Jeremiah Coder, People in Tax: Interview with Anthony Infanti, 43 ABA Tax Times 6 (Winter-Spring 2024): 

Editor’s Note: Anthony “Tony” Infanti is a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Professor Infanti teaches a variety of tax courses at Pitt Law, including Federal Income Tax, Corporate Tax, and International Tax. He is a prolific author, with scholarly work focusing on comparative tax law, critical tax theory, and the intersections between these two fields of study. He received degrees from New York University (LL.M. Taxation), University of California Berkeley (J.D.), and Drew University (B.A.), and is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the American College of Tax Counsel, and the American Bar Foundation.

ATT: Professor Infanti, it’s great to be talking to you about your career. What got you interested in tax in the first place?

PI: Rather than following the more typical path of coming into law school with an interest in tax or developing an interest after taking a few tax courses, you might say that tax found me. Although tax was always on my list of courses to take, I never actually managed to work it into my schedule during law school. After law school and clerking, I began work in the corporate department at a law firm in New York.

Within days of starting, the head of the corporate department came to speak with me. I was a bit nervous until he told me that there were no new associates joining the tax department, that the tax department had gone through the resumes of the entering associates, and that they wanted to see if I would be interested in working in tax. I readily confessed that I knew nothing about tax law (aside from having filled out a Form 1040-EZ each year to report my earnings from summer work during law school), but the head of the corporate department took me up to the tax department anyway. I told the head of the tax department the same thing, but he was very easygoing and suggested that I give tax a try for six months—after which I could stay if I liked or rejoin the corporate department if I didn’t. The firm didn’t have a formal rotation system for junior associates, which made the possibility attractive. Being young and willing to give new things a try, I readily agreed and quickly found that I loved tax—the research, the writing, and especially the intellectual stimulation of grappling with the text of the Code. This led me to enrolling full time in NYU’s Tax LLM program the following academic year so that I would be better prepared for practice. The Tax LLM program only deepened my interest in tax law, and I’ve never looked back since—or regretted my decision to keep an open mind about my career path, which is something that I’ve tried to impart to my students. …

ATT: You’ve done some really interesting research and writing on unique tax law concepts, such as critical tax theory. What does that term mean, and why is that topic important to you?

PI: Critical tax theory means different things to different people. For some, it means employing different methodologies for engaging in scholarly work than what you traditionally encounter in law review articles. Personal narrative is one example of a methodology that I and other critical tax scholars have used and that you don’t normally encounter in traditionally dispassionate law review articles written in the third person. For others, critical tax is about bringing the perspective of outsiders—those marginalized by society—into the conversation. Some write about the impact of the tax system along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, immigration, or disability (to name a few axes of subordination in American society). My focus has been on the impact of the tax system on the LGBTQ+ community, but I have also written about critical tax theory more generally as well as about the impact of the tax system along the lines of race and gender, particularly in my forthcoming book The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press forthcoming Spring 2025). So, for me, critical tax is really a combination of bringing a different perspective to tax as well as exploring different methodologies for examining and explaining the connections between tax law and society.

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