This week’s Tax Prof Spotlight of Meredith Conway (Texas-Wesleyan) continues our series of profiles of folks starting their careers this fall as tenure-track tax professors at American law schools. We hope the profiles will help introduce our newest tax colleagues to the academic tax community./p>

When I was in the eighth grade, my civics teacher asked my class what we wanted to be when we grew up.  I announced that I was going to be an "international corporate tax attorney."  I really had no idea what an international corporate tax attorney did, but it sounded really important. Of course, my career focus changed from time to time, but eventually it came full circle and I ended up as a corporate tax attorney.

People often ask me why I chose tax law.  The easy answer is that my father is a tax attorney and he highly recommended it as a  practice area I would enjoy.  The real answer, however, is that I had my own passion for tax law.  Like father — like daughter.  My parents would debate tax laws over the dinner table every night when I was growing up and so tax terminology became "plain English" to me.  The tax code did not intimidate me the way it intimidated many of my classmates at Rutgers.  When I summered after my second year of law school at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP (formerly Shanley & Fisher) in their New Jersey office,  the tax group was kind enough to give me a number of tax assignments to see if I liked it — and I loved it.  I am so interested in the way the tax code works — it is like a never-ending puzzle.  Each section of the Code has a history to it — policy motivations, lobbying interests behind it, and often unintentional effects — it fascinates me. 

After graduating from Rutgers I began working in the business tax group at Drinker Biddle & Reath (first in their New Jersey office and then in their Philadelphia office) and went to NYU at night for my LLM in taxation. Traveling back and forth from New York to Philadelphia while working full time was challenging at times, however it was well worth the effort (particularly because I met my fiancé in Penn Station after a final exam for Yariv Brauner’s Corporate Tax class). 

I had a great experience in private practice at Drinker Biddle and had the opportunity to work with some truly brilliant tax attorneys — particularly the partners in the group — Stephen Hamilton and William Goldstein.  For a few years I was the only tax associate in a firm numbering 450 attorneys so I certainly got my pick of the work.  I worked on every deal in the firm, every debt offering, every partnership agreement.  Steve and Bill were wonderful mentors.  I knew, however, that what I really wanted to do was teach.

I decided I wanted to enter the academia for two reasons.  First, I wanted to share my enthusiasm for tax law with law students.  I did not want students to be intimidated by the "Code" and hoped to teach them to learn to enjoy working with the tax code.  Secondly, I wanted to explore certain areas of the tax law in more depth and to criticize the tax code rather than just interpret it — an exercise to which private practice is rarely conducive.

I am so grateful I decided to go into academia.  I am in my first semester of teaching at Texas Wesleyan and I absolutely love teaching. There is nothing better than watching students grasp a section of the tax code and then understand the implications of that section and the motivating policy reasons behind the section.  I am teaching Federal Income Tax, Taxation of Business Entities and Tax Procedure.

My research agenda is currently focused on corporate tax issues, with a particular emphasis on debt and securities in reorganizations.  I am also interested in many other facets of corporate tax as well as certain issues involving partnership taxation.

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, particularly for our series on new tax professors. For prior Tax Prof Profiles, see here