For over 30 years, the University of Florida Graduate Tax Program has been one of the nation’s leading programs for the advanced study of tax law. Among the country’s 30 graduate tax programs, Florida has by far the largest number of full-time faculty and is the only school to offer three advanced tax degrees:
Graduate tax students assist in the publication of the Florida Tax Review, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed tax journals in the country. In this 12-part series, TaxProf Blog will profile the Florida Graduate Tax Faculty.
Martin J. McMahon, Jr. is the Clarence J. TeSelle Professor of Law at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the Graduate Tax Program, although neither he nor anyone else is quite sure how he ended up there. He is a 1971 graduate of Rutgers College, where he majored in narcolepsy and minored in economics, in which his principal focus was socialist and communist economic systems. Since his senior thesis — researched in part in Russian-language Soviet economic journals, which was difficult since Marty didn’t read Russian all that well — predicted, based on the Soviet economic journal articles, that the Soviet centrally planned economic system would eventually give way to a more market-oriented system, he didn’t see any future as a communist economist. (Nevertheless, some people, particularly Ira Shepard, continue to this day to call him a “commie” after reading his various articles on progressive taxation.) So Marty started looking for something else to do.
When he discovered that any decent Ph.D. program in economics required a lot more calculus than the mathophobic young Marty was capable of mastering, he hired someone much smarter than he was to take the LSAT, and the resulting score got him admitted to Boston College Law School, from which he graduated in 1974. While in law school Marty spent most of his time playing racquetball, but in between matches took a few tax classes with Paul McDaniel, who introduced him to tax expenditure analysis. Marty and tax law experienced love at first sight, and ever since they have been inseparable. Tax expenditure analysis revealed government investment in business after business as far as the eye could see! As far as Marty was concerned the U.S. was a socialist country after all. Nevertheless, even socialists have to eat and pay off educational loans, so after graduating from B.C. Law School, Marty went to Nashua, New Hampshire to practice law doing business and estate planning work from 1974 to 1979.
It didn’t take too long for Marty to figure out that he was listening to the beat of a different drummer than most tax practitioners in private practice, as well as, as they say on kindergarten report cards, “does not play well with others.” One of the partners for whom he did a lot of work kept asking Marty to “show me the rule that says he [the client] can’t deduct that expenditure” and “where’s the specific rule that says that the client has to include that receipt in gross income.” Marty’s incessant response was “you’ve got it backwards — expenditures aren’t deductible unless you find the rule that says they are, and receipts must be included unless you find the rule that says they aren’t.” After several years of countless incorporations, shareholder buy-sell agreements, recapitalizations of family corporations, wills, inter vivos pour-over A/B trusts, irrevocable life insurance trusts, Crummy trusts, not to mention fruitlessly explaining endless oil and gas, cattle feeding, equipment leasing, and movie tax shelter prospectuses to a long queue of doctor, dentist and airline pilot clients, and other types also pathologically addicted to tax avoidance, Marty developed an exit strategy. One night a week, for two and a half years, Marty slept through evening classes as a part-time student in the Boston University Law School Graduate Tax Program, from which he purchased an LL.M. in taxation in 1979. This paper credential fooled the University of Kentucky College of Law into thinking that he actually knew something about tax law and enabled him to retire from practice to the gentrified life of being a law professor in the fall of 1979.
After settling in Lexington, Kentucky, which he thought was a genteel, quiet, charming Southern city where he would spend the rest of his life attending the horse races, snacking on sandwiches of country ham on beaten biscuits, and sipping mint juleps, Marty discovered that they really did expect him to write bunches of law review articles to get tenure and keep his job. Thus, Marty set about churning out a series of potboiler law review articles about taxation — none comparing, however, with John Grisham’s book The Firm, because the law reviews kept editing out the gratuitous sex scenes — including one published in the N.Y.U. Law Review in 1981 that suggested the cockamamy idea of taxing kid’s income at their parents’ rates. (He still has, side-by-side in a file folder letters from Stanley Surrey, dated Feb. 16, 1982, stating “as the world is presently turning I would not be so hopeful of movement in the direction you so clearly analyze,” and one on Department of Treasury letterhead from some guy named Gene Steuerle, dated June 14,1982 stating “[y]our article on the aggregation of income of children and parents came to my attention recently. … ”) Marty likes to think that the N.Y.U piece, along with a couple of others about things like corporate reorganizations and natural resources taxation, got him tenure, but it’s widely rumored that he really got tenure by jogging with the dean every day, keeping two paces behind the dean, and commenting on how fast the pace was, no matter how slow the pace really was, and by hanging out at Keeneland race course with the dean studying the Daily Racing Form. While he was at UK, many people — mostly his faculty colleagues — suggested that he should leave and go elsewhere. On several occasions the dean and his faculty colleagues at Kentucky shipped him off elsewhere to teach for a while, and he visited at the University of Virginia in 1982-1983 and at Florida in 1991. (Amazingly enough, Florida took him back again in 1997!)
To get revenge on his UK colleagues, in the mid-1980s he went to work as a Professor-in-Residence at the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, where he suggested that the entire UK faculty be audited. Because little revenue was raised from the audits of law school professors that he suggested, however, he was relegated to tasks like helping to promulgate the first guidance on something called the ‘Kiddie Tax,” or something like that, which was enacted in 1986, working on devising the interest tracing rules in Treas. Reg. §1.163-8T, and reviewing the first set of temporary and proposed regulations under the § 469 passive activity loss rules. In fact, Marty’s very last act as Professor-in-Residence was to spend three hours with the Chief Counsel himself explaining to him in such a confused and disjointed presentation the proposed rules in a tentative signature package of temporary § 469 regulations that the Chief Counsel refused to release the regulations for months after Marty left (and presumably only after someone who was more capable explained a substantially revised version of the regulations to the Chief Counsel more coherently than Marty could).
After returning to UK, he eventually worked his way up to being the Laramie Leatherman Professor of Law. He probably couldn’t have gotten that position except the donor earmarked (oh my, is that a “naughty word” these days) the endowed professorship for a full professor teaching taxation and Marty happened to be the only faculty member who fit that description. Nevertheless, according to rumor, in the mid-90’s a new dean there got so tired of Marty rescheduling classes to go bass fishing — he kept driving down to Florida to go fishing with his buddy David Richardson — that the dean told Marty to go someplace where the fishing was better and gave Florida a glowing, if imaginative, recommendation regarding Marty’s teaching credentials. As a result UF squandered a faculty slot on hm in 1997. (Only a week after Marty announced his departure, Rick Pitino resigned as UK basketball coach and moved to Boston. Whether there is a connection or not is anyone’s guess.) Because he now spends so much time fishing and floating in his pool, when not using his season tickets to football, basketball, and baseball — GO GATORS! — instead of writing, Marty has been stuck at the University of Florida ever since.
To satisfy the lust for money of the bursars of multiple universities, and to mollify, and sometimes even keep cheerful, his two sons, one or the other or both of whom seem to have been a full-time college, graduate, or — gasp! — law student, every year for over a decade, Marty moonlights as a book author. He has ridden on Boris Bittker’s coattails by coauthoring three editions of a treatise, Federal Income Taxation of Individuals, with this Titan of Taxation. (The story of how this gig evolved from Bittker dialing a wrong number and getting McMahon on the phone has already been chronicled on TaxProf..) Because Marty is no longer willing to read, let alone try to understand, the “Annual Tax Change Act” (or is it “Semi-Annual’) that has become in vogue this decade, Larry Zelenak pulled Marty’s fat out of the fire by joining as a co-author on the treatise with the most recent edition. When Marty ran out of ideas for new law review articles in the late 1980s and was looking for something to do to convince the dean that he was still working, Marty’s law school mentors, Paul McDaniel and Hugh Ault, felt sorry for him and let him coauthor multiple editions of four casebooks covering basic income tax, corporate tax, partnership tax, and taxation of business organizations. So he didn’t have to work too hard, Marty also conned them into also taking on board as another co-author his old co-Professor-in-Residence and beer drinking buddy, Dan Simmons. (No kidding, you should have seen the looks in the D.C. bars back in 1986 and 1987 when over beers, Marty and Dan would pull out of their briefcases their annotated copies of The Tax Reform Act of 1986 and start debating the nuances of the language of the new statutory provisions between swigs of beer.) Although he much prefers writing casebooks (thereby generating royalty income to pay for his kid’s law school tuition and car insurance), academia being academia, and the President of the University of Florida having dreams that UF will soon become a “Top-10 Public,” in order to get raises sufficient not to fall too far behind inflation, Marty still has to write a occasional law review article about something, but he tries to keep them simple and co-authored, for example, the Current Developments series in the Florida Tax Review co-authored with Ira Shepard. As a result, he doesn’t really get to go fishing quite as much as he hoped to when he retired to Florida.
All of those articles that nobody actually reads also superficially appear to have gotten him elected to the ALI, but most people consider that to be a case of mistaken identity; they probably meant to elect that guy with the same name who wrote all those A.L.R. annotations. At a conference quite a few years ago, he said something so long winded and confusing that it was mistaken for profundity, causing one of the prominent tax lawyers in attendance to nominate him for fellowship in the American College of Tax Counsel. Since his scant royalties are devoured by subsidizing support of his college graduate, but needy, sons, one now at Boalt Hall (“No, no,” he screams, “I will never, never, become a tax lawyer; it’s a tree-hugger’s life me.”) and the other an art conservator for the State of New Mexico (do you know what art conservators get paid? — it’s definitely not the same question as asking “Do you know what investment bankers get paid?”), Marty’s generally been willing to go anywhere for a mini-vacation paid for by a CLE sponsor. Over the years he has found a surprising number of suckers to subsidize his thinly disguised vacation travel. On occasion, he’s even cozied up to foreign tax professors who were visiting at UF, and after treating them to enough dinners, wangled gigs at places like Cambridge (no not on the Charles, on the Cam) and Westfälische Wilhems-Universität Münster. (No, Marty doesn’t speak German; although it is one of the four languages that he has unsuccessfully attempted to learn, but how hard is it to say “Bier und Wurst, bitte.”) But, please don’t tell the IRS about these trips. Marty suspects the quality of the opinion letters he gave himself concluding that the travel is a working condition fringe benefit might be considered to be as credible as tax shelter opinion letters from that firm that sounds like it operates a radio station somewhere west of the Mississippi.
For prior Florida Graduate Tax Faculty Profiles, see:
- Yariv Brauner
- Dennis A. Calfee
- Patricia E. Dilley
- Michael K. Friel
- David M. Hudson
- Lawrence Lokken
- Paul McDaniel
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.
