Nancy A. McLaughlin (Utah)
-
B.S. 1987, University of Massachusetts
- J.D. 1990, University of Virginia
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts with an honors degree in psychology and having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa and appointed a Phi Kappa Phi math scholar, I left my home state to attend law school in lovely Charlottesville, Virginia. It was there that I met my husband (a Virginia native, whose family was alarmed at the prospect of his marrying a Yankee) and discovered my affinity for tax law.
I spent my first years after law school working in the tax department of Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in corporate and international tax. At that firm, in between REMIC and REIT deals, I helped the Australian syndicate that won $28 million in the Virginia lottery avoid U.S. taxation of the winnings. I eventually moved back to Charlottesville to join the estate planning department of the McGuireWoods law firm, where I was able to combine my interests in tax law, the outdoors, and land conservation by helping landowners both protect their land and accomplish their income and estate tax planning objectives through the conveyance of conservation easements. I also had the pleasure of teaching Estate & Gift Tax as an adjunct at the University of Virginia Law School (thanks, in large part, to Robert Danforth (Washington & Lee), who encouraged me to pursue a career in teaching), and it was that teaching experience and my desire to influence environmental policy through my writing that led me to seek a permanent teaching position.
I joined the faculty at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2000, where I have been able to successfully combine my interests in tax law and environmental policy. I teach Federal Income Tax, Trusts & Estates, Estate Planning, and Private Land Conservation, and soon will teach Property and the Federal Income Tax course from an environmental perspective. I am a member of the faculty of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the College of Law, which hosts annual workshops, conferences and symposia that address a variety of natural resource and environmental issues. My expertise in private land conservation and the use of tax and other financial incentives to promote land conservation adds an important dimension to the Stegner Center as the federal government, state and local governments, and the nonprofit sector are increasingly relying on voluntary (versus regulatory) measures to accomplish land protection goals. In March of 2005, I organized and spoke at the Stegner Center’s 10th Annual Symposium, Private Property and Nature Conservation: Land Ownership in the 21st Century, which aired to a sold-out audience of over 250 people from around the country.
This past year I was invited to speak about conservation easements, the appropriate use of tax and other financial incentives to promote land conservation, and private land conservation issues in general at a variety of both academic and nonacademic venues around the country, including the Conference of State Planning Directors in the West; the Land Trust Alliance’s National and Southwest Conferences; the Certificate Program in Environmental and Land Use Law at Florida State University College of Law; the Environmental Law Conference at Yosemite; the 13th Biennial Natural Resources Law Teachers’ Institute; and a Roundtable on Conservation Easement Reform at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I have been asked to serve as a member of the policy group on easement amendments formed by the Land Trust Alliance, which is the umbrella organization for the nation’s land trusts, and as an advisory board member to Vital Ground, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to protect grizzly bear habitat on privately-owned land. I continue to serve as a member of the board of trustees of Utah Open Lands, a nonprofit conservation organization that works to protect land throughout the state of Utah, and as an associate editor for probate and trust for the ABA’s Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal, which helps me keep abreast of the latest developments in probate and trust law.
I was pleased to note that the Senate Finance Committee cited to one of my articles regarding the difficult issue of conservation easement valuation in its June 2005 report on The Nature Conservancy and the federal tax incentives offered to easement donors (so my goal of influencing policy seems like it might just be attainable). I was also happy to receive the 2005 American Agricultural Law Association’s Professional Scholarship Award for my article Rethinking the Perpetual Nature of Conservation Easements, 29 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 421 (2005), and the Probate & Property Editors’ 2004 Excellence in Writing Award for my article Questionable Conservation Easement Donations, 18 Prob. & Prop. 40 (2004).
The Tanner Humanities Center has awarded me a one-semester in-residence research fellowship for the 2006-2007 academic year, which I will combine with a one-semester sabbatical to take a year’s leave from teaching. I plan to use the leave time to complete a book entitled Conservation Easements: An Experiment in Land Preservation. The book will explore the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of our attitudes in this country toward land use and private property ownership; how those attitudes led to the prominence of the conservation easement as a private land protection tool; and how those attitudes may be evolving in response to the public/private co-ownership of property that results from conservation easement conveyances. The book will also examine the laws and policies undergirding the use of conservation easements (including federal tax laws), and offer much-needed guidance as to how such laws and policies should be interpreted and shaped to ensure that conservation easements are able to deliver the long-term public benefit they promise.
When not teaching, researching, or writing, I enjoy exploring the backcountry with my husband, James, and our 170lb Pyrenean Mastiff, Toso. We are often fortunate to catch a glimpse of the diverse wildlife that inhabits the more remote parts of this country—and I am extraordinarily lucky to be able to devote my professional energies to protecting what I find precious.
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.
