Daniel N. Shaviro (NYU)
- A.B. 1978, Princeton
- J.D. 1981, Yale
Among the nation’s leading legal scholars on tax policy, Daniel Shaviro is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. Before entering law teaching, he spent three years in private practice at Caplin & Drysdale, a leading tax specialty firm, and three years as Legislation Attorney at the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, where he worked extensively on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In 1987, Shaviro began his teaching career at the University of Chicago Law School, and he joined the NYU School of Law in 1995. Dan picks up the story . . .
I was a history major in college, and planned to go to graduate school in American history. This probably would have been a bad choice for me, because I don’t have the patience to pore through archives as opposed to pursuing my own thoughts. One hot day during exam period in my junior year, as I vainly searched the library for books I needed for a term paper on medieval towns (in a seminar with only two other students and a demanding professor), I suddenly said to myself: “Do I have to keep doing this forever? No – I’ll just go to law school like all of my friends.”
I took a couple of tax courses in law school because I liked Marvin Chirelstein’s sense of humor. Then I decided on tax practice after being told by several peers that, for junior associates, it generally involved shorter hours, more intellectual issues, and less far-flung research than other practice. That sounds about right, I thought. It was not until later, when I joined the Joint Committee on Taxation staff after three years as a law firm associate, that I developed any sense of the issues in tax policy that interest me today.
If I could have any other career than the one I have, my first choice, if I thought I could do it well enough and lucratively enough, would be to write novels. This may reflect, in a way, the values that I absorbed while growing up. In my family, if one child had grown up to be Bill Gates and another to be the first violinist at the Philharmonic, the latter would have been considered the greater success. I have actually written a short novel (begun in 1985, shelved for fourteen years, and completed in 1999), with the triple entendre title of Getting It. It is unpublished but copyrighted and available on request. I would call it a farce or satire, somewhat in the Evelyn Waugh vein. Anyone who knows how I could get it published should please let me know.
I probably work shorter hours than some of my friends at other schools suspect. My family, including my wife and two children, not to mention three cats, are important to me. I also spend a lot of time working out at the health club, playing squash and tennis when healthy, reading books both fiction and non, listening to popular music from the 1960s through the current alternative scene, and following politics and professional sports, plus to a lesser extent movies. I find most TV unwatchable, but I will vouch for the first season of Survivor.
In class, I try to some extent to be the sort of professor whom I would have liked to have. But I certainly hope for students with greater dedication and interest than I had during my law student years. As a student, I peaked during the fall semester of my freshman year in college. After that, I tended to lose interest in following the professor’s agenda rather than my own. Luckily for me today, academics can to a considerable degree follow their own inclinations.
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