SPEAKER_01: 0:00

What was it like telling Congress what's broken?

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

I always tell people the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.

SPEAKER_01: 0:06

What does distance running teach you that's useful in tax law or in building this program over decades?

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Diligence and preparation. Success breeds success, right?

SPEAKER_01: 0:17

So, Fred, you started as an electrical engineer at Rutgers. What was the moment the law pulled you away from engineering?

SPEAKER_00: 0:28

It actually pulled me away even before I started as an electrical engineering major. So when I went to college, I I sort of had it in my back of my mind I was going to go to law school after college. And I really can't tell you why. I don't know. Growing up, things were maybe not different, but there's only like a few professions that I sort of was thinking about. One was being a lawyer, one was being a doctor, possibly being an engineer. I can't tell you why. I don't know. Just maybe those were the professions that people looked at as far as being achieving some success. So I thought about, I guess I thought a little bit about being a doctor. My father's a pharmacist. My brother actually then became a medical doctor. But I don't know, it just maybe just as young people are, like fear of blood and that kind of stuff. So it seemed to me that law was probably the better choice among those different professions. But I also had a proclivity for like math and science. When I went to college, I said, well, I think I'd rather major in something more scientific. So I got into Rectors School of Engineering. And I and even though I didn't have enough foresight at the time to see whether that would be a good background for law, I've convinced myself over the years I think it's a very good background for law. Because engineering or any kind of hard science requires you to think analytically, to work your way through very dense material and problem solve. So yeah, I guess what I have one regret is that it might have been better if I actually tried engineering a bit afterwards, because I didn't. I just I got the degree and I immediately then enrolled in law school. So that's one bit of a regret that I have. There's been a lot of good that came out of it. I think overall it's been a good career. As far as like tax law, I think engineering and tax law, they there's a a lot of common elements there. You're dealing with complicated formulas all the time. And tax law is more or less like that. These code provisions are just a bunch of, I think, verbal formulas. And it takes a lot of the same skills, I think, that you need as an engineer to work your way through these complicated formulas and very dense material. And I've seen in my after I went into law school and then I started practicing and then in academia, I I I've seen it's not that uncommon to see tax lawyers having a background in math and science. A lot of them have background in accounting, but like people I worked with when I was practicing, one was an engineer, and the other one was a physics major. So these are people I worked very closely with. So I think it it it was more happenstance than anything, but I do think it it turned out to be a very good preparation for what I ended up doing.

SPEAKER_01: 3:30

You graduated from NYU for your tax LLM. Then you chose U Ball.

SPEAKER_00: 3:35

So choosing U Ball, first of all, I was excited by the fact that they had a graduate tax program. Whereas other schools that I was looking at, and let me say, when you're looking for a job as a law teacher, it's a little bit like I guess being a professional athlete. There's only so many jobs out there, right? There's 200 law schools, okay, so more than let's say Major League Baseball teams, but still there's 200. And in any given time, they're all not looking for new professors, and they're all certainly not looking for tax professors. So it is somewhat limited. And even though, yeah, I had a pretty good resume at the time, I think it was like seven callback interviews or something like that. And yeah, so UBalt's grad tax program excited me because it gave me the opportunity to teach multiple tax courses. Whereas your typical law school that doesn't have a grad tax program, they'll offer, like, say, basic tax, at that time, maybe corporate and partnership tax, but probably not much beyond that. So that was exciting. I mean, I like the people there, certainly. They were the people some of them were still there, and it seemed like a very good collegial atmosphere. And and I guess also, too, that i i it was close to home. That was another factor. So at that time I just got married, but no children, and my parents were still alive, my siblings are in the area, fairly close by New Jersey. So that was certainly a factor as well. So it was a combination of the ability to teach multiple tax courses, liking the people there, as well as proximity to my parents and siblings at the time. I joined UBault in fall of 90, and the program began in the LM and program began in fall of 87. And it and actually UBault actually had an MS and tax program, I think it was started like in the early 80s. So in fall of 87, they added the LM program, and then they made it this combined graduate tax program. It wasn't my doing. Although I do think it's a great thing to have accountants and lawyers and even law students in the same classroom. I think that it does allow for an environment where everybody can share ideas, and you know, most of course the learning is from the instructor. Students make really interesting points as well, especially the students that we have at UBault, almost all of them are working either part-time or full-time, most of them full-time, and they have a lot of experiences they could share. And so I do think it's a very enriching environment to have accountants and lawyers in the same classroom.

SPEAKER_01: 6:15

You arrived in fall of 90 to the program. What was the first thing you knew that you wanted to change?

SPEAKER_00: 6:23

I had prior teaching experience at NYU. So after I got my LM in tax, and actually during while I was getting my LM in tax, I discovered, I didn't even know this, that NYU will hire for temporary teaching positions people to teach for maybe a couple years after getting an LM. And they usually look to the current class. Not always, but the people in the current LM class are people that they're thinking about hiring, if they're interested, to work as what they called an acting assistant professor for either one or two years thereafter. So when this opportunity arose, I I applied and I was fortunate enough to receive it. So that was a learning experience, let me tell you. At NYU, they had the new professors teaching often a course, let's say that maybe the full-timers didn't want to teach, so it was tax practice and procedure. So I taught that, and then I taught another course called focused or more IRS administrative. It was everything. It was a full realm of tax practice and procedures. Following basically doing looking at all the deficiency procedures, the refund procedures, penalties, and and they're I'm surprised they didn't want to teach that. That was too dull for them. That's the thing. And they usually would have and I also got to teach another course my second year called, I think we called it tax one. It was like timing issues in federal income taxation. And that was interesting. And that was a course that not all acting assistants taught, but I got to teach that because I stayed on for not just taught for one full year, I also taught during the summer, and then I felt taught for the next full year as well. So I had some more opportunities to teach, and I got to teach that course. So anyway, but they were very helpful, the people at NYU. They shared, they would give me their notes and things like that. But I was more or less on my own for the first semester, and as far as just teaching and not really getting feedback, but I got tons of feedback on my student avows, and that really helped me a lot because I was, I really didn't know exactly what I was doing. And the student avows I felt were really invaluable. So I learned a lot about teaching in those two years. And by the time I got to my second year, I think I was pretty good. At least the avows indicated that I was good. So I learned when I was teaching there, so you're asking what to change. I don't know if change is the right word, but when I was in law school, law school was pretty much, as far as professor was concerned, it was more of an audio experience rather than a visual audio experience. That is, most professors did not use even the, we don't think we had whiteboards then, the blackboard. Yeah, they'd scribble something once in a while, but it was pretty much one-dimensional. They would talk, they would question us, we would listen, write down, but you didn't have the sort of visual experience. And that's something, at least in most courses. But in some of the courses, you had that. And that's something that I tried to incorporate right away. So I was right starting at NYU, I was really heavy with board use, diagramming things, writing out sort of shorthand the formulas. And that's something that I continued at Baltimore. And then around, I don't know, 15 years or so ago, I basically switched over to PowerPoint, but kind of using the same thing. But also still, if I'm teaching in the classroom, having some board use. So I don't know if to change because I think people maybe at Baltimore were doing the same thing. I'm not sure. As a young professor, you don't really visit other people's classes. But that was something that I tried to incorporate. I tried to make it a multi-dimensional experience, not just a talking head.

SPEAKER_01: 10:04

How often do you reminisce about that first year of teaching at NYU?

SPEAKER_00: 10:07

It was a learning experience. It wasn't great. So I do look back sometimes at some of the things I didn't do right. For example, I was doing a lot of lecturing, I was doing a lot of reading of my notes. I mean, today I almost never read notes, but as part of it was nerves and not exactly knowing what you're doing. So yeah, I look back sometimes of things that I certainly could have done better.

SPEAKER_01: 10:32

Fred, walk me through those early days of the program.

SPEAKER_00: 10:36

Walter Shredetsky, who's still teaching at the school, he was my prime mentor. And he was very helpful. I still have notes in my discussions with him about bouncing ideas off him as far as not just law, but but teaching as well. So he was extremely helpful. Another colleague of mine at the time was Wendy Gerzog. So we would have a lot of conversations as well about teaching tax. We used to have also Jack Lynch. He both Jack and Walter have retired now. But Jack was also very helpful as well because he taught some tax courses. And we used to have for a while, like sort of tax lunches, like the tax group would go out to lunch, and we would we would discuss teaching tax or tax in general. So that was all, I think, really good about getting me more knowledge from more experienced people about teaching, and and just too, like just talking about the law. I mean, tax law, the thing about it is that, and I remember when I was a summer associate back in this is I had a job in Atlantic City after my first year of law school, and there was like one tax person in this law firm. And I remember one time he said to us the difficulty about being the one tax person is there's nobody to talk to. And what he meant was there's nobody really to bounce ideas off of. And and taxes just, as you know, is it's a very difficult area. And it was really good to have. And that's another advantage you bought at that time was that you had multiple tax professors that you could just run ideas by and just sanity checks and and the like just to make sure that you were understanding things something well. So that was very helpful.

SPEAKER_01: 12:16

And your faculty has included tax court judges, IRS chief counsel attorneys, the former head of OJ Tax Division. How do you pitch Baltimore to that?

SPEAKER_00: 12:27

Well, part of it was uh historical. So the program was it it began in 1987, and actually the founder of the program was a tax court judge. His name was Howard Dawson. He passed away about 10 years ago, but he again I wasn't there, but I believe he took like a temporary leave of absence from the tax court, and he had some kind of professor status for a couple years, and he had a lot of credibility, and he basically he and I think Professor Shrodetsky were the ones that really put the program together, and I think Jack Lynch as well. But it was Judge Dawson, I think, who kind of took the lead there. And then so Judge Dawson taught on the program for a few years, and then I guess convinced some of his colleagues to do the same. So I think ever since 1987, we've always had a tax court judge that has taught in the program. So part of it is just that Judge Dawson started to start in this tradition, and other judges followed it as well. So it's really not my doing. It's just that it was started by a tax court judge, and and thank thankfully the tax court has continued. So today it doesn't matter as much because we have all of our classes now are online. But you know, going back even just a few years, we would have in-person classes. So having proximity to Baltimore was important, and it was convenient for not just the judges, but for IRS personnel to want to come to Baltimore to teach. So I think it was more, it was proximity that helped. And then I think that once you sort of get that pipeline going, I think we're well known now among, let's say, IRS Office of Chief Counsel. So it's been really surprisingly easy to get really good people from that department to teach in our program as far as being uh a head position in DOJ. So Caroline's a graduate of the program. So she graduated the LM program, I think it was right around the early mid-90s. She's been really very good to us as far as wanting to teach in the program, giving something back. So there's a lot of historical and proximity and other factors that allow us to really get excellent, not just judges, but IRS officials to teach in the program. Having very good faculty is real key. And, you know, not just people who are knowledgeable, I mean they're all extremely knowledgeable, but you know, people who can teach well. And, you know, I I try to make a strong effort to make sure that the quality of teaching is there. So I will review professors, review evaluations, and yeah, trying to maintain that high standard.

SPEAKER_01: 15:01

Aaron Powell There's someone out there listening, perhaps, who wants to be an adjunct professor in tax law. What would you advise them?

SPEAKER_00: 15:08

Aaron Powell It depends on the area, but schools are usually looking for people to be adjuncts. So I think there are a lot of opportunities there. So initiative, reaching out to the law schools. Usually the people at law schools that make these decisions are the associate dean for academic affairs, reach out to those people, or if you're interested in teaching in a graduate tax program, obviously the director of the program. It's so I think that if if you're expert in a certain area and that school is looking, has a need, I I think apply, put your best case, best foot forward. I think that as far as what do we look for in adjuncts, not just interest and expertise, but if somebody has experience in doing CLEs or other sort of public presentations, I mean that's very helpful to give the people making decisions, you know, some information about your experience of presenting material. It's the thing about adjunct teaching is that it requires a tremendous amount of dedication. These people are all working full-time, and the very first time you teach a course, no matter how expert you are, there's a lot of preparation that goes into it. Because even if you're an expert in a certain area, there's an excellent chance that you don't know everything super well, so you have to make sure that you have the other things down. I always tell people the best way to learn a subject is to teach it, which I think is true, because you really you want to not just when you're teaching a course, in my opinion, you you just don't want to be prepared as far as teaching the material you expect to cover in class, but you want to try to anticipate as well, like other issues that maybe are tangential, that students are interested in, that you might get questions on. So you really do have to be fully into the material and I think prepare quite a bit beyond just what you intend to cover in class.