J. Clifton Fleming (BYU)
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B.S. 1964, BYU
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J.D. 1967, George Washington University
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).
No one in my family had been a lawyer and the only thing I knew for certain about lawyers was that my father despised Clarence Darrow for getting Leopold and Loeb out of the death penalty. I went to law school largely because I was unemployable with my B.S. in political science, some of my friends were going and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I chose George Washington University because my pre-law adviser said I was unlikely to get a scholarship and could probably work nights as a Capitol Hill security guard if I needed money.
The 1L year was terrifying. The 2L and 3L years were mostly boring, particularly the only tax course I took. It focused strictly on income items and deductions with no economic or policy analysis. Relief came in the form of law review work and a couple of competition law courses that were taught as elegant structure with a decent policy component. I really liked them.
So I agreed to join a Seattle law firm as an antitrust associate. After I had cut off all my other employment prospects, the firm announced that I would be assigned to the tax department under the harshest taskmaster in the office. When I saw the document review work that the antitrust lawyers were doing, I was ecstatic to be railroaded into tax. Moreover, the harsh taskmaster turned out to be a great teacher, though not a gentle one, and I got six years of terrific training in substantive tax law, tax planning and general transactional lawyering. But I still knew almost nothing about tax policy.
In 1973, I started teaching tax full time at the new University of Puget Sound Law School (now Seattle University Law School) and began educating myself out of my policy deficit by reading the classics. I moved to the new Brigham Young University Law School in 1974.
My wife, Linda, and I took five small children to Kenya where I taught Kenyan tax law in 1977-78 as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Nairobi. I learned a lot that year from looking at taxation through the lens of third world scarcity instead of the lens of American abundance.
Then it was back to BYU until the summer of 1985 when my wife and I took five of our six kids to Washington, D.C. where I worked for a year as Professor-in-Residence in the IRS Chief Counsel’s office. This was a terrific learning experience. I did most of my work with co-Professor-in-Residence, Bob Peroni, which has led to a very productive collaboration in international tax.
I returned to BYU in the summer of 1986 as associate dean. The dean said I could get out of the job after two-three years but I didn’t escape until June 1, 2004 – a grueling 18 year run. It wasn’t all bad, however, and I was named to the Ernest L. Wilkinson Chair in 1998.
I was doing most of my publishing in corporate tax and had written one subchapter C treatise and co-authored a second with my law school friend Janet Spragens. One day in 1996, a letter arrived announcing that my publisher had been acquired by another with competing treatises, that my books were being discontinued and that the publisher hoped I had a nice day. Fortunately, Joseph Dodge, Debby Geier and I had begun work on a basic tax casebook that yielded a third edition last summer. Moreover, I had done international tax in practice and had always wanted to return to it as an academic. I took the demise of my corporate tax treatises as a sign and began the collaboration with Bob Peroni that has absorbed virtually all my scholarly energy that’s not taken up in working with Joseph and Debby.
Working with these collaborators has been the most intensely educational time of my life and I can’t say enough about the rewards of partnering with bright people.
In recent years, I’ve been teaching principles of international taxation each April-May at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. The students are young lawyers from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia who are pursuing LLM and SJD degrees. This is principally a labor of love which I hope contributes towards building a competent and ethical legal profession in a region that is troubled and where it’s not clear that the good guys will win. In spite of this uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, it’s very rewarding to try to help things turn out right.
My wife and I have raised our six children and now have six grandchildren. Fortunately all are concentrated in Utah and California and we enjoy them enormously.
My wife and I also enjoy academic visits. We’ve been to the University of Florida and three times to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, as well as our annual trips to Hungary.
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.
