TaxProf Blog

Joseph M. Dodge (Florida State)

• B.A. 1963, Harvard
• L.L.B. 1967, Harvard
• LL.M. (Taxation) 1973, NYU   

In this three-part series, we profile the authors of one of the truly great federal income tax casebooks: Federal Income Tax: Doctrine, Structure and Policy — Text, Cases, Problems (LexisNexis, 3d ed. 2004), by Joseph M. Dodge (Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson Professor of Law, Florida State), J. Clifton Fleming Jr. (Associate Dean & Ernest L. Wilkinson Professor of Law, Brigham Young University, J. Reuben Clark Law School), and Deborah A. Geier (Leon M. and Gloria Plevin Endowed Professor of Law, Cleveland State University, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law).

The authors share some of the background of how the book came to be:

Cliff:  Joseph Dodge and I had known each other for a long time through the ABA Tax Section. He called one day in 1992 and said he had a draft manuscript for a casebook and an expression of interest from Michie and asked if I wanted to join in getting to the finished product. Joseph’s stature as a tax scholar made the invitation both flattering and appealing and I promptly accepted. We thought that it would be a good idea to have a third author to help with the work and broaden the market appeal. We approached some senior academics and were turned down. But Eric Jensen had earlier told me that a young teacher named Debby Geier was supersmart and the 10th Circuit judge for whom she had clerked said the same thing. Based on that, I had invited her to speak on an ABA Tax Section program and she was terrific. So although she was a relatively junior faculty member, Joseph agreed that I should invite her to join the book project. She accepted. We thought that there was a place for a book that made heavy use of problems and provided more explanatory text than was the norm. We have also worked on developing coherent and sensible organizational structures. The evolution of our organizational efforts has currently brought us to an approach in which we constantly ask students to tie their positive law learning back to tax policy norms and to the tension between income taxation and consumption taxation, which we regard as one of the overarching tax stories of the current era.

Joseph: I don’t know if I had a "contract," but I had a skeleton for a book. I think I met Debby at some professional meeting just before then. My recollection is that we approached Alice Abreu (with whom Cliff might have worked on something) and George Yin.

Debby:  Cliff Fleming approached me at an AALS Tax Section meeting in 1992 or 1993 to ask if I would be interested in joining a new Basic Tax book for which Joseph got a contract from Michie (now LexisNexis). I had worked with Cliff on an ABA Teaching Taxation mini-program that he put together on divorce taxation. I had never met Joseph at this point, but of course I knew of his reputation. I think Joseph and Cliff may have asked Alice Abreu first, but she declined. So I was the lucky beneficiary of their busy schedules!

Joseph Dodge is one of the giants of the tax academy.  Before returning to his native Florida in 2001 as the Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler, Alhadeff & Sitterson Professor of Law at Florida State, Joseph spent twenty-three years on the faculty at Texas (the last sixteen years as William H. Francis, Jr. Professor of Law) where, with Calvin Johnson (since 1981) and Mark Gergen (since 1986), he helped Texas establish a reputation as one of the strongest tax faculties in the country (a tradition they have continued with Mark Ascher (since 2000) and Bob Peroni (since 2003)).  Joseph began his career at the University of Detroit School of Law in 1973, where he rose through the ranks and became tenured before leaving for Texas in 1979. Joseph also has been a visiting professor at UCLA and Utah.

After graduating with a B.A. from Harvard in 1963, Joseph worked for a year as a business analyst for Arthur D. Little Co. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He then went to Harvard Law School and, after graduation, worked for two years as a consultant on foreign law for Nagashima & Ohno in Tokyo, Japan before working as an associate for two law firms (Goodsill, Quinn & Anderson, Honolulu, Hawaii, and Silverstein and Mullens, Washington, D.C.)

Joseph has published over a dozen important books in addition to his income tax casebook, including:

• The Logic of Tax (West Group, 1989)
• Wills, Trusts, and Estate Planning (West Group, 1988)

But he is perhaps best known as the author of over two dozen major law review articles, including:

• Inflated Tax Basis and the Quarter-Trillion-dollar Revenue Question, 106 Tax Notes 453 (Jan. 24, 2005) (with Jay A. Soled)
• Comparing a Reformed Estate Tax with an Accessions Tax and an Income-Inclusion System, and Abandoning the Generation-Skipping Tax, 56 SMU L. Rev. 551 (2003)
• A Deemed-Realization Rule for Gratuitous Transfers is Superior to Carryover Basis and Avoids Most of the Problems of the Estate and Gift Tax, 54 Tax L. Rev. 421 (2001)
• Accessions to Wealth, Realizations of Gross Income, and Dominion and Control: Applying the “Claim of Right Doctrine” to Found Objects, Including Record-Setting Baseballs, 4 Fla. Tax Rev. 685 (2000)
• Lifting the Shroud Over Estate of Hubert: The Logic of the Income and Estate Tax Treatment of Estate Administration Expenses, 3 Fla. Tax Rev. (1998)
• A Feminist Perspective on the QTIP Trust and the Unlimited Marital Deduction, 76 N.C. L. Rev. 1729 (1998)
• A Pass-Through Replacement to Subchapter J – Putting It in Perspective, 14 Amer. J. Tax Pol’y 267 (1997)
• Taxation of Gratuitous Transfers Under a Consumption Tax, 51 Tax L. Rev. 529 (1996)
• A Combined Mark-To-Market and Pass-Through Corporate Shareholder Integration Proposal, 50 Tax L. Rev. 265 (1995)
• Further Thoughts on Realizing Gains and Losses at Death, 47 Vand. L. Rev. 1827 (1994)
• Taxing Human Capital Acquisitions Costs – Or Why Costs of Higher Education Should Not Be Deducted or Amortized, 54 Ohio St. L.J. 927 (1993)
• Scholarships Under the Income Tax, 45 Tax Law. 697 (1993)
• Taxes and Torts, 77 Cornell L. RevI. 601 (1992)
• Zarin v. Commissioner: Musings on Cancellation of Indebtedness Income and ‘Consumption’ in an Income Tax Base, 45 Tax L. Rev. 677 (1990).
• Redoing the Federal Estate and Gift Taxes Along Easy-To-Value Lines, 43 Tax L. Rev. 241 (1988),
• Retentions, Receipts, Transfers, and Accumulations of Income and Income Rights: Thoughts on the Post-Byrum Role of Federal Estate Tax Sections 2036, 2037, 2039, and 2043, 58 Tex. L. Rev. 1 (1979)
• Beyond Estate and Gift Tax Reform: Including Gifts and Bequests in Income, 91 Harv. L. Rev. 1177 (1978)
• Generation-Skipping Transfers After the Tax Reform Act of 1976, 125 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1265 (1976)
• Substantial Ownership and Substance vs. Form: Proposals for Unification of Federal Estate and Gift Taxes and for Taxation of Generation-Skipping Transfers, 1976 U. Ill. L. F. (1976)

For a complete listing of Joseph’s scholarly publications, see here.

Joseph is a member of the American College of Trust & Estate Counsel and has been Chair of both the Tax Section and the Donative Transfers Section of the AALS.

Joseph’s hobbies include the production of art works (oil, acrylic and pastel painting; drawing; welded steel), photography, and art collecting.

[Editor’s note: one of the proudest moments of my career was convincing Joseph (along with nine of my other tax heroes) to participate in a scholarly project that became the Tax Stories book, which created the template for the new Law Stories Series of books from Foundation Press that will soon beget Business Tax Stories among over twenty additional titles.  Joseph work laid the foundation as the opening chapter, The Story of Glenshaw Glass: Toward a Modern Concept of Gross Income.]

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. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here.