Henry M. Ordower (St. Louis)
- A.B. 1967, Washington University
- M.A. 1970, Chicago
- J.D. 1975, Chicago
“On a dark and stormy night” in March, 1972, I concluded that it was time to abandon the Ph.D. work in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures I had pursued for five years and change to a field offering opportunities for employment and the ability to provide for our two sons. Our third son joined the group during my final year in law school, while my wife Ilene was in the middle of her MBA program at the University of Chicago. With ABD (all but dissertation) in hand, I applied to a couple of law schools. The University of Chicago admitted me. Knowing a degree from the U of C might open the door to law teaching, I put aside the Ph.D. work that still drew me in order to develop myself in law. Twenty-six years later in December 1998, while serving as vice president and general counsel and to an emerging markets, hedge fund manager (on a leave from SLU Law after more than twenty years teaching), Ilene and I, following a rough crossing of the Drake passage, stepped from a zodiac onto Antarctica, our seventh continent (six by the European view). By then all our boys were finished with college and establishing themselves in their careers. Life and tax law indeed have been great to me.
Although I still tell people who ask about the relationship between Scandinavian languages and tax that there is no language quite so foreign as the Internal Revenue Code, it was possibly Walter Blum’s classes in tax that defined my future. I sought to emulate his Socratic mastery and to make my way in his area of expertise. After receiving my law degree in 1975, I took a large firm job in Chicago, but the University of Chicago soon arranged a leave of absence for me to fill-in as a Bigelow Fellow and Instructor when the scheduled Bigelow did not show for the start of the 1975-76 academic year. As luck would have it, my office was next to Walter’s for the year. I worked part time for the firm while I was a Bigelow, then a year full time. Saint Louis University offered me a teaching position for fall 1977 and I have hung around there ever since. With a grandparent and other family in St. Louis, the move was a good choice for the boys and us.
Tax, family, travel have been my passions, languages my principal hobby. Tax has offered enormous intellectual stimulation. I consulted regularly in order to stay in touch with developments in practice and to support my travel habit. I try to keep up my languages both with visits to other countries and reading fiction in each language. As to travel, with kids in tow, we spent every school vacation driving around the United States, Iceland, the Soviet Union, most of Europe, parts of Asia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and South America. Of the Soviet Union, the boys commented that the U.S. had nothing to fear from such an undeveloped, poor, and chaotic place. When the boys stopped traveling with us, Ilene and I continued and have visited over one hundred countries and 49 states – I have never been to Oklahoma, but I’ve been to heavenly Bhutan. Travel now takes a back seat to our four grandchildren, all in the New York City area, where we spend every free moment.
My publication focus has been a bit eclectic – the flexibility of teaching is wonderful – from law and literature to transactional legal ethics to estate planning to technical tax matters. Most recently, I have begun to shift focus to comparative tax law but have been distracted lately by the need to write something about hedge funds (soon out of the way). I am the general reporter for the tax section of the 17th quadrennial Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in the Netherlands this July since I designed the project that examines the intersections of taxation and constitutional law. For the past several years, I have been a co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at SLU, doing a fair amount of lecturing overseas and developing exchange relationships. I taught a couple of times in Germany for five or six weeks and will again this coming summer, and once in China.
I have no regrets, although I must confess that I have looked wistfully at a tenured faculty member of a major law school whose publications involve the Icelandic family saga (the area of my uncompleted dissertation). Who would have thought that I might have captured tenure in law teaching without really changing fields? Oh well, tax law is more fun and less bloody, and there probably would not have been much consulting work in Icelandic literature.
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