Stephen B. Cohen (Georgetown)
- A.B. 1967, Amherst
- J.D. 1971, Yale
Stephen Cohen has led a double professional life, engaged on the one hand in political and foreign policy issues, and on the other, as an academic tax lawyer. In 1968, the year after graduating from Amherst, he worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, doing a variety of jobs including speechwriting, political advertising, press relations, and staging mass rallies. Law school initially consisted of continuing political work for the Moratorium to End the Vietnam War and the National Citizens Committee Concerned About the Anti-Ballistic Missile System, until the second semester of his second year, when he fell for Tax with Marvin Chirelstein, whom he describes as “the greatest classroom teacher I ever had.”
Stephen then taught law school for six years, moving from Rutgers, to Wisconsin, to Stanford, and back to Wisconsin. After Carter was elected President in 1976, he joined the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., working on arms control issues. After a year in Policy Planning, he spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, concentrating on U.S policy toward Iran, the Philippines, and Zaire.
After leaving the State Department in 1980, he wrote about U.S. foreign policy for The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and began regular trips to South Africa to report on conditions under apartheid for human rights organizations. He also moved to Georgetown where he has taught federal income taxation for the past 26 years except for a visit at Harvard two years ago.
His favorite book on taxation is Louis Eisenstein’s The Ideologies of Taxation, which, he says, conclusively proves the French maxim, "plus ca change, etc." He began his academic career writing about financial theory and taxation but for the past decade his major scholarly interest has been the intersection of tax and civil rights law. He has also written about the flat tax, income inequality, and Thurgood Marshall’s tax law opinions, as well as a series of articles for the Green Bag, 2d on tax law oddities, including: Hester Prynne, Lydia Bennet, and Section 306 Stock; Tax Metamorphosis: A Miniscule Contribution to Law and Literature; and The Tax of Physics, The Physics of Tax. His proudest accomplishment, however, was a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the brilliant African-American lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, who was Dean of Howard Law School and architect of the NAACP’s litigation strategy in the 1930s and 1940s
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