the tax department,
a guy named Charlie McClain,
who was the head of the
tax section of the ABA
and a gruff, tough guy.
His biggest client was Mobil Oil.
Big client, and the oil
companies were very sophisticated
in doing their tax planning.
The reason (chuckling) I know
that is David Rosenbloom and I
shared offices across from
each other at the Treasury.
Literally.
He was the international tax counsel
and I was the domestic tax counsel.
Whenever the oil companies came in,
I would hear David start
to scream and shout.
(all laughing)
And they would be screaming and shouting.
I've always put my money on David.
In any event, I was at
home and in my apartment
in the Village one Saturday
morning, and the phone rings.
There weren't cell phones then.
No caller ID.
I pick up the phone and
it's a guy named Tom Bagg,
who was the head of
Mobil's tax department.
This was 9:30 on a Saturday morning.
He said, "John, you have
a few minutes to talk?"
I say, "Yes."
No iPads then, no computers.
He said, "I've got a few
tax questions for you."
I said, "Well, what's that?"
Mobil was doing a very large acquisition.
He started to grill me
on triangular mergers,
Section a2E's,
a2D's, reverse B's.
Thank God I had just taken reorganizations
with Carr Ferguson.
(audience laughing)
And I actually knew this stuff.
I was able to answer his
questions quickly, responsively.
The call lasted, I think,
for maybe half an hour or 45 minutes.
Seemed like forever.
The next week, Tom Bagg
called Charlie McClain
and said, "You know
that young man, Samuels?
"He is a great tax lawyer.
"You ought to make him a partner."
I can promise you,
without that phone call,
that probably never would've happened.
I mentioned I teach
law at Yale, which I do, and
I've done it for 10 years.
I love the students,
just like any good faculty member
loves his or her students.
What I tell them is,
first, they wanna know
what the law should be.
I tell them, "You can't
know what the law should be
"until you know what it
is and why it is that way.
"This program teaches you what the law is
"and why it is that way.
"Only then can you begin to think
"about how it should be changed."
But then they ask me
what to do for a career,
those who wanna do tax work.
I tell them, "I would advise
you to try to get a job
"with a big New York City
law firm, if you can,
"or a small New York City law firm,
"one that's got a good tax group.
"And then, whatever they tell you,
"take the program, the LLM program at NYU.
"You'll learn the law."
Because there's a lot to learn
and there's no better place to learn it
than the NYU law program.
So whatever success I've had in my career,
I am confident, in no small part,
it's attributable to this program
and the great professors
and great friendships
and all of the things I've learned.
So I only hope that you...
I'd like to be here, I plan on being here
for the 100th, Carr,
(audience laughing)
and I know you will be, too.
With that, I'm gonna turn it
over to my estate planner,
Carlyn McCaffrey.
(audience applauding)
- Well, thank you, Josh, for
asking me to come tonight
to share my memories about
New York University Law School
and its tax program, its
70-year-old tax program.
It's been an important part of my life
as a student, faculty member, and adjunct
for more than 50 of the 70 years
that this program has been around.
Now, I never wanted to be a tax lawyer.
I actually wanted to
be a flight attendant.
(audience laughing)
But I never grew tall enough,
so that option was out.
(audience laughing)
So I went to law school.
I went to NYU at night
with visions of Perry Mason in my future,
and I went at night because, in 1963,
NYU gave working men and working women
the opportunity to go to law
school on a part-time basis.
In those days, NYU was
a very different place.
There weren't many women students at all.
There were so few of us
that we were able to form
our own study group that
met every night before class
in the women's staff lounge
up on the second floor
of Vanderbilt Hall.
There were no women professors at all.
All the best scholarship
programs were restricted to men.
There were no women Root-Tilden scholars.
They weren't permitted to apply.
There was no casual Friday.
There was actually a dress code,
one that prevented the
few women students we had
from wearing slacks, even on snow days.
(audience chuckling)
In the early '60s, all of this
shockingly seemed perfectly natural to me.
I was just grateful to be here.
On the plus side for NYU,
unlike, I think, other schools,
I never noticed that any of our professors
were reluctant to require
our participation in class,
and they did that.
There wasn't much choice as to curriculum.
Fortunately for me, although
I didn't think so at the time,
the federal tax law was a
required second-year course.
I dreaded the thought of it.
The tax code in 1964 was
an intimidating thing.
The top rate was 77%,
just recently down from
91% the year before,
and I was never very good at math.
Guy Maxfield was my first tax
teacher, and he was terrific.
A little scary, but terrific.
The course was what we
eventually came to call baby tax:
how you identify gross
income, what are deductions,
what are your exemptions,
how do you calculate the tax.
To my surprise, I
discovered that I loved it.
I was hooked.
I was learning something
that affected real people.
Not everyone commits a tort.
Not everyone commits a crime
or forms a corporation.
But almost everyone has
to deal with the tax law.
And any lawyer working in any field at all
has to keep the tax law in mind.
It affects what the
litigation winner gets to keep
and how corporate
and other commercial
transactions are structured.
Now, unlike all those other courses
where you have to worry about
50 different jurisdictions,
50 different sets of
case law, of statutes,
dealing with Corpus Juris Secundum
in the West Digest System,
in tax, there was essentially one law,
and it was all in what was
then a relatively slim volume.
(audience chuckling)
Sure, there were regulations,
but then the regulations
were only in two volumes.
Best of all, there was
Commerce Clearing House
Federal Tax Reporter, a
Prentice Hall equivalent.
All the answers I needed,
I could find in one of those places.
It's difficult for you youngsters
to appreciate that in 2016
when you can find all the answers you want
just by googling it.
But it was more difficult then.
In 1964, that was remarkable.
After graduation in '67, I
went off to clerk for a year.
But I hadn't lost my
enthusiasm for the tax law,
and I returned the next
year to begin studying
for my masters in tax with
some really terrific teachers,
some of whom are here tonight.
Charlie Lyon, Jerry Wallace,
Carr Ferguson, Jim Eustice,
George Zeitlin, and many others.
Here, I brought a
learning aid for you all.
(audience laughing)
That was us
back in the early '70s.
In the one year I was
away, when I was clerking,
things at NYU had changed radically.
There were all of a sudden
more women students.
Many more women students.
In fact, in that year, there
were more women students
at NYU Law than any other law
school in the entire country.
And they began to organize.
They formed the Women's Rights Committee
and worked to change things.
Their first success was opening
the Root-Tilden Scholarship
to women in 1969.
With help from Ruth Bader Ginsburg
who was then a Rutgers
University Law School professor
and the wife, by the way,
of an NYU tax professor, Marty Ginsburg,
we organized the first national
conference of law women.
Our organization meetings
took place in Ruth's apartment
and up in the faculty law library.
Our first national
meeting took place in 1970
in classrooms throughout Vanderbilt Hall.
By that time, thanks to an
invitation from Carr Ferguson,
I had decided to join the tax faculty.
My interests in the tax law hadn't faded,
but my friends on the
Women's Rights Committee
wondered what I was doing.
How could the study of tax law be relevant
to the societal changes that
they were trying to engineer?
But, of course, it is.
Tax law is relevant to
practically everything.
The tax law was, and as a
matter of fact still is,
pretty much structured
to encourage one parent
in a two-parent household
to stay out of the workforce
and remain at home caring for the children
and doing the household tasks.
And the one who stayed
home, back then at least,
was almost always the woman parent.
Now, how does the tax law do that?
It does it by not imputing
income to the homeworker
and by not allowing a
deduction for the cost
of replacing those tax-free services.
If a parent's services are
worth $60,000 to $70,000 a year,
no one pays any tax on that value.
But if that parent goes
out into the workforce
and has to hire somebody to replace
that $60,000 to $70,000 worth of services,
there's basically no
deductions for those services.
We're so used to this principle
that it may seem perfectly acceptable now.
But think about it.
We did, and we even
picketed the tax court.
Some of us, with our
children in strollers,
went down to the tax court
while they were hearing a case
for Michael and Elizabeth Nammack
who were trying to
deduct childcare expenses
as business expenses so that
the wife could go to work.
Now, does there's a sad
ending to that story
because, of course, as
you know, it didn't work.
They lost.
Ultimately, the case was lost.
But it made the tax law very relevant
to our women's rights group.
NYU's tax program over the
years gave me the opportunity
first as a student then as a teacher
to get a really solid
understanding of the tax principles
that have gone on to serve me very well
in my practice for many years,
despite the fact that the
code now fills two big volumes
and the regulations take up six volumes.
The code has almost four million words.
But one of the great
things about the tax law,
always seemed to me, is
that it's always changing.
It's a constant challenge.
Who knows what the next
change is going to be?
And, depending on what
happens in the election,
you youngsters may be able to read it all
on a single postcard.
(audience laughing)
(audience applauding)
- Hi, everyone.
My name's Noel Cunningham.
I just wanted to say a few
words about teaching in NYU.
The tax program has always
had a great reputation
for launching the careers
of successful tax lawyers.
But what is less well-known is
how effective the tax program
has been in launching the
careers of tax academics.
Our graduates are on law school faculties
throughout the country,
and one of the reasons underlying this
is what is now known as, and
Victor referred to it before,
as our Acting Assistant Professor Program,
or as it's commonly referred
to as the AAP Program.
This program actually originated,
I think Victor talked
about it, in the '60s,
where NYU started to
hire aspiring academics
to a two-year program to teach tax.
During this two-year
period, at least currently,
the person, who is now
referred to as an AAP,
(audience chuckling)
would have the opportunity
to interact with other
members of the tax faculty,
develop classroom skills,
and hopefully complete a
draft of a significant article
to use as a job talk.
I personally cannot express
how much I love the AAP Program
and the positive impact
it's had on my life.
In 1975, I was lucky enough
to be asked to become an AAP.
I had always wanted to be a teacher,
but quite honestly I suffer
from performance anxiety,
and I didn't really know if I could handle
a large classroom full of students.
As an AAP, I was given the
time and support that I needed
to find out if I could.
As it turned out, I realized
that I was much better suited
for teaching the law
than for practicing it,
and my academic career was launched.
40 years later, I'm still at it.
(audience chuckling)
I've always felt I was blessed
to have the opportunity to be an AAP.
It was the best job I ever had,
and Victor mentioned
two reasons earlier why.
I got to teach, no committee assignments,
and no faculty meetings.
(audience laughing)
It was all together.
And, since joining the full-time faculty,
I've had the good fortune to work with
and to get to know a new AAP every year.
This has been a wonderful
experience for me
because I find the AAPs as a group
very talented and interesting people.
And, as some of you know, I love AAPs.
As a matter of fact, I love
them so much, I married one.
(all laughing)
Now, although the AAP Program
has always been of the highest quality,
over the past 25 years, it has
really reached new heights.
Typically, when one of our
AAPs enters the job market,
she becomes the most
sought-after tax candidate
in the country and typically
receives many interviews
and several callbacks.
The AAPs Program is in no small measure
due to the role of our next
speaker, Deborah Schenk.
When Deborah became editor-in-chief
of the Tax Law Review in 1989,
she also became mentor-in-chief
for the AAP Program.
Although many of us worked with the AAPs
developing their teaching skills,
Deborah devotes an enormous
amount of time and effort
to helping the AAPs
develop their scholarship
and preparing them for the job market.
And she does a wonderful job.
I can speak from personal experience
how valuable and generous Deborah can be.
Over the years, Deborah
and I worked closely
on many different projects,
including several Law Review articles.
She's just amazing.
For example, she has the
ability to critically read
and analyze a draft while
skillfully editing it.
I'm in awe.
I really am.
And she's so generous.
Since we first met in 1982,
she has always volunteered
to critically read
every article that I have ever written,
and my final products have
always been much improved
as a result of her efforts.
The AAPs clearly have been very fortunate
to have Deborah as their mentor
as I have been to have her
as my very good friend and colleague.
(audience applauding)
- It won't come as a surprise to you.
I'm Deborah Schenk.
(audience chuckling)
I graduated in 1976 in the evening program
while I had already
started my teaching career.
Josh allotted me 10 minutes to
talk about scholarship at NYU
and the impact of the
Graduate Tax Program,
and that, of course, is a
completely impossible task.
I would need all evening.
But I will do a quick overview.
In addition to being known
for its innovative and excellent teaching,
NYU tax faculty have always been known
for their contributions to
the scholarly community.
I'm just gonna give you a
few examples of the impact.
Mainly, it's numbers and name-dropping.
NYU faculty have produced some
of the leading tax casebooks
used in law schools around the country.
The late Paul McDaniel, Laurie
Malman, Dan Shaviro, and I
have all authored books that
are used in basic tax courses.
My colleagues, Brookes Billman,
has coauthored a procedure book,
John Steines has authored a
book on international tax,
and I authored a book on tax ethics.
We have influenced many former students.
Many of them are acting assistants
who have become academics
and have also written their own casebooks.
In addition, NYU pioneered the use
of producing its own teaching materials,
including, as others mentioned,
the innovative problem
method, which are now used
by many of our former
students across the country.
Other published tax classroom materials
include a popular
nutshell on partnerships,
which Noel wrote with a former
aide, that would be his wife,
and a tax map.
(audience chuckling)
I could probably spend
all of my remaining years
tracking down all the Law Review articles
written by the full-time
members of the tax faculty.
I actually attempted
to do that and gave up.
By my count, we've had around
40 full-time tax professors,
not including the AAPs,
and all have contributed
significant scholarship.
For decades, some of the leading
tax scholars in the country
have produced their work at NYU.
Tax faculty who are
currently writing regularly
scholarly articles
include Lily Batchelder,
Josh Blank, Noel Cunningham, David Kamin,
Mitchell Kane, and Dan Shaviro.
Articles written by our late colleagues,
such as Charlie Lyon and Jim Eustice,
continue to be cited regularly
and are also still assigned.
Some of my colleagues have
produced scholarly books.
Some were written years ago
and are still widely cited,
such as the late Paul McDaniel's
"Pathways to Tax Reform."
The reigning champ,
however, is Dan Shaviro,
who has managed to write 10 books already,
all of which have had an impact
on the tax policy debate.
NYU scholars have also produced
a number of important treatises
that are widely used by practitioners.
For example, Guy Maxfield's treatise
on estate and gift taxation
and John Peschel's treatise
on the taxation of trusts and estates
were very early examples of
this kind of scholarship.
Our adjuncts are also quite
active in the scholarly area.
A number of them have written treatises
such as the late Michael
Saltzman, Bob Fink, and Rick Pomp,
and they also have written
a lot of scholarly articles as well.
I've saved the best for last.
Or the most important,
I guess I should say.
That, of course, would
be Bittker and Eustice.
Some of you have probably never read
a scholarly tax article.
Some of you have probably never
picked up another treatise.
But I am confident that every
single person in this room
either borrowed or bought
and actually consulted
a copy of B&E.
It is truly the granddaddy
of all treatises,
and for many people, it is NYU.
Another prominent example of
our contribution to scholarship
is the tax policy colloquium.
It was begun by Dan Shaviro
when he arrived in 1996,
and it was the first such
colloquium like that.
It is currently in its 21st year
and it has always been run by Dan.
For a long time, his co-convener
was our late colleague, David Bradford.
But after David's untimely death,
his co-conveners have included a number
of well-known economists and lawyers.
At this point, there have been
almost 300 papers presented
by leading tax academics,
all of which Dan has
commented on at length.
(all chuckling)
NYU is often the first to adopt something,
but we often have many followers.
Over the years, there have
been almost 20 other schools
that have followed our format
and adopted tax colloquium,
where my colleagues are
often the presenters.
Another major contribution to scholarship
associated with the Graduate Tax Program
is the Tax Law Review,
which began publishing
just about the same time
as the Graduate Tax Program began in 1945.
We are now working on Volume 69.
I believe, but I'm not positive,
it was the first faculty-edited
journal at a law school.
By now, there are a
number of such journals.
The TLR has always been edited
by a full-time member of the faculty.
There have been 11 editors-in-chief
of the Tax Law Review.
The first, as Carr mentioned,
was a philosopher, Edmond Cahn.
But after that, all the editors-in-chief
all taught tax at NYU.
Two of them served for only a year,
William Waugh and Leo Schmolka.
But the following all served
for two or three or more years:
Robert McDonough, Norman
Redlich, John Taggart,
Victor Zonana, Mike Wallesen, Jim Eustice,
Brookes Billman, John
Steines, and Larry Larkin.
Except for me.
(audience chuckling)
I'm in my 26th year
(laughing) of editing the Tax Law Review,
and I was an executive editor
three years before that.
I am not particularly proud of this,
but a side effect of being
an editor for 26 years
is I believe I'm the
world's leading authority
on the Bluebook rules of citation.
(audience laughing)
The TLR has had 366 student editors.
These are the winners of our
Tax Law Review Scholarship,
our best entering students.
They assist me with what I don't wanna do.
I have enjoyed immensely working
with all of these students
and have followed many of their careers.
For the first several decades,
almost all the articles were descriptive,
and they were written by practitioners
in part because there weren't
really any tax faculty
in the country.
Tax was a topic taken up
in constitutional law.
In the last several decades,
most of the articles had
been written by academics.
Today, I'll say that the TLR
is the leading legal
journal of tax policy.
In our seven decades of publishing,
we have published 980,
yes, I counted them,
articles, reports,
commentaries, and essays,
23 forewords, 11 tributes,
two banquet transcripts,
one letter, one survey,
one group book report,
three addenda, one corrigendum,
which is a correction,
and I found something called
"The Editor's Secret,"
which turned out to be pedantry.
We also published in past years
notes which were written by practitioners,
dissents and concurrences
which were disagreements or agreements
with previously published
articles, and book reviews.
On eight occasions, the whole
issue was a single article.
Len holds one of those.
And on one occasion, the
issue had only notes.
There was no article in it at all.
The largest volume, which I edited,
contained two symposia and was
over a thousand pages long.
The first article published
by a female author
was not until Volume 21.
Of the 980 articles we've published,
only 83 have been written by women.
Like many law reviews,
we have held symposia.
Before 1991, there were
only three of them.
The first one was actually devoted
to how to be a successful tax lawyer.
Then there was the Tax Reform Act of 1969
and one on simplification.
Beginning in 1991, the Tax Law Review
began to hold regular symposia
which presented papers
prepared by academics, accountants,
practitioners, and economists.
We've covered a wide range
of topics from our first,
which was on partnership tax,
including wealth transfers,
corporate tax shelters,
European Union taxation,
designing a VAT, et cetera,
and many of the people in this room
have contributed to those volumes.
In 2012, NYU began it's
collaboration with UCLA,
and each year we now hold the
NYU/UCLA Tax Policy Symposium.
Our topics have, as somebody
had already mentioned,
included the Piketty
Symposium, healthcare reform,
and the income tax at 100.
We like to think that each
volume, symposium issue
has the most relevant and
the thought-provoking papers
on the topic.
Again, we were the first law
school to produce a journal
devoted solely to tax,
but a number of schools have
now followed in our footsteps.
Today, there are at least seven
student-edited tax reviews,
but we remain the only
faculty-edited tax review.
I would like to think
that, 15 years from now,
someone else will be standing here
(audience chuckling)
on the 75th anniversary
of the tax program,
talking about their
reign as editor-in-chief,
extolling the 84th year
the TLR has been published,
although perhaps at that
point only in digital form,
and noting that the 500th
paper has been presented
at the tax policy colloquium,
and describing the ever-lengthening list
of NYU-authored Law Review articles
that continue to make NYU the
center of tax scholarship.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Good evening.
My name is David Rosenbloom,
and I am the director of the
International Tax Program,
which is an entirely separate program,
although we had a brief panel
before this program started this afternoon
where some of our early graduates said
that it really wasn't so different,
it was really part of
the overall one program
and the international
program was just part of it.
I come to you from a different route
from many of the other speakers.
I am not a graduate of NYU Law School.
I do not have an LLM from
NYU in tax or anything else.
I don't have an LLM anywhere.
(audience chuckling)
I have, however, taught
at five law schools,
five law schools in the United States,
and NYU is the fifth one
that I have taught at.
The longest one that I taught
at previously was Harvard,
where I was on and off for 13 years.
Started teaching international
taxation in 1984,
and I've taught that or
related subjects ever since.
I come not as sort of a family member,
although I've now been here for 14 years,
but I come with a really
profound admiration
for what NYU has done in
the international space.
I'm not sure it's as well
appreciated as it might be.
NYU got into this
International Tax Program,
first year was 1996, 1997.
The esteemed Paul McDaniel,
who's been referred to many times,
was the leading light
in starting the program.
We now have from that program
over 500 alumni around the world,
by my count somewhere
between 45 and 50 countries.
There's a little ambiguity
there because you get people,
like I'm thinking of a
woman named Van Harris
who was actually from
outside Nairobi, Kenya,
but had been at Goldman Sachs in London
before she came to the program.
So is she from the UK
or is she from Kenya?
I don't know.
But we have alums and we
have students from all over,
and every year there's
a bit of a surprise.
Next year, we're gonna have
our first two students from Georgia.
We will also have only our
second student from Ecuador.
NYU has really walked the walk
in the international area.
I say that as someone
who's really quite familiar
with what other law schools have done,
including Harvard, including Stanford.
I'm less familiar with Penn and Columbia,
although I taught there.
But most of these schools
have, for quite a few years,
talked about how they wanna become active
in the international area.
NYU really put its money
where its mouth was
and started this program.
The program has been incredibly vibrant.
Every year, we admit,
we've just sent out letters
of admission recently,
we admit to our International
Tax Program somewhere between
14 and 28 or 30 students.
We would take more, but that
seems to be, year after year,
the range that we attract.
The qualification for
being in this program
is that you must be a lawyer
and you must have your
first law degree abroad.
You can be, and some very
few people are, US citizens.
I can think of two over the
14 years that I've been here.
Generally speaking, they
are not US citizens.
In the early days, the idea,
at least Paul McDaniel's idea,
was that the students would go
back to their home countries.
That proved to be not entirely realistic.
As the years went on, numbers,
not all but substantial numbers
wanted to stay in the United States
and found either temporary employment
or permanent employment
in the United States.
It's a small program by comparison
with the Graduate program.
Many of our students have not been
in the United States at all
before coming to New York.
Some have been here only for
a very brief time as tourists.
It is a bewildering
experience for some of them.
There are others who
are much more familiar
with New York and with the
United States, but in general,
it's a different population
than one thinks of
when one thinks of the Graduate program.
On the other hand, it's also
true that the Graduate program
has now, for quite a few years,
admitted a substantial
number of foreign students.
So it is probably somewhat confusing
from the standpoint of, oh, I don't know,
Beijing or Santiago or somewhere,
to look at the NYU course offerings
and the program offerings
and to decide just what is the difference
between this Graduate program
and this International program.
Well, the big difference is we're smaller.
Because all of our students are foreign,
it tends to be a bonding
experience in a way
that is much harder to achieve
when you're talking about
120 or 130 students.
We try to give the students who are here
for a very brief time, and eight
months goes by like a shot,
we try to give them the
year that is gonna be
the best year of their
lives in every way we can.
We do require, more than
the Graduate programs,
certain courses be taken.
There are, out of 24 credits to graduate,
there are 16 required credits
in the International program.
The Graduate program's a
lot more flexible, I think.
It is a very high-quality experience
in terms of education.
I meet with all of the students
at the beginning of
every year, one by one.
I tell them, essentially,
and there are some in the
audience, they all know this,
I tell them three things.
I tell them, first of all,
that they're probably gonna learn more
from their fellow students
than they learn from their professors.
Because the quality of the students
that we attract from other
countries is just amazing,
and it gets better every year.
And there's an awful lot to learn
when you're spending a lot of time closely
together with people that
you would not otherwise
have a chance to meet at all.
Secondly, I tell them to take
the program very seriously
because it is serious and
people wanna see performance,
they wanna see excellence.
But the third thing I tell them,
and this is very meaningful
for the students from abroad,
is to make sure that they don't leave here
without experiencing New York City.
Because that's one of the things,
one of the attractions in our program
that is really so important.
We offer, in addition
to the educational
opportunities and the courses,
we have a seminar program
that is extremely active.
This year, we will have 17
seminars on Friday afternoons.
The public is invited.
We sometimes get members of the press.
We get all sorts of people.
Anybody can come, and we
actually serve sandwiches.
(audience chuckling)
I'll tell you about that.
That program, which I started
when I took over for Paul
after the sixth year,
that's become sort of
a practical supplement
to the coursework.
The idea of those seminars
is to bring in practitioners,
people, well, not only practitioners,
government people, academics
from around the world.
Anybody who I can find and entice
to come talk to the students
for an hour and a half,
we have these seminars.
For example, just to give an
example, an immediate example,
we will have one of these
seminars tomorrow afternoon
and it's gonna be on the development
of controlled foreign
corporations in Brazil
by a practitioner from a
large law firm in Sao Paulo.
That's a pretty typical
thing that we'll do.
After that, the next one is
gonna be by a practitioner
from Chevez Ruiz in Mexico City.
I'm sure he's gonna talk about
tax developments in Mexico.
That's the kind of thing
that we do in our seminars.
We also have US, plenty of US presenters.
One thing I wanted to
report on and just mention
is that we have organized also
what we call a Practice Council,
which is an advisory board.
The origins of it really go back
to our opening lecture in the
year, the Tillinghast Lecture.
Tillinghast Lecture is
our intellectual kickoff
for the International Tax Program.
It takes place usually in
September or October each year.
This year, we had Pascal Saint-Amans.
He's the head of the OECD tax office
and was the leader of the Base Erosion
and Profit Shifting project for the OECD,
a very, very popular and very demanded,
much in-demand speaker.
Pascal gave a great lecture,
and we're gonna be
publishing that later on.
Any event, I wanted to put
this Tillinghast Lecture
on a sound financial footing.
Together with the late Leonard
Terr from Baker McKenzie,
we put together something that
we call the Practice Council.
The Practice Council
is our advisory board.
We didn't do a lot of
organizing to put it together.
We basically went through
our combined Rolodexes,
sent out letters, and said to
everybody that we addressed
that "it's gonna cost you
$5,000 to be part of this group.
"We would like you to come in.
"We would like to have funding for it,
"but we also want you to play a role
"in development of the
International Tax Program."
We got 33 return mail acceptances.
The Practice Council is now at 59 people
from 23 countries.
We meet once a year.
We're about to meet in April.
People fly in from Asia,
from around the world.
Not the entire membership,
but we usually get about,
somewhere more than half every year.
So I'm quite proud of that.
And the Practice Council
members get first dibs
on taking these Friday seminars,
and I usually take up many of them.
That's another feature of the program.
Another thing that's happening
and that I'm very pleased with
is that we've long offered to our students
the opportunity to do internships.
For many years, we've had
an internship in the summer
with the International
Monetary Fund in Washington.
This year, we have now,
I think permanently but
certainly temporarily,
arranged for two separate internships
with the tax function
at the United Nations.
So our students, having
come here to study with us
for eight or nine months, can
then spend a couple of months,
if they prevail in
getting these fellowships,
working in that capacity.
This is all fantastic from the standpoint
of NYU's reputation, its reach.
I think it's fair to say we
have literally 400 or 500
very, very loyal NYU
alumni around the world
that we can call upon and we do call upon
for all sorts of things,
including recruiting of our students,
coming to give conferences,
organizing seminars, et cetera.
I'm happy to report that the
International Tax Program,
and this is its 20th anniversary,
it's coincidental the same as the 70th
of the Graduate program,
is strong and vibrant.
We have just sent out admission letters
to 36 students from 21 countries,
and we'll see how many
of them we get next year.
I would imagine somewhere in the 20s.
Later in the year,
probably after graduation,
we are gonna put out a volume.
This will be the second
volume that we've put out.
This is in celebration
of 20 years of the ITP.
In there, we will have texts
of some of the Tillinghast Lectures,
Pascal Saint-Amans' lecture.
We'll have articles by
the foreign professors
who come to teach in our program.
We have a visiting foreign
professor every year.
This year, it's Professor Luis Schoueri
from Sao Paulo in Brazil.
Next year, it'll be Richard Vann
from the University of
Sydney in Australia.
This is a truly international program.
It is not just a veneer of international.
This is truly international.
We try to make it as
broad as we possibly can.
And I'm just very proud and pleased
to be given the opportunity to be up here
and to be directing it.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, David.
And thank you to all of the
speakers for your remarks.
I think it's clear by now
that the success of
the tax programs at NYU
is attributable not just
to some abstract concept
of reputation or prestige
but to the efforts of
specific individuals.
So to conclude our program,
we'd like to acknowledge three
individuals and honor them
for their lasting positive influences
on the tax programs and
the tax law profession.
First, our first honoree is Carr Ferguson.
(audience applauding)
As many of you know, Carr
was a full-time member
of the tax faculty from 1962 to 1977.
Until 2013, he co-taught
Advanced Corporate Tax Problems
with his colleague, Norman Sinrich.
Unfortunately, when Norman
passed away in 2013,
Carr retired from teaching.
Many of our graduates credit
Carr with instilling in them
a passion for corporate tax
law issues and practice.
As one of Carr's former students
who later became a leading
practitioner commented to me,
quote, "When Carr was my teacher,
"he was methodical, thorough, and patient.
"He coaxed me into considering
different perspectives
"and interpretations of
the Internal Revenue Code
"and related authorities.
"He invited challenges and had
not the slightest hesitation
"in admitting, on the few
occasions that it happened,
"that the challenge was valid
"and that it taught him something new.
"He loved teaching and it showed."
In addition to teaching
with us for so many years,
Carr is a trustee of the
NYU Law Center Foundation.
Thanks to his generosity
and his friends' and
colleagues' generosity,
we've established the M.
Carr Ferguson Scholarship,
which is awarded each year to
a full-time tax LLM student
who demonstrates academic excellence
and an interest in legal academia
or public service as a career.
Thank you, Carr, for everything
you've done for this place.
On behalf of the Graduate Tax Program,
I'd like to present you with
a certificate of appreciation
from the Law School and
call you up to the podium
to present it.
(audience applauding)
- Well, this is quite a surprise.
I didn't expect anything at all from Josh.
I feel more than amply rewarded
just by having been part
of the school so long,
a school that I love very much.
I feel very comfortable here, Josh,
in front of these two flags,
which, when I was
assistant attorney general,
I took and put by my desk in Washington,
both the United States flag,
in fact, I think that was already there,
but I did bring a full-sized NYU flag.
I still have it at home
but I don't have a ceiling
high enough to put it up.
(audience laughing)
This award means a great deal to me.
I don't know how innovative I was,
but I know that I learned a lot
from a lot of you.
I think this certificate
really should be given
to each of you.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
(audience laughing)
(photographer speaking faintly)
- [Photographer] Great, there we go.
- Next, we'd like to
acknowledge the contributions
of another of our colleagues
we've heard about tonight,
Steve Gardner.
(audience applauding)
Steve is currently
teaching Corporate Tax II
as an adjunct professor of law,
and I mean literally currently teaching.
He was teaching until 30 minutes ago
when he dismissed his class early
in order to be here tonight.
So thank you for that, Steve.
At the end of the last academic year,
Steve celebrated his 50th consecutive year
of teaching on our faculty.
Steve has taught a number of courses
in the Graduate Tax Program
involving taxation of
corporations and shareholders.
He's an engaged and enthusiastic
member of the tax faculty.
In navigating the
intricacies of Subchapter C,
Steve deploys detailed problem sets
and relies heavily on the
use of the Socratic method
to push his students
to approach the issues
as they will in practice.
One of Steve's former
students commented, quote,
"Professor Gardner is
one of the best lawyers
"I have ever learned from.
"I felt like he really prepared me
"to become a better lawyer."
In addition, I'll say,
as one of Steve's former
Corporate Tax II students,
I will add that he is deeply
passionate about Subchapter C.
I have never heard anyone, anyone,
speak about ambiguous statutory provisions
or outdated regulations
in such colorful terms.
(audience laughing)
His passion for the material
not only entertains his students
but it truly inspires them to learn.
So thank you, Steve, for
your ceaseless support
of the Graduate Tax
Program and its students.
I'd like to invite you up to present also
on behalf of the Law
School and the tax program
a certificate of appreciation.
(audience applauding)
- [Steve] I'll stay home.
(audience laughing)
- Last.
On this special occasion,
we would like to present
the James S. Eustice Tax Leadership Award.
Every few years, the Law
School presents an award
to an alum who has
distinguished him- or herself
as a leader in the legal profession
and who has had a significant impact
on this Graduate Tax Program.
The award's named for our
legendary colleague and teacher,
Jim Eustice, a giant in the tax world
and a member of our
faculty for over 50 years.
Past recipients are Jim Eustice himself,
the first recipient,
Carr Ferguson, Lou Steinberg,
John Samuels, and Len Schmolka.
Tonight, on behalf of the tax
faculty and the Law School,
it's my pleasure to present
the 2016 James S. Eustice
Tax Leadership Award
to our colleague, Deborah Schenk.
(audience applauding)
Now, if she'll allow me, I'd
like to take just a few moments
to describe Deborah's accomplishments.
Many of my comments that I'll read
are direct quotes from
Deborah's colleagues
and her current and former students
who contributed thoughts and anecdotes
in advance of this evening's festivities.
To begin with the review of
Deborah's accomplishments:
As a scholar, Deborah has
had and continues to have
deep impact on tax law
scholarship and academic debate.
She's the author or
coauthor of three books,
including "Federal Income
Taxation: Principles and Policies"
with Michael Graetz, one
of the most widely used
tax textbooks in the US.
She's authored numerous
influential academic articles
on topics such as the
capital gains preference,
the realization rule, tax
simplification, tax ethics,
and, more recently, behavioral economics
and the design of taxes.
As a teacher, Deborah
is dynamic, engaging,
and all-around incredible.
As one of my colleagues has
said of Deborah's teaching,
quote, "For her students, Deborah has been
"an always available, always welcoming,
"encyclopedically knowledgeable
educational resource."
To give you a sense of
the effect Deborah has had
on her students, one former
student commented to me, quote,
"Professor Schenk's
classroom is where I realized
"for the first time who I really was:
"for better or worse, a tax person."
(audience laughing)
I'll also add my own anecdote, if I can.
About 10 years ago, when I
was a very junior professor,
Deborah asked me to be
the substitute teacher
in one of her basic Income Tax classes,
and it was right in the
middle of the semester.
So I dutifully prepared
all of my lecture notes,
it was like 20 pages of notes,
and I walked into this classroom.
These students had been in
the class already with Deborah
for about eight weeks.
I asked what I thought
would be a quick question
to get things started, which
is why Congress created
the special 2% floor under
Section 67 of the Code.
Instantaneously, in a class
of about 100 students,
80 hands simultaneously
shot up in the air.
I think I made it
through about three pages
of those 20 pages of notes.
This level of class participation
was completely normal
in Deborah's classroom,
where students were used
to actively engaging
with the material and their teacher
in every class on every issue.
Deborah has served as the editor-in-chief
of the Tax Law Review since 1989.
She continues to serve in this position.
As one colleague
characterized Deborah's role
on the Tax Law Review, quote,
"In direct consultation with authors,
"Deborah has contributed and
edited hundreds of articles
"across the entire tax spectrum."
She has a family cumulatively
numbering in the hundreds
of graduate tax student editors.
Because Deborah personally
reviews and edits
every article and every
footnote in every article
that's published in the Tax Law Review,
this peer-edited journal has
become one of the top-choice
publishing venues of the
academy's leading tax scholars.
And Deborah has made
countless contributions
as a mentor, citizen, and colleague.
At the Law School, in addition to leading
the Tax Law Review, she has
served as faculty director
of the Graduate Tax Program.
Outside the Law School,
she has participated
in the executive committees
and the advisory boards
of the ABA Tax Section,
New York State Bar
Association Tax Section,
and Tax Analysts.
She's provided tax advice
on a pro bono basis
to low-income taxpayers.
One of Deborah's major
contributions, as Noel mentioned,
is that she serves as one
of the primary mentors
to the acting assistant
professors of tax law.
In this role, she's
advised aspiring academics
on their first teaching experiences,
their job market papers, their
research agendas, and more.
By my count, she has personally mentored
at least 40 acting assistant
professors of tax law.
And Deborah's mentorship of tax scholars
is not limited to just
those at this Law School.
As one of my colleagues
wrote to me, quote,
"I would not be surprised if
half the tax law academics
"in this country were
directly mentored by Deborah."
As a former acting assistant
professor of tax law
who was mentored by
Deborah, I can safely say
that I owe my own career as a tax academic
and my own position at
this Law School to Deborah.
So, in reviewing all of the comments
from Deborah's colleagues and students,
three basic attributes continue to appear.
First, Deborah is dedicated.
She spends thousands of hours
editing the Tax Law Review,
including during the
summer and on the weekends.
And I'll tell you, indeed,
30 minutes before this event,
I saw her tonight editing an article.
(audience chuckling)
And it's with her, I see,
under her chair.
She displays what can only
(audience laughing)
be described as devotion
to the aspiring academics she's mentored.
From working with Deborah
and the Acting Assistant
Professors Program,
I can tell you that it's
absolutely par for the course
for Deborah to monitor their
progress wherever she is,
whether it's in the office, at home,
on vacation in Africa or Hawaii.
Second, Deborah's intellectually honest.
As one colleague who
views Deborah as a mentor
has written to me, quote,
"She never shies away
from speaking tough truths
"and can be brutally honest in
a way that someone only does
"if they deeply care about making you
"and your work better," quote.
Another commented that at our
weekly tax policy colloquium,
Deborah, quote, "lobs incisive
questions and suggestions
"at the speakers, all
while she is knitting."
(audience laughing)
From personal experience,
I'll say that whenever I write a paper,
if I ask Deborah to read
it, I always build in
at least three days to review
and then to recover
from Deborah's comments,
(audience laughing)
which always highlight
every claim and statement
that I should reconsider.
And I'm not surprised if Deborah's honesty
goes beyond intellectual honesty.
One of Deborah's former
students wrote to me, quote,
"In class, when impressing
upon us the broad scope
"of Section 61, all income
from whatever source derived,
"she told us that, as a tax professor,
"if she finds a dime on the street,
"she reports it on her tax return."
(audience laughing)
Last, I will say Deborah is selfless.
While many scholars make their
own scholarship and teaching
their first priority, Deborah
is constantly finding ways
to help other scholars and her students.
There's little personal recognition
that comes from editing
literally tens of thousands
of footnotes in other scholars' articles
so that they can be published
in a peer-edited journal
or from spending countless hours
mentoring aspiring tax academics
or advising her colleagues
regarding their own professional
questions and concerns.
In terms of Deborah's selflessness,
one of my colleagues wrote to me, quote,
"Deborah hates the
spotlight with a passion.
"But at some point, we
have to ignore her wishes
"and toot her horn for her," quote.
Indeed, in just a few
moments, I will consider
one of my greatest
professional accomplishments
to be that I was able to convince Deborah
to accept this award,
(audience laughing)
named in honor of her colleague
and her former office
neighbor, Jim Eustice.
So, for all of these reasons, Deborah,
you are the ideal recipient
of the James S. Eustice
Tax Leadership Award,
and if you could come forward,
I'd like to present the award to you
on behalf of the Law School.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
- I'll just read.
The award says that,
"The James S. Eustice Tax Leadership Award
"is presented to Deborah H. Schenk
"in recognition of her extraordinary
"and inspirational contributions
"as a scholar, teacher,
editor, and colleague."
(audience applauding)
- I will only keep you a minute longer.
I am deeply honored by this.
I thank my colleagues.
I'm deeply honored to receive
the James Eustice Award.
This is all very embarrassing,
so I'm going to tell a short story
that's not very flattering.
10 years ago, at the 60th
anniversary of the tax program,
I was privileged to speak and
actually award Jim Eustice
the first Jim Eustice Award,
and I'm gonna repeat a story I said then.
Not many people read the Tax
Law Review cover to cover,
but Jim did.
He read every footnote.
He read every word.
And whenever there was a
mistake or a wrong pincite
or something missing,
Jim came to my office
and pointed it out to me.
I have a collection of these mistakes.
(audience chuckling)
I only made one
that I deeply regret.
Maybe 20 years ago now,
we dedicated an issue of
the Tax Law Review to Jim.
On that issue, I gave
Jim a new middle initial.
(audience laughing)
Jim came to my office and
he pointed it out to me.
He was very gracious.
And then he went back to his office.
About five minutes later, he
went through his file cabinet
where he kept every piece of paper
that ever came to the Law
School, and he produced
a 1950s Law School Alumni Magazine column,
in which Jim Eustice was
given a different initial,
and he said to me, "Don't
worry; things happen."
(audience laughing)
I assume, by getting this
award, I've been forgiven.
(audience laughing)
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Deborah.
And thank you, all,
for coming this evening
and for your support of
the Graduate Tax Program
and the International Tax Program.
Please join us for a reception.
Thank you, all, for coming.
Have a good night.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(audience chattering)
