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

Whenever someone asks me how I became interested in tax, I tell them it’s genetic: Mom’s a CPA, and Dad’s a banker, and by the time I got to college, I already knew I was interested in tax. Even in college, I was intrigued by the realization that the tentacles of the tax system reach into almost every nook and cranny of people’s lives. It seems like no matter what one does, there is a corresponding potential tax consequence. After graduating from college (Trinity University in San Antonio), I practiced as a CPA for almost five years for small firms in Denver and Dallas, which I really enjoyed. After a while, however, I started feeling limited in my accounting practice by the fact that I wasn’t a lawyer; and I was also frustrated as a practicing accountant by the time and billing limitations on my ability just to explore the issues I uncovered. So I decided to go to law school with the idea that I might want to be a tax professor.

Still, I didn’t follow that path immediately. While I was in law school at Northwestern in Chicago, I enjoyed several tax courses with Charlotte Crane and a really great course in taxation of financial instruments with Julie Roin (now at Chicago) when she visited Northwestern during my second year; but I took even more non-tax courses, including several in constitutional law. Indeed, while my interest in tax is obviously long-lived, it was doing independent research on the Chevron doctrine in law school with Tom Merrill (now at Columbia), followed by my clerkship with Judge David Sentelle at the D.C. Circuit, that I developed an equally strong affection for administrative law. I ultimately returned to tax, practicing at Skadden, Arps in Chicago after my clerkship; and I learned just a tremendous amount particularly about corporate and international taxation working with the fantastic folks in Skadden’s tax department. Despite the excellent caliber of work Skadden has to offer, just as before when I was an accountant, I found myself frustrated by time and billing limitations and by the practical necessity of planning transactions to avoid tax issues rather than taking the time to contemplate how those issues might be resolved.

So, after one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor back at Northwestern, I’m delighted to be settling in here at Minnesota. I’m teaching Tax I this fall and Administrative Law in the spring, and next year I will pick up another tax class – hopefully International Tax. I’ve developed a research agenda that combines my longtime interest in tax with my more recently discovered fascination with administrative law. Following up on my work with Tom Merrill (which culminated in our article, Chevron’s Domain, 89 Geo. L.J. 833 (2001)), I’m currently working to finish an article on judicial deference principles as applied in the tax context. I’ve also got ideas for a few international tax projects.

Meanwhile, after the whirlwind of law school, clerking, and Skadden, I’m trying to get back to a more balanced existence. My husband, Trey, and I welcomed our wonderful little boy, Charles, into the world earlier this year. We also bought an old Arts & Crafts house that needs a lot of work here in St. Paul, so we have a long list of home improvement projects to keep us busy through the long, cold Minnesota winter.

Each Saturday, TaxProf Blog shines the spotlight on one of the 700+ tax professors in America’s law schools. We hope to help bring the many individual stories of scholarly achievements, teaching innovations, public service, and career moves within the tax professorate to the attention of the broader tax community. Please email me suggestions for future Tax Prof Profiles, particularly for our series on new tax professors. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.