Bridget J. Crawford (Pace)
- B.A. 1991, Yale
- J.D. 1996, Penn
I am an Associate Professor at Pace Law School where I teach Federal Income Tax, Estate & Gift Tax and Feminist Legal Theory. For the Fall 2006 semester, I will be a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where I will be teaching Wills, Trusts & Estates, too.
I love teaching, studying and writing about tax because it is the subject that I have to work at the most to understand the least. I entered law teaching after more than six years as an associate in the Trusts & Estates department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP in New York.
My practice was concerned mostly with estate and tax planning for high net worth individuals. I also did a fair amount of work for tax exempt organizations and financial institutions. I loved my law practice and had the good fortune to work with some of the profession’s most gifted tax lawyers, including Jonathan Blattmachr, Carolyn Clark, Madeline Rivlin, Georgiana Slade and Jim Sligar. I remember that one of my colleagues had hanging in her office an old cartoon from the New Yorker whose caption (loosely paraphrased) read, "The law yields its secrets only after an expensive struggle." At the time, I thought of this as an appropriately justified dig at Wall Street lawyers’ high billing rates. In retrospect, it also sums up nicely why I stayed in law practice as long as I did: the more I learned about the tax law, the harder I realized I needed to work to get the Code to yield its secrets. The Code has a complex elegance and, of course, it is the rare hypothetical that can be as challenging as a real client’s problem. I received a tremendous education at Milbank.
Unfortunately, clients cannot and should not pay for a lawyer to scratch her or his intellectual itches. Luckily now that I have transitioned to the academy, I’ve been able to do that through my scholarship. My first two articles have been about estate and gift tax issues and the ways in which certain tax rules reinforce traditional notions of gender and the family. I have explored the estate and gift tax marital deduction in One Flesh, Two Taxpayers: A New Approach to Wealth Transfer Taxation, 6 Fla. Tax Rev. 757 (2004) and the estate tax definitions of family in The Profits and Perils of Kinship: Conflicting Meanings of Family in Estate Tax Law, 3 Pitt. Tax Rev. (2005). I have had lots of support from the TaxProf community and have met great colleagues all over the country.
My teaching career has gotten off to a running start. I am now in my third year of teaching. In a stroke of beginner’s luck, my first class of students voted me best teacher. I half-jokingly attribute that to low expectations. At my school, tax is a required class which most students think will be absolutely horrible. When it turns out to be half-way decent, my Pace TaxProf colleague, Ron Jensen, and I look great!
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