TaxProf Blog

Anne L. Alstott (Yale)

• A.B. 1984, Georgetown
• J.D. 1987, Yale

Anne Alstott is Jacquin D. Bierman Professor of Taxation at Yale Law School, where she has taught since 1997. Her colleague, friend, former Treasury boss, and former teacher Michael Graetz is her sole tax colleague at the moment. But the tax tradition at Yale is a rich one: Anne is honored (and daunted) to have predecessors including Marvin Chirelstein and Boris Bittker (still working hard but emeritus).

Before joining the Yale faculty, Anne taught for five happy years at Columbia Law School. At Columbia, Anne was lucky enough to have an office right next to Marvin Chirelstein, who is the world’s funniest and most elegant man – a Cary Grant for our time.

At Columbia and twice at Yale, Anne won the annual teaching award. Her theory is that low student expectations explain her teaching success. Students – especially Yale students – walk in the door expecting tax to be boring, and they find to their surprise that it is a great public policy field. Grateful students then conflate the subject with the teacher.

Anne was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, about a mile from the Indy 500 racetrack. She grew up in Lafayette, Indiana and attended public schools until she left the Midwest to attend Georgetown University and Yale Law School. After a three-year stint at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, she joined the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy as an attorney-advisor. The Treasury group was fantastic – 15-20 young, interesting, committed tax lawyers.

At Treasury, Anne followed her predecessor Adam Handler as the lawyer responsible for day-to-day work on the EITC – a lucky assignment that gave Anne the topic for her first scholarly article. After that, Anne wrote articles defending the estate tax, considering tax policy toward child care and other feminist issues, and advocating an unconditional basic income. Turning to book-writing, she proposed The Stakeholder Society (with her Yale colleague Bruce Ackerman) and just last year published No Exit: What Parents Owe Children and What Society Owes Parents (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Anne’s biggest challenges in the last few years have been teaching Corporate Tax for the first time and serving as Deputy Dean. Corporate Tax led to her latest scholarly project, a historical study of federal taxation in the 1920s. The Deputy Dean job led to her latest hobby, beginning karate.

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