David Brunori (Executive Vice President of Editorial Operations, Tax Analysts) has published Teaching State and Local Tax: Law Schools Still Not Getting It, 48 State Tax Notes 729 (6/2/08):
80 of the 195 ABA-accredited law schools regularly offer at least one course in state and local taxation. That is a large increase in terms of the number of schools now offering the class (32 in eight years). But the truth is that our law schools are still not recognizing the importance of this subject. A significant number — 115 — of accredited law schools do not offer a course in a subject critical to understanding how 50 states and some 95,000 local governments operate.
Perhaps the elitists among us don’t care about most of those 115 law schools. After all, I must admit there were a handful I had never heard of before. But what about the best law schools in the country? Surely we care about what they do. And more than half of them don’t teach state and local tax law. Of the U.S. News & World Report top 25 law schools in the United States, 14 don’t teach the subject in which we work. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Cornell, Duke, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Texas, USC, Columbia, and Notre Dame could not be bothered to teach state and local tax. …
According to the TaxProf Blog, 31 law schools offer Masters of Law programs in tax. Of those schools, only five don’t offer a regular state and local tax class: Loyola in Los Angeles, Miami, DePaul, John Marshall, and Michigan. At least we can say 26 of 31 LLM tax programs offer the course. But it strains the imagination that even one school could offer a graduate program in tax and not offer a course in state and local tax law. By the way, the editor of TaxProf Blog is Prof. Paul Caron, a highly respected tax scholar. His law school, the University of Cincinnati, does not teach state and local tax either [ouch].
I would have thought that by 2008, every top law school, and certainly every top tax program, would be offering at least one state and local tax class. There are many reasons why. But the two most important are that there is a market for professionals with knowledge and interest and that state taxation is an intellectually stimulating subject, the study of which will help train better lawyers. …
The leader in the state and local tax field among academic institutions is unquestionably New York University. NYU lists three different state and local courses — almost every other school with a course offers only one. And at least two of those NYU courses are taught by the irrepressible Rick Pomp. Pomp, along with Wally Hellerstein, has dominated the field of state and local taxation for two decades.
The only school that comes close is the Georgetown University Law Center. Georgetown offers two different courses in state and local taxation; although the courses are primarily designed for LLM students, they are generally open to juris doctor students as well. Georgetown has a close working relationship with the Council On State Taxation and uses some excellent practitioners (Phil Tatarowicz and Jeff Friedman) to teach.
Most people who teach state and local tax realize the difficulty of jamming so much information on a wide variety of topics into a one-semester course. I have always thought law schools could offer separate courses on constitutional limitations (for example, the commerce and due process clauses), corporate and franchise taxation, and consumption taxes. Yet in our survey, Tax Analysts could not find any schools other than NYU and Georgetown that offered two different courses.
