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students real-life experience reading deal documents and exploring the tax provisions in them. The final exam is a deal document with questions. Like many law students, Hayes Holderness ’11, LLM ’12 wasn’t initially interested in tax. But Schenk’s 1L income tax course changed that. After a tax policy fellowship at the Joint Committee on Taxation and an LLM in tax, he is now an associate at McDermott Will & Emery in New York focused on state and local tax issues. “The environment at NYU helped me to form not only a good understanding of the tax law,” he says, “but also a love for it.” While students who will practice in the US hunker down in deals documents or learn the ins and outs of employee benefits law, an increasing number of foreign students choose to study tax in the US. A select few foreign students will study in the International Tax Program, launched in 1997. Director H. David Rosenbloom, James S. Eustice Visiting Professor of Taxation and member at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, describes it as a tightly knit intellectual oasis with a maximum of 30 students from around the world. “It’s very intensive,” says Rosenbloom, who is an expert in tax treaties, some of which he helped negotiate during his time as international tax counsel at the Treasury Department’s Office of International Tax Affairs in the late 1970s. “It’s an education in tax and in internationalism.” Tax policy might be more in vogue and intellectually interesting than tax practice, but the reality is that most tax lawyers will wind up at law firms. And as the legal market gets squeezed, having more specialized knowledge up front is not just an advantage but also a necessity. “It’s important for grads today to show prospective employers they can deliver immediate value,” Steines says. “Particularly in view of the economic condition of the legal profession, it is important that law schools not forget that most people view them as professional schools.”
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NYU/KPMG Tax Lecture Series, and even an annual tax movie night, which this year featured episodes from The Honeymooners and The Simpsons. As tax becomes more complex and the legal market changes, the Graduate Tax Progam has been adding even more classes that will better prepare students for jobs as tax lawyers. There are now more in-depth classes on issues in state and local taxation, for example, and specialized courses that focus on transactional tax planning. In a new course on tax deals, students read merger agreements and try to understand how the deal was structured and why. Another new offering focuses on accounting for tax consequences, a nod to the closer relationship between accountants and tax lawyers. “We are working with the faculty to incorporate a level of practical training into the substantive classes,” Blank says. The faculty is also moving rapidly into online education, making sure that tax classes are available for time-pressed attorneys across the nation. Since 2008, NYU Law has offered the Executive LLM in Tax in an entirely digital format. “Our online program is thriving,” Blank says. It currently has roughly 100 students, several of whom are experienced partners in law firms and high-ranking lawyers in accounting firms. Blank and Graduate Tax Program Director John Stephens have worked closely with the faculty to expand the number of online courses offered. With streaming software that’s used by some of the most popular movie services, the online classes give the feel of being in the classroom, with chalkboard scrawls turned into detailed graphics. Adjunct Professor Sarah Lawsky, for example, created the online Tax Deals course. Tax ramifications are an increasingly important consideration in mergers and acquisitions, and the course seeks to give
looking forward
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enjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Paying taxes, however much you may personally grumble about it, is part of the social contract. And as last year’s presidential debates heated up over the taxes paid by the one percent and what type of social safety net we as a country want to have, the critical role of tax policy was impossible to ignore. While the fiscal cliff deal at the end of last year settled tax policy for individuals, both Democrats and Republicans have continued to talk about the possibilities for major tax reform, something that has not happened since 1986. Since last fall, both Senator Baucus (who has announced he will retire in 2015) and Congressman Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, have been working up their proposals and have issued 10 bipartisan options papers. “We’re going full steam ahead,” Batchelder says. “The chairman really wants to do tax reform. It’s an extremely ambitious goal, and there are a lot of challenges, but we’re going to work as hard as we can to make it happen.” The debates in Washington echoed back at NYU Law with a series of evening discussions called Pathways to Tax Reform, to look at ideas that range from the possible to the radical. What sort of tax reform should happen? What might it mean? Interesting questions worth pondering, and studying.
Amy Feldman is a New York-based business journalist. She writes a tax column for Reuters, and contributes to Fortune and Barron’s.