Lily Batchelder (NYU)
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A.B. 1994, Stanford
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M.P.P. 1999, Harvard, Kennedy School of Government
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J.D. 2002, Yale
Lily initially became interested in tax law for its potential to "simultaneously affect poverty, broad disparities of income and opportunity, and economic growth." After college (Stanford University), she worked as a client advocate in a small soup kitchen in central Brooklyn, which fueled her interest in these issues.
Lily then attended public policy school (Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a Kennedy Fellow and President of the Kennedy School Student Government) and law school at Yale (where she was Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal, Executive Editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Recipient of the Clifford L. Porter Prize for Best Paper on Taxation in 2001 and 2002, Founder and Director of the Pro Bono Network, and Director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Project).
While Lily thought when she was at the Kennedy School that she might want to focus on tax in law school and eventually teach, she says, "I wasn’t sure if tax law just involved rote memorization of rules. It wasn’t until I attended my first tax class in law school and opened the casebook that I fell in love with the subject. Virtually everything I wanted to think about and work on was covered in that class."
Since law school, Lily has been enjoying practicing at Skadden, Arps in Washington and New York, where her practice has focused on a broad array of transactional and tax policy issues. She says she is grateful to her mentors at Skadden, Yale and the Kennedy School for encouraging her to go into teaching. "I still can’t quite believe that I am going to be paid to do this."
Lily will be joining the NYU faculty in January. Her scholarly interests currently center on intersections between tax and social policy. "I am interested in the extent to which tax policy should be used to address some of the economic challenges that individuals and families face, like limited savings, balancing work and family obligations, and income volatility." In her first article, "Taxing the Poor: Income Averaging Reconsidered," 40 Harv. J. on Legis. 395 (2003), she argues that the current income tax system places undue burdens on those with volatile incomes, and makes the seldom-acknowledged point that income volatility is both more pronounced, and more onerous from a tax standpoint, for low-income families. As a solution, Lily proposes a progressive tax policy that, in certain instances, would average incomes over a two-year period.
In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, serving on the board of the soup kitchen where she worked, and watching (generally bad) big-budget action movies.
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