What are your top priorities as the head of the LDF?

Many civil rights organizations have been playing an important and aggressive defense game to hold onto the extraordinary gains of the civil rights movement. But I want to play offense, and my focus is on those who are the most marginalized—at the intersections of race and class, and race and poverty—and on the legal barriers to educational and economic opportunities.

Does the discussion about race obscure other injustices, such as those rooted in poverty?

Actually, race illuminates poverty. The most egregious injustices in our country occur at the intersection of race and poverty.

LDF defended the VRA. What will be the longterm impact on the country after the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively allow states to change their election laws without advance federal approval?

It changes what we have come to expect of democratic participation in this country. Unless Congress can pass a fix to the VRA we’ll see the success of voter discrimination and suppression, especially at the local level, so in judicial elections, and those for school boards, town councils, water districts.

What about the short-term impact?

Within hours the Texas AG announced plans to immediately implement that state’s voter ID law, known as the most onerous of its kind in the nation. South Carolina, Alabama, and North Carolina announced plans to implement voter suppression measures that had been stopped by the VRA. We expect more as we get closer to the 2014 elections.

LDF is co-counsel with the Legal Aid Society on a case that deals with unconstitutional stops, frisks, and arrests in public housing. What other policing issues is LDF working on?

We are increasingly concerned about the relationship between law enforcement and education. So we just filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against the Bryan Independent School District in Texas, where police officers are empowered to give misdemeanor tickets to students for engaging in profanity. The figures show African-American students disproportionately get these tickets. The issue of police in schools is delicate because we have to calibrate our concern about safety in schools with an understanding of what it means when we begin to criminalize the merely inappropriate conduct of middle school and high school students.

You wrote a book called On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Why, today, is lynching so important to confront?

What inspired me to write the book was seeing how people abroad—in Rwanda, South Africa, Yugoslavia—were dealing with traumatic incidents of violence in the past. It wasn’t perfect, but they were dealing with it with tremendous courage and honesty. And here I was in a country that had never confronted lynching. The silence surrounding lynching was toxic, in both the black and white communities. The reaction to those events has almost frozen those communities in amber.

What, if any, are the special responsibilities that you feel taking on the mantle of such an historic organization?

It’s not a rest-on-your-laurels job. I don’t even regard it as a make-your-name job because your name is going to be mud as much as it is going to be lauded. The reality is, you take this because somebody passed you the baton. I have to make the best of it as did all of those director-counsels like Thurgood Marshall and Elaine Jones who came before me. They ran their race and they left a great American institution for those of us who came later to steward.

Ted Shaw, former head of LDF, said about you, “She has a toughness about her that I think will serve her very well. I mean the right kind of toughness.” What is the right kind of toughness?

I have a pretty unrelenting view of justice. You have to be willing to fight and lose the battle sometimes in order to win the war. You also have to have contempt for failure. I like to think I have that kind of toughness. It’s not the toughness of just being intimidating. Unfortunately, very few people find me intimidating.

Well, you are from New York City.

Yes, I’m from Queens.

I’m from the Bronx.

You got me. When you say “Bronx,” people back up. We Queens girls couldn’t live off the name of our neighborhood, like, “Oh, I’m from Harlem.” No, we had to really bring it. That’s why Queens girls have an attitude.

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“NYU has long been a leader in innovative legal education,” notes Chesler. “However, there have been profound changes in the expectations of clients for what lawyers need to be prepared to do.” Many clients, for example, now want even recent graduates to have collaborative problem-solving skills, to understand business fundamentals, or to know how to deal with colleagues or adversaries from different cultural or legal backgrounds. The strategy committee was formed, Chesler said, because “there was the the distinct sense that it was time for our law school to lead the way on the complex issues concerning the imperatives of legal education in the 21st century.”

After fact finding over the course of 18 months, the committee—whose members include NYU Law trustees who are leaders at major law firms, general counsel at large publicly traded companies and asset management firms, and others with deep knowledge of the legal marketplace—issued a series of recommendations for curriculum enhancements. Following faculty approval of central elements of the recommendations, then-dean Revesz and Chesler announced the plans to students at a Milbank Tweed Forum on October 17. That morning, the New York Times ran a story about the new steps on the front page of its business section.

“In recent years, a variety of forces, including globalization, advances in technology, and the worldwide economic crisis, have significantly changed the way law is practiced in many organizations,” Revesz said at the time of the announcement. “The steps we are announcing today assure that the education we offer is keeping pace with those changes.”

A multi-front effort to implement the initiatives got underway as soon as they were announced. One recommendation of the strategy committee was for the Law School to do more to prepare students for global legal practice, including the introduction of new study-abroad opportunities for students during their third year. Under the supervision of Kevin Davis, vice dean for global affairs and Beller Family Professor of Business Law, NYU has now established semester-long programs in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai that will accommodate up to 25 JD students each. The initial group of students is preparing to head to those cities in January.

“These aren’t the typical study-abroad programs that we and other law schools have offered for years,” notes Davis. “These are designed and managed by NYU Law faculty and they will include not just classroom study, but also clinics, internships, travel study, and language training,” with some variation based on location. In Buenos Aires and Paris, the programs will be operated in cooperation with local university partners. What’s more, Davis emphasizes, these semester-abroad experiences for 3Ls are meant to serve as the capstone of an extensive set of curricular and co-curricular options offered to JD students who are interested in global practice beginning in their first year.

Closer to home, but still well off campus, is the Washington, DC-based Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic that is being jointly taught by two of the foremost experts in Washington legal practice: Robert Bauer, former White House Counsel to President Obama, and Sally Katzen, a member of the Obama-Biden transition team who held a number of senior positions in the Clinton Administration. Combining the practical and the scholarly, the clinic’s 16 3L students work four days a week in a federal agency or government office, but also attend a weekly seminar, as well as special sessions with senior government officials and guest lecturers. The clinic is an outgrowth of a strategy committee recommendation calling for “a program of intensive study and practical training in the role of government,” noting that it would be relevant to many career paths. “What we’re offering with the clinic is the rare opportunity to study the machinery of government and the political process, while simultaneously working within it,” says Katzen. “These students are developing an on-the-ground understanding of what it means to be a government lawyer, combined with an instructional component that fosters insight and analysis.”

Not all of the curricular changes are limited to the third year or require a journey. At Washington Square, the Law School is currently rolling out stepped-up training in leadership and financial and business literacy for students at all levels of the JD program. The strategy committee noted that “lawyers in our society routinely become managers and leaders of organizations, yet law schools offer little training in leadership and collaboration.” In addition, the committee observed,“a large proportion of lawyers … encounter business and financial issues, yet law schools have long lagged in assuring that their graduates have a basic grounding in these areas.” Providing instruction in these areas, the committee said, will make NYU Law graduates “more attractive to employers and more helpful to their clients.”

The Law School, Vice Dean Jeannie Forrest observes, has long offered elements of leadership training through programs such as the Dean’s Roundtable and the Public Interest Law Center’s Leaders in Public Interest Series. Last February also saw the debut of the Leadership Series in Law and Business, when Herbert Kelleher ’56, the charismatic founder and chairman emeritus of Southwest Airlines, came to Vanderbilt Hall to talk about his career. But now, says Forrest, the Law School will emphasize leadership “in a much more conscious and deliberate way.”

Forrest, who has a doctorate in psychology, is overseeing one major initiative: offering students evaluation and instruction in EQ, or emotional intelligence, since an ability to deal with people in a thoughtful and empathic manner is critical to good leadership. During their orientation in August, all entering JD students were invited to take an online EQ assessment to help identify skills they may want to develop. And certain classes throughout the curriculum will incorporate EQ instruction, building on interpersonal skills training that has been part of the first-year Lawyering Program for many years.

This academic year, the Lawyering Program is also adding instruction on business and financial concepts—including statistical inference, core accounting practices, and time value of money analysis—by incorporating an intensive mini-class on these subjects into a transaction-negotiation exercise. The mini-class will be taught by Geoffrey Miller, Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor of Law and director of NYU Law’s Center for Financial Institutions, and Gerald Rosenfeld, distinguished scholar in residence and senior lecturer, and co-director of the Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business.

As the range and diversity of the Law School’s curriculum expand, it can be a challenge for students to decide how best to prepare for practice in a particular area of law. To address that, Vice Dean and Professor of Clinical Law Randy Hertz has worked with faculty to identify core courses that provide an essential foundation for practice in a number of fields students commonly enter, ranging from tax to civil litigation to intellectual property and information law. This Professional Pathways system offers advice on a sequenced course of instruction, including substantive-law classes, clinics, simulation courses, and seminars. In addition, Hertz notes, Pathways includes career guidance, utilizing faculty members, Office of Career Services counselors, and alumni to counsel students on employment options and how best to pursue them.

That combined approach was on display in April, when faculty held their first Pathways advisory sessions. At a session on criminal practice, for example, Professor Erin Murphy (who spent five years as a public defender) explained differences in two evidence classes taught at the Law School, one with a more nuts-and-bolts focus, the other more theoretical. She also discussed how students might decide between being a prosecutor or a public defender.

The Law School’s new dean, Trevor Morrison, has fully embraced the curricular initiatives. “The new measures squarely address concerns that have been raised by employers about the need for more practice-focused training, as well as questions that have been raised about the utility of the third year of law school,” he says. “At the same time, throughout our curriculum, we continue to emphasize the problem solving, critical thinking, and analytical skills that have long been the hallmarks of an outstanding legal education. It’s the combination of the two that will enable NYU Law graduates to excel throughout their careers.”

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In early 2008, Kenji Yoshino faced an unusual dilemma: The respected constitutional scholar had in his hands a tempting offer to become a full professor at NYU School of Law—and yet he could not accept it.

At the time, Yoshino was in the midst of a successful visiting professorship at NYU, on leave from his post as Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale, where he had been on the faculty for nearly 10 years. To lure him to NYU, Dean Richard Revesz presented Yoshino with a seemingly ideal title: the inaugural Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law.

Yoshino, who is of Japanese heritage, was honored but explained to Revesz that he could not accept the chair because Warren, as attorney general and later governor of California, had been a central figure in establishing the Japanese American internment camps there during World War II.

“Ricky completely understood, but a few weeks later he reached out to me again,” Yoshino recalled. Revesz told him that he had consulted a biography of Warren and confirmed that as Chief Justice of the United States—the post he famously held for 16 years after his governorship—Warren had publicly expressed profound regret for his involvement in the internment program.

Revesz added that he had discovered he had some flexibility in the exact name of the professorship, and proposed that the chair instead be called the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professorship of Constitutional Law. “He mentioned that as a specialist in civil rights, I might enjoy having a title that would remind me how much an individual can grow over a lifetime,” Yoshino said. “I knew then that I had found my new dean.”

The story, which Yoshino recounted during a celebration on April 9 honoring Revesz’s 11 years of service at the helm of NYU Law, evoked many of Revesz’s best qualities: “his keen problem-solving approach, his relentless energy—but most of all, his humane wisdom,” Yoshino said to the hundreds of professors, administrators, alumni, and students who filled Tishman Auditorium to bid a bittersweet goodbye to the outgoing dean.

Yoshino, as a fellow faculty member, was last in a lineup of speakers who each revealed different relationships to Revesz as dean: John Sexton, president of NYU, spoke as Revesz’s decanal predecessor and, subsequently, his boss; Elena Kagan, associate justice of the Supreme Court, was both a colleague and a direct competitor when she was dean of Harvard Law School; Robert Katzmann, judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is both a longtime adjunct professor and a close friend; and Nicholas Bagley ’05, assistant professor at the University of Michigan Law School, is a former student and collaborator of Revesz.

The 90-minute event, emceed with wit and banter by Vice Dean Jeannie Forrest and Professor Barry Friedman, also featured the unveiling of Revesz’s official portrait, painted by Daniel Mark Duffy. But before the scrim was pulled off Duffy’s handsome work, the speakers painted their own “verbal portrait,” as Yoshino called it, each reflecting with insight and a little humor on the myriad ways Revesz had transformed and strengthened NYU Law since he took over as dean in 2002.

First up was Sexton, who recounted his 1984 trip down to the Supreme Court to try to convince Revesz, then a clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, to join the NYU Law faculty.

“He elevated our faculty the minute he joined it,” Sexton said, adding that during his own 14-year tenure as dean, no one “had more to do with shaping the heart and soul of the Law School, which is its faculty, than Ricky.” In this way, Sexton said, “it really is the case that for 25 years, Ricky’s been the dean, in the most important way.”

Sexton cited Revesz’s many accomplishments as dean, including more than $500 million in fundraising, the addition of 46 new faculty members, the expansion of NYU’s pioneering loan repayment assistance program, the creation of multiple new and influential policy centers, the doubling of the number of clinical courses, and the trailblazing steps to adapt legal education to the fiscal and global realities of the 21st century.

But the outsized success of Revesz’s tenure was by no means preordained. To the contrary, remembered Kagan, Revesz “flunked the first test of deaning…which is, you have to pick your predecessor really well.”

Noting that Revesz assumed the job in the shadows of the extremely popular Sexton, Kagan, who became dean of Harvard Law School in 2003, recalled that “there were some number of people who said, ‘Well, he’s not John Sexton, is he?’” But, she added, “Ricky proved in really short order that you didn’t necessarily have to have the personality type of John to be just an extraordinarily successful dean.”

Kagan recounted with rueful amusement the frequent battles she and Revesz engaged in over faculty hiring. “It just turned out that a few choice moments from… every time I decided I wanted a faculty member, there was Ricky Revesz! We seemed to have quite the same taste,” Kagan said, remarking that when she heard people mention 46 new faculty at NYU, she felt “as though I was there for every single one of those.”

As the crowd roared with laughter, Kagan added with a smile, “I have to say, this was all highly annoying.”

But Kagan made it clear that any annoyance was dwarfed by her respect for and admiration of her New York counterpart. Calling him the best dean in the business over the past 11 years—“bar none”—Kagan said that when she looked outside Harvard for ideas on how to improve legal education, “there was no one I looked to more than Ricky Revesz and no school I looked to more than I looked to NYU.”

As an example of the model Revesz set for other deans, Kagan highlighted his commitment to public service and public interest law, primarily through his championing of the Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship Program, his support of the loan repayment assistance program, and his protection of the summer funding provided by the Public Interest Law Center.

Yet Revesz’s “true greatness,” Kagan said, resides in his values. NYU Law “is an entrepreneurial, innovative, optimistic place,” she said. “And law schools don’t have to be that. Law schools can be—and often are—stodgy and tradition-bound and not the most adventurous institutions in the world.” But Revesz “imbued this place with his optimism, with his sense of adventure and innovation.”

Following Kagan, Katzmann spoke admiringly of Revesz’s ability to maintain a high level of scholarly output even as he bore the burdens of running a top-tier law school. “Usually when somebody becomes a dean, the sense is he or she is done with scholarship and is going to become an administrator,” Katzmann said, but Revesz took “active efforts to promote the careers of the young talent around him.”

Katzmann also echoed the near-universal observation that Revesz personally responded to e-mails deep into the night, saying that it instilled in everyone else a sense not just of awe but also of mutual obligation: “We want to say yes to Ricky, because we know that he would say yes to us if he possibly could.”

One person Revesz said yes to many times was next on the podium: Nicholas Bagley, who told the audience that as a first-year student in 2002, all he knew of Revesz was “that he didn’t hug people as much as John Sexton did.”

In Bagley’s second year, however, Revesz tapped him to help edit a textbook chapter on the law and economics of environmental regulation. Bagley was wary, because he had not studied economics since high school, but “Ricky insisted it would be fine,” he said. “And some part of me—some big part of me—wanted to believe him.” Meanwhile, Bagley said, the rest of him thought, “This man is clearly out of his mind!”

The following year, Revesz asked Bagley to co-author an article—one of the first in a series of Revesz’s collaborations with students while he was dean. Again, Bagley was concerned that he couldn’t live up to the dean’s expectations. But Revesz’s persistence won out, and the resulting article, “Centralized Oversight of the Regulatory State,” ran in the Columbia Law Review and won a 2006 American Bar Association award for best article in its field.

Bagley, who still sounded astonished eight years on, said he initially thought Revesz’s optimism and faith in a student was misplaced, possibly even “reckless.” But because Revesz “couples that optimism with a huge investment of his own time and energy,” Bagley said, it “turns out to be a subtle but effective way to get the people around him to step it up a notch, to be better than they think they are.”

Anthony Welters ’77, chairman of the Law School’s board of trustees, was tasked with the official presentation of Revesz’s portrait, but first he took an opportunity to thank not just the dean but also his family.

“It’s easy to focus on the accomplishments that are visible to everyone,” Welters said. “It’s a little harder to recognize the sacrifices that people must make to achieve that level of success.” Gesturing to Revesz’s wife, Professor Vicki Been ’83, and their daughter, Sarah (their son, Joshua, was unable to attend the celebration), Welters said, “We owe you a debt of gratitude for sharing your father and your husband with us.”

When the man of the hour finally took the stage beside his portrait, he appeared to be overwhelmed by the affection and accolades that had been showered on him. After thanking each of the speakers individually, Revesz took Welters’s cue and turned to his family.

“As much as I enjoyed this job, I enjoyed being with Joshua and Sarah even more,” he said. “Our trips together and family board games, my bike rides and chocolate-chopping sessions with Sarah, my ongoing political discussions and chess games with Joshua—that’s what makes life special.”

Then Revesz pointed to the front row to acknowledge his “indefatigable mother,” Nora Revesz. He remembered his childhood in Argentina and his dream of studying in the United States and thanked his mother, who now lives in New York City, for helping him to realize it. “I would definitely not be here had it not been for her,” he said, and the audience laughed at the double entendre.

By the end of the evening, incoming dean Trevor Morrison, who had been appointed just days earlier and was sitting a few rows from the stage, could be forgiven for feeling a bit daunted by the challenge he’d accepted. As Kagan admonished him in her closing remarks, “Trevor, you too have flunked the first test of deanship, which is not to succeed a legend.”

—Jesse Wegman ’05 is a member of the New York Times editorial board, where he writes editorials on the Supreme Court and legal affairs.

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This discussion was edited and condensed. Watch or read the full discussion here.

RICHARD PILDES, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law (moderator): The defining feature of American democracy over probably the last 20 years, but even more so today, has been the emergence of extreme political polarization within government, at the very least, and maybe among the rest of us. It is unlike anything that we have had in American democracy since the late 19th century. There is virtually no center. The most conservative Democrat now is considerably more liberal than the most liberal Republican. This process seems to have begun in the late 1970s and has been accelerating.

Many people view this extreme polarization as making American democracy dysfunctional, particularly in a system of separated powers with checks and balances, a House, a Senate, and a Presidency, elected from different constituencies on different time cycles, which is dramatically unlike a parliamentary system. Can the American system function effectively in the face of these kinds of extreme divisions?

So the first question is whether this extreme polarization is as bad as is typically discussed in the media.

ROBERT BAUER, Partner, Perkins Coie; Former White House Counsel; General Counsel for Obama for America, 2008 and 2012; Distinguished Scholar in Residence, NYU School of Law: Well, let me distinguish this very powerful, very extreme sorting out of ideologies into opposing political camps from what I call polarized debate. Polarization is not what creates the singular dysfunction that we’re talking about. It is the way in which those differences are discussed and affect negotiation. The debate has become extreme.

PILDES: Why aren’t you troubled about the actual polarization of the political parties beyond public debates, civility, and discourse?

BAUER: Years ago I remember people saying the biggest problem we have with the American political parties is that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. It was thought that the voters weren’t really presented with a sharp choice, debate didn’t have a particularly gleaming edge to it, and therefore the political process suffered. But that’s obviously not true anymore.

BENJAMIN GINSBERG, Partner, Patton Boggs; General Counsel, Romney for President, 2008 and 2012: Something has caused the elected representatives in Washington to change their relationships with each other over the course of the past 20 years. There is a notable difference in the collegiality and how much they talk to each other about golf or restaurants or families. When it comes to the cause, we need to deal with that.

There really are differences between the parties now in a way that hasn’t happened before, and it helps to look at the three areas where that manifests itself in the policy realm. It’s certainly true in the size of government, all of these dangerous fiscal cliff actions that are taking place. It’s certainly true on the social issues, by and large, where there are just two concepts that are pretty far apart and hard to bridge the gap.

The military and our foreign policy muscle was the third area. Now, interestingly enough, you’d be hard pressed to really find great differences between the current president and the past president on most foreign policy matters. So we need to take a look within those particular issues for why this is happening.

PILDES: But why would certain issues be more polarizing today than in the past? Haven’t we always been deeply divided at some ideological level on these kinds of issues?

GINSBERG: The country is going through a growth spurt and hasn’t quite come to grips with who it is. You’ve written about the Voting Rights Act and how that started breaking up the coalitions. The Vietnam War tore the Democratic coalition asunder. Coalitions have been breaking up over the last 40 or 50 years and just aren’t quite re-formed yet. The media is a very different place today in terms of transmitting views than it was even 10 years ago. It’s much more polarized. Over the last 40 years people have come to live much more with people like them rather than in diverse communities. That contributes, too.

MICHAEL WALDMAN ’87, President, The Brennan Center for Justice: Well, the period of consensus that we think of as the norm from which we’ve deviated was itself unusual in American history. Many things that were the quirks of American politics have worked themselves out and are no longer so different. It used to be said that Americans were ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. Now people tend to sort out more in both of those areas.

I have a book in my office, The Deadlock of Democracy, which not only talks about political parties not being responsible and you couldn’t tell what the difference was between them, but that there were really multiple party systems where conservative southern Democrats and northern liberal Republicans each played their own roles. Those vanished in the mid-1960s with the move of southern white Democrats slowly into the Republican Party, first for the presidency, then for the Senate, then for the House. Less noticed but just as significant, the Rockefeller Republicans disappeared in the Northeast. These big trends make us look more like a European-style ideologically divided party system. The challenge is not so much polarization but paralysis. Can we have a system as polarized as it is now without government being either paralyzed or lurching from one extreme to the other?

PILDES: That is one of the big questions. If we are forming Europeanstyle parliamentary parties—a much more unified Democratic Party, a much more unified Republican Party, much sharper differentiations between the parties—can those changes be made to work within an institutional framework from 200 years ago that wasn’t designed with the idea of political parties at all?

SAMUEL ISSACHAROFF, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law: I don’t find the polarization disturbing. People should disagree strongly about things like the death penalty or abortion or the size of the military or foreign interventions. What I find reassuring is that public opinion surveys generally show a bell-shaped distribution of views among the American population where the center still holds in terms of broad public views on even the most controversial issues. The difficulty is that the institutional framework through which those social views are mediated reinforces the poles. The election system where we use “first past the post”—that you get one more than the other side and you get everything—means that you’re going to end up with two basic parties.

PILDES: Let’s talk about the dramatic change in the media over the last 10 years. We no longer have the three major broadcast networks with 25 million viewers and network anchors like Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw, centrists moderating representations of what’s going on in politics. Instead, we have cable television and the Internet, which is a much greater source of political information but which many people use to confirm the beliefs they already hold. How much is public opinion actually more polarized today? And how much are politics actually reflecting that polarization?

MONICA YOUN, Brennan Center Constitutional Fellow, NYU School of Law: People who study election law tend to be policy wonks, and that often leads to an assumption that people vote their policy preferences. Sam is absolutely right to say that there still is a relatively bell-shaped distribution of views on a number of social issues. What the evidence of the southern Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans has hinted to me is that people will vote their party even despite their policy preferences. People’s affiliation towards parties may be less policy-based than tribal affective, more like a sports team or a religion.

SEAN CAIRNCROSS ’01, Former Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel, National Republican Senatorial Committee: Today we woke up and found out that the House is moving toward an immigration package that is probably going to look like the Senate’s immigration package. So one of the most controversial issues of our current time where both parties have skin in the game looks to be moving forward. Just a little bit of perspective that we shouldn’t stand on the panic button.

But I agree with Ben that the relationships between the principals who negotiate these issues has changed. People travel home much more. There’s a 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, and you can rest assured that if you are cutting a deal or you are moderating on an issue that that is a very real force. I can tell you after two cycles at the senatorial committee that the potential for a primary challenge, and this is true on both sides of the aisle, is a significant constraint on your ability to negotiate.

PILDES: But what are the larger causes? I wanted to ask particularly about some institutional features of the election system that may be contributing. And should we consider changing some of them?

You all brought up primary elections, which is perhaps the single biggest institutional factor that contributes to the polarization of office holders today. Although primary elections were celebrated as great democratic achievements, wresting control of the choice of candidates from the smoke-filled back rooms of the party bosses in the late 19th century, over time voter turnout in primary elections, even for very significant races like for Senate, has become shockingly low. And not surprisingly the people who show up for primary elections in both parties are the most committed party activists, the most ideological wings of the parties. Certainly it’s a plausible argument that the Republicans would control the Senate today were it not for the primary election process over the last couple of cycles, in which more extreme candidates emerged—defeating sometimes long-serving incumbents—but who were not electable in the general election.

CAIRNCROSS: Let’s not lose sight of the voter. The people who show up in a democracy are going to determine what the governing structure looks like, and I’m not sure that you change that by going back to the smoke-filled room. We saw in the recent campaign that technology makes it easier to reach out and contact particular voters and motivate them to go to the polls. These new means of reaching people will have an impact on primaries. It doesn’t take much to change the course of a primary where there is very little turnout to begin with.

GINSBERG: It’s too early for me to sign onto the return to the smoke-filled back room, but I agree with Sean that you can’t forget the voter, that the mobilization efforts that have created bad results for Republican primaries in terms of being able to have better general election candidates are one of those thingsthat the voters have brought about.

Overall on the state level, you can’t overlook the impact that McCain-Feingold has had. The weakening of state parties on both the Republican and Democratic sides is profound. The personnel at state parties over the last decade have by and large migrated from people who were very involved in campaigns to people who care very much about policy. And the nuts and bolts of campaigns at the state level are much weaker today than they were in the past. So the state party brand on the local level is much more diffuse.

PILDES: Explain how the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms are a significant cause of the decimation of state and local political parties?

GINSBERG: Campaign finance “reform” eliminated money that’s legal under state law. So it is now a felony for the chairman of the Democratic or Republican National Committees to make a contribution to a candidate for governor with money legal under that state’s law. To even go out and raise the money for that candidate is now illegal. The result is that the party-building programs—voter registration, voter persuasion, get out the vote activities—must all now be done with federal money. State parties are uneven in their ability to raise especially federal money, and now do not get involved in primaries in the way that they once did nor in fundamental grassroots organizing.

PILDES: Are you also saying that the decimation of state parties is contributing to political polarization at the state level?

GINSBERG: Not only on the state level but also on the national level. This is a much longer conversation, but what parties have historically done for candidates—raised money, mobilized volunteers to mobilize voters to come out to vote, and messaging, which is basically advertising and, these days, independent expenditures—is not only done much less by the parties, but created a vacuum that has produced more robust special interest groups. It is much easier for a special interest group to raise money for a candidate, provide volunteers, and do ads for them. And, at least in our party, groups deeper in what you might call the “polarization zone” have been more adept at doing that.

PILDES: Unless you hope with Sean that turnout will change dramatically with the Internet, should we say it’s not healthy for democracy to have candidates chosen by such low-turnout electorates, and let’s start thinking about whether there are other ways of organizing the choice of candidates? Sam, you raised a hand to defend the smoke-filled back rooms.

ISSACHAROFF: Well, I used to be much more distrustful of elites choosing on behalf of the people, but I’ve grown accustomed as I’ve grown older.

PILDES: As you’ve grown more elite, of course.

ISSACHAROFF: Yeah, sitting at this table with the party elites and I don’t actively dislike them.

BAUER: We’re not actively hostile to you, either.

ISSACHAROFF: Ben’s point is absolutely critical on the weakness of the state-level parties. And it’s not just that they don’t perform the functions that Ben identified. They don’t groom the candidates. They don’t train. They don’t do all of the things that they used to do. We learned in the last two election cycles how an effective political organization can bring people out who might not have voted otherwise. This is something that the Republicans did effectively in 2004 and the Democrats did much more effectively in 2008 and 2012. The problem is you need a centralized organization with resources. At the primary stage you don’t have that. In 2004, 2008, and 2012, the national campaigns didn’t work through the state parties. They went out and mobilized voters themselves. There’s been an effort on behalf of both parties to push toward open primaries to draw a bigger swath of voters. You’re seeing different candidates emerging within the parties depending upon whether it’s an open or closed primary.

PILDES: Are you prepared to go that far and give it back to the party leadership?

ISSACHAROFF: Sure. We’ve done 100 years of this experiment, are we doing better for it or not? In 1972 the Democrats pushed very far in the direction of no party control of the nomination process, and they paid the cost for it. The Republicans are paying the price right now for ceding too much control. There were certain reform efforts, and Ben was obviously central in these, to rein that in a little bit to impose more institutional filters in the Republican process. So it’s not a question of going back completely to smoke-filled rooms—because we don’t allow smoking there anymore—but it is a question of recognizing that there have to be other institutional leverages to keep the primary system from degrading.

PILDES: Michael, as the president of the Brennan Center, which is very committed to increasing popular participation in politics and in elections, how do you feel about going back to the non-smoke-filled back rooms?

WALDMAN: We ought to look instead at ways to build on the mass participation model of the last few presidential cycles, which started with McCain in 2000, and find ways to use the new money and the new technology to make the primaries less the smoke-filled room of the super PAC and more something that actual
voters are participating in.

BAUER: Whether it was direct democracy, the top-two system, or, frankly, some of the engineering that was intended by McCainFeingold, these things typically don’t work out the way the sponsors have in mind. There’s simply no linear relationship between the problem they’ve identified, the institutional design feature that they craft, and the outcome that they’re looking for.

Take, for example, Stand by Your Ad. After all, we’re having a conversation about polarized debate, and the notion was there was too much negative advertising and therefore if we force candidates personally to state that they’ve approved the ad it will reduce the quantum of negative speech in the political process. And of course it didn’t. Period. That’s because very frequently, with the best of intentions, we design these features with an enormous amount of optimism that frankly experience belies.

Second, there was a discussion of campaign finance and state parties. And I significantly disagree with a couple of the comments made. I don’t think McCain-Feingold weakened the state parties. The truth is that the world had changed to the disadvantage of state parties for decades. Party money flowed from the states up to the federal government. By the time I began practicing in the 1970s that wasn’t true anymore, and critics would say that state parties and election cycles were pumped up with national activists who were sent to the states to run the state parties and with national resources that were sent to state parties. McCain-Feingold didn’t create that set of circumstances. It may have accelerated the difficulties of all of the parties. It certainly created some difficulties for the national parties by shutting off a main source of financial support, but it’s very difficult to say in my view that McCain-Feingold was responsible for it. So, the plea I’m issuing is for recognizing how often we fail with these institutional design issues. We become terribly excited at a particular moment by the panic of the day. Not too many years ago the view was that Republicans would never ever obtain control of the Congress unless they had term limits, and then they gave up term limits once they gained control of the Congress.

PILDES: Okay, let’s come back to the issue that Bob put on the table that the problem is not polarized parties but the nature of debate, discourse, and the like. Monica, is that a significant problem now? Do they no longer want to get together because they’re spending so much time raising money, or because polarization itself makes it politically costly to get together with people from the other side of the aisle?

YOUN: People who have spent more time in DC than I can talk about the softer cultural factors. But a lot of the problem does reflect the polarization of the electorate. The electorate will always say, Oh, yes, we want reasonable, moderate, bipartisan solutions, but when push comes to shove the electorate will say, What we really want is for our party to trounce the other guys and to win this debate that we’re on. And if you take it to the level of the individual voters, the politicians are responding to demand rather than otherwise.

PILDES: Michael, you’ve written in particular about the very polarized debates on voter identification issues and laws that have been emerging over the last two or three years. And what we see there is that, at least within legislative bodies, the votes on these laws break down on completely partisan lines, although public opinion polls generally seem to suggest that three-quarters of voters endorse these kinds of laws.

WALDMAN: The voting wars of the past decade are a symptom rather than a cause of the polarization. There have always been challenges about who could vote, but there has not been as sharp a red/blue divide as now. The public has broad but not particularly deep views on these matters. On the one hand, there’s broad public support for something like voter ID. On the other hand, when you point out that a lot of people don’t have the particular kind of ID that’s being proposed, the public voted against it, as in Minnesota. The real challenge is how to advance something where there is in fact a solution that meets the concerns of both sides in the debate, as I would argue is the case here.

PILDES: What is that solution?

WALDMAN: Well, you could have a system that registers just about every voter and is less susceptible to fraud. And even on the very polarized issue of voter ID, you’re now starting to see proposals around the country, as in Nevada, where the Democratic secretary of state has proposed a system where you have to have an ID. But if you don’t have it, your photo gets taken at the polls. That has the potential to calm concerns about security without disenfranchising people.

There are some real solutions. We’re seated at the table with the co-chairs of the president’s new commission on electoral reform [Bauer and Ginsberg]. If we could find a way to take these issues out of the partisan crossfire, it’s far more likely to get a solution that actually meets the concerns of all parties.

PILDES: Can we take these issues out of the partisan crossfire, especially at the national level?

WALDMAN: Sometimes, when both parties want something, whether it’s a grand bargain between them, or, as in immigration, where suddenly both parties for entirely different reasons want exactly the same thing. But it’s important not to neglect some of the soft matters of leadership. The filibuster rules are the same as they’ve been for a long time, but all of a sudden they’re used so incessantly that you suddenly need an impossible supermajority to do anything in the Congress. There are numerous things where the rules are what they are on paper, but if leaders of both parties aren’t willing to stand up to their base or exert leadership then the system breaks down. The polarization that we’ve seen is not only a function of the voters or even the money in the system pulling people, but the difficulty that people inside the system have had resisting it.

PILDES: Ben, you’re the one who opened up the personal side of polarization. What, in your view, accounts for the situation Michael is describing?

GINSBERG: I’m honestly not sure. One of the contrasts with the atmosphere in Washington is on the state level, where there are any number of governors from both parties in either unified or divided legislatures who have managed to get an awful lot done in their states. So despite the polarization that we’re talking about, and we’re really talking about it as a national phenomenon, in any number of states it’s not true. I’m not really sure what the differences are temperamentally and in the relationships between people, and why it is different in Washington from the way it is in so many state capitals.

BAUER: There’s no question that the tenor of relationships in the city has changed. When I came to Washington, DC, full time in 1976, there was a very different quality to relationships across the aisle. Sometimes the rhetoric was still very hard edged, but there was more of a likelihood that you would see the previous combatants walking off the floor of the Senate joking with each other. And that’s very different than the reported period, post-1994 election, when the Democratic leader of the House and the Speaker of the House did not speak to each other for a year and a half directly. So there’s a difference, but to go to Michael’s distinction, it’s more of a symptom than a cause of the larger divide.

ISSACHAROFF: American government has traditionally depended upon two different things, which both are in short supply right now. One is people who rise above the partisan divides in the institution and are the deal brokers, and there seem to be fewer of those due to the decline of the center.

The other is that there seems to be less identification with the institution than with one’s party. If you look at the separation of powers, there is a Senate that has an understanding of its role, and a House in the same way, and a presidency organized around the executive in opposition to the Congress and to the judiciary. That seems to have broken down. There seems to be willingness to disable the various institutions in favor of an immediate partisan objective. The causal stuff is hard to figure out because there’s so many factors: that life is more transparent, that our sources of information are more available. The monopoly of information under Walter Cronkite was a terrible thing. I learned about the Vietnam War from Walter Cronkite, but that can’t be the right image to hold onto in this era.

BAUER: One thing about the kind of polarized debate that has most gotten my attention is what I call a negotiating inflexibility clothed in high moral principle. At a keynote recently delivered at a conference (I won’t identify which party), the fundamental choice put to the audience was that there were large issues facing the country, and the choice was between standing up for the Constitution or surrendering. Increasingly there is a view that the large national issues that we are dealing with are essentially a zero-sum game. Therefore you’re not splitting the difference when you compromise, you’re giving up, you’re losing. To defend that point of view there is an impulse to adopt a very stern moral tone so that the refusal to negotiate is not being unreasonable, it is being principled. That has to do with the way in which arguments are increasingly framed around issues that Tom Edsall calls “the age of scarcity.” We don’t have the resources to allocate fairly among all of the potential participants. And therefore, polarized debate is a negotiating strategy, but it’s an anti-negotiating strategy, and it serves a function in this particular political environment.

CAIRNCROSS: It’s also important to remember where you stand on this depends on where you sit, which is to say the filibuster is a big problem if you support an administration that’s trying to move judicial nominees through or whatever the case may be. It’s not if it’s a prior administration. But the tables always turn, so radical change to this system or reform for reform’s sake needs to be approached with some level of caution.

WALDMAN: I’ll say for the record that presidents should be able to make judicial appointments regardless of what party they are, and that will be for the record even when there’s a Republican president or a Democratic president. That’s not really a way to make our courts, let alone the rest of the system, work.

But I want to go back to something Sam said. I want to strongly defend Walter Cronkite.

GINSBERG: Brave.

WALDMAN: And Huntley-Brinkley. What we’re really talking about is a period when there was a sense of journalism that spoke to the whole country, that was more or less regarded as fair, and that facts were more or less regarded as facts. And that was unusual. In the 1800s that was not the way it was. Newspapers were highly partisan. Among the challenges to making the kind of compromises that inevitably are necessary, there must be some basic agreement on facts, and so this especially is challenging on things that involve short-term pain and long-term gain. As I look at the whole panoply of things affected by the polarization and dysfunction right now, you know, budgets come and go, taxes come and go. But climate change is different. We will look back on this era as a time when our political system was unable to grapple with a looming catastrophe, and one reason is there is no more shared space where people can persuade the media that something is a problem and force political actors to do something about it.

YOUN: One thing that’s happened is that the people’s expectations of Congress at this point are so low that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one expects Congress to govern anymore. So the more interesting question to your average voter is: Did my representative back down out of a negotiation? You have Planned Parenthood and the NRA both with their ideological purity tests, on which ideally you want your candidate to score 100 percent. You have political parties suggesting their own versions of the purity test, and it becomes this spiral in which you start to wonder: Are we going to lose a certain amount of democracy in our democratic institutions because more and more responsibility gets pushed onto less accountable institutions such as administrative agencies, executive action of various kinds, and the courts? Is Congress meant to be just an ideological battlefield?

GINSBERG: Let me call attention to three issues, which in the last 20 years were positions of principle on both sides, where there’s now been a sea change. Number one is immigration, number two is same-sex marriage, and number three is the gun debate—though still current, the goalposts are really different from where they were. So if we were having this discussion a few years ago we would say we’re locked in concrete, that there will be no compromise because people have their principles. Through the electoral wars, discussions, whatever it is, the debate shifted.

BAUER: That is true, but in two of three cases, and to some degree the third, what really shifted was public opinion, and it drove the two parties together because if there’s one thing we expect from our political actors, it’s a keen sense of survival. So it’s no shock that we’re moving toward immigration reform, that we’re moving toward acceptance of gay marriage, but it’s not a result of reasoned discourse over time in which both parties sat down and listened closely to each other. It’s a result of
a fundamental change in the electorate’s judgment that has moved the political actors.

PILDES: With that, I want to thank everybody and particularly the people who came in from out of town. It’s a real tribute to their commitment to these issues and to NYU. This is the biggest issue, I think, in democracy, and these are some of the best people to talk about it.

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Under discussion was a 2012 paper, “Are We There Yet?: On a Path to Closing America’s Long-Run Deficit,” that Kamin wrote for Tax Notes, a popular tax news and commentary magazine. The deficit discussion, with tussles over tax increases and spending cuts, was one of the biggest and most important political battles in Washington, and Kamin—who at the age of 33 is one of the country’s top experts on the federal budget—thought that the common wisdom was wrong.

The Congressional Budget Office’s projections showed a longterm budget gap of nearly nine percent of GDP over the next 75 years. The impact: Stabilizing the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio would require a combination of $1.3 trillion in spending cuts and revenue increases per year, starting immediately and growing with the economy. The size of those numbers had Washington in a tizzy.

Kamin argued that uncertainty and flawed predictions, including a failure to include consensus measures on which Republicans and Democrats agreed or to account for what he called a “long game on revenue”—meaning those tax provisions already in place that will bring in more funds in future years—gave a false impression of how bad things were. The actual long-term gap could be below two percent, he said, an amount that would be hard to categorize as a crisis. “[D]enying the possible progress distorts the policymaking process and does not reward tough choices when they are made—while also justifying evermore radical solutions,” he wrote.

That provocative argument is exactly the kind of thinking for which Kamin is known, and why the school wooed him back. Kamin, until last year an economic adviser to the OMB and the National Economic Council, and Lily Batchelder, on leave to be chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, embody tax law’s trend toward innovation. At a time when fiscal policy is splashed on the front pages of every newspaper, they both influence the national debate and form a bridge between Washington and the Law School classrooms.

They join other NYU Law faculty with a tax policy focus, including Daniel Shaviro, organizer of the Tax Policy Colloquium and one of the nation’s leading tax policy academics; Deborah Schenk LLM ’76, editor-in-chief of the policy-focused Tax Law Review; Joshua Blank LLM ’07, who specializes in tax administration and compliance; and Mitchell Kane, whose interests lie at the intersection of tax with environmental policy and development economics.

The tax faculty also encompasses those who focus on cutting edge transactional tax issues, such as Noël Cunningham LLM ’75, a foremost authority on the taxation of partnerships; Leo Schmolka LLM ’71, an expert in estates and partnerships; Laurie Malman ’71, who specializes in individual and corporate tax; John Steines LLM ’78, who focuses on corporate and international taxation; and Brookes Billman LLM ’75, an expert in tax procedure. In addition, top practitioners such as Victor Zonana ’64, LLM ’66 in hot areas like taxation of cross-border transactions also teach as adjuncts. This combined focus on both policy and practice makes NYU Law—whose tax law curriculum has been ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report every year since the survey began in 1992—“home to a world-class tax faculty that has a deep impact on national, and often global, tax policy debates,” says Blank, faculty director of the Graduate Tax Program.

At law schools across the country, there has been a shift from practice to policy, especially in tax. The tax code itself is arcane and complex, and tax lawyers can spend years of study deep in its details to learn to navigate it for their clients. But the rules and regulations that govern this country’s tax policy are also an expression of who we are as a people and what social policies we want to foster or curtail. Should the tax law be used to shrink poverty? Can it be tailored to ease inequality? In a global economy, what is the best way to tax US-based multinational companies? Should investment income be taxed at lower rates than wage income? Should an estate tax or inheritance tax halt family dynasty-building? Should the tax law be used to change our behavior, such as by encouraging us to purchase health insurance? Whatever your political perspective, the questions multiply the more you try to get your arms around them.

Nowhere does this increased emphasis on tax policy find a more organic fit than at NYU Law. “I think it’s a natural extension of the fact that the school is focused on public service,” says Batchelder. “One of the things you can do is be a public interest lawyer and have clients, and another thing you can do is work on policy issues.”

“The most complete and imaginative offering”

The federal income tax was passed into law 100 years ago, in 1913, and for the first few decades of its existence law students learned about tax as a minor offshoot of constitutional law. “Tax as a subject came into the curriculums of law schools in the 1930s,” says M. Carr Ferguson LLM ’60, a longtime member of the tax faculty and former US assistant attorney general for the Tax Division of the Department of Justice, who now teaches as an adjunct. “It was regarded as the work of accountants until then.”

It wasn’t until 1934 that Randolph Paul ’13—one of the name partners of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison—co-wrote the six-volume Law of Federal Income Taxation, one of the earliest studies of tax as a legal discipline. And while taxation had become more complicated by the 1940s, and litigation had begun to build up case law, law schools had not kept pace with the developments.

That was the landscape when Arthur Vanderbilt became dean of NYU School of Law in 1943 and quickly moved to enhance the school’s reputation beyond its regional base. Tax, Vanderbilt realized, was a wide-open area for training lawyers, and teaching it could give NYU an edge in the new field. While NYU Law offered a couple of basic tax courses then, there were no professors who specialized exclusively in tax. Vanderbilt’s idea would go one giant step further than simply beefing up the tax curriculum for JD students; he would establish a graduate tax program, the first in the nation, and create an academic home for all those who cared about tax. “It was a radical departure in legal education,” says Professor Emeritus John Peschel, who joined the tax faculty in 1967.

To make a splash with this new program, Vanderbilt was determined to hire Gerald (Jerry) Wallace, one of the country’s most brilliant tax teachers. Wallace had taught at Yale and had worked as special assistant to the US Attorney General and as chief of the criminal unit of the Justice Department’s tax division. Vanderbilt convinced Wallace to leave Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 1945.

Wallace was not only one of the nation’s most beloved tax professors, but he had also devised a new way of teaching tax that replaced law schools’ traditional Socratic method. In the problem method, as Wallace’s way came to be known, students were given a set of facts and required to analyze the code, regulations, and case law to produce an answer. This allowed students to get deep into the tax code and grounded the analysis with real-life problems and rules, rather than getting into a discourse that might veer too far into the hypothetical. Students across the country are now taught tax with the problem method. This, Schenk says, is in part because NYU has educated so many tax law academics.

The program launched with evening courses for associates at the city’s elite firms who were seeking LLMs. Wallace, known as the Chief and renowned for the camaraderie he fostered, built up the curriculum and expanded the program, teaching at NYU until 1983. Eventually, the program grew to offer a full-time day schedule.

Senior members of the tax faculty still tell stories about how the Chief and Charles Lyon—who joined the faculty in 1955 after serving as deputy chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and being an early name partner at what became Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—would hold court at Marta, a nearby Italian restaurant where Blue Hill is today, drinking martinis. (This was, after all, back in the day of the three-martini lunch.) Students would join them after class. “Charlie and Jerry would go there so regularly that their drinks would be ready at their table when they got in from their morning classes,” recalls Ferguson.

Wallace not only knew all of the program’s students, but he also remembered the names of their girlfriends and boyfriends. And Lyon, who was widely read—and was married to New Yorker writer Andy Logan—would make jokes. The duo also organized outings to Bear Mountain, basketball games, and other social events with the graduate tax students. “It was just the personalities of Jerry and Charlie. They were the kind of people who wanted to engage students,” says Stephen Gardner LLM ’65, a partner at Cooley and an adjunct professor since 1966. “Jerry didn’t care about writing; it was not what he considered important.”

Vanderbilt, who later became chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, had big ambitions for the tax program, and he insisted on creating a new law review that would be the first such journal devoted exclusively to taxation. The Tax Law Review, which remains the preeminent tax law journal, launched in 1946.

As Dean Russell Niles wrote in a commemoration of his predecessor, Vanderbilt, in the Tax Law Review: “Vanderbilt was not a tax lawyer; he did not even find the study of tax law congenial. As an imaginative realist, however, he saw before any other law school dean what the impact of the new tax laws would be on the post-war world…. And so, with his usual audacity and vigor, he recruited a tax law faculty…and with their help set up the most complete and imaginative offering ever made in this field.”

As the program gained in students and popularity, NYU Law brought in heavy-hitting tax lawyers to join Wallace and Lyon in teaching there. James Eustice LLM ’58, known to all lawyers for his co-authorship with Boris Bittker of the most important corporate tax treatise, Federal Income Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders, arrived at NYU Law in 1960.

Eustice, who died in 2011, was a marathon runner—known for wearing tracksuits and passing hours running around Washington Square Park—who kept stacks and stacks of paperwork (and of used Styrofoam coffee cups) in his office. Though his notes scribbled in the margins of the tax code were barely legible, and he never did use e-mail, his mind was a steel trap about all things tax-related. He had spent decades, after all, keeping B & E, the nickname for nothing less than the treatise on corporate tax law, up to date. “He was revered by everyone,” says Schenk. “If the answer was not in his book, there was no answer. He knew everything there was to know about tax.”

An expression of who we are as a people

As the Bush tax cuts approached their expiration at the end of 2012 and congressional Democrats and Republicans prepared for battle, Lily Batchelder was the woman at the center of the storm. On leave from her professorship of law and public policy at NYU Law since 2010, Batchelder has been the Senate Finance Committee’s chief tax counsel, serving as right-hand person to its powerful chairman, Senator Max Baucus, in the tax negotiations. In 2012, inside-the-Beltway newspaper Roll Callnamed her one of the top five Hill aides to know regarding tax and noted that she had become “a very visible presence on Capitol Hill, often appearing on the dais at hearings, and alongside [Baucus] as he roams the hallways.” She has led all of the committee’s tax work over the last couple of years, including the tax extensions and reauthorization of federal transportation programs.

Batchelder, whose low-key manner belies her sharp intellect, came to tax policy because of a passion for social justice and economic fairness. Unlike many tax professors who gravitate to tax early and have straightforward career paths, by the time Batchelder joined NYU Law in 2005 she had worked as a client advocate at a small social service agency in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, as director of community affairs for then–State Senator Marty Markowitz (who’s now the Brooklyn borough president), and as a tax attorney at Skadden, Arps. She has both a master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a law degree from Yale Law School.

Batchelder’s academic interests naturally fall squarely at the intersection of tax and social policy. She has completed research on how to use tax incentives to help low- and middle-income families and how to structure wealth transfer taxes for societal good. “What interested me about both was, how can we promote equal opportunity so that people’s economic rewards reflect their efforts, and folks from disadvantaged backgrounds get a fair shot,” she says.

For example, Batchelder has been a big proponent of structuring financial incentives as refundable tax credits. The credits are available to people regardless of whether they owe income tax, and they are considered more progressive because the poorest families, who otherwise might be excluded from the benefit, can use them. (Most tax incentives, by contrast, are nonrefundable, which means taxpayers can take them only to reduce their tax bills.) “Why not give incentives to people that need them the most?” Batchelder asks.

Like most tax policy wonks, Batchelder is interested in ways to simplify the tax code. Consider, she says, the complexity of tax benefits for higher education; there are more than 10 credits and deductions, each with its own rules and eligibility requirements. “If we’re going to use the tax code to promote education, we should do so in the most cost-effective way,” she says. Equally important for the education benefits in an age when college costs have soared, she argues, is the issue of timing. Families that are really strapped for cash would do better to get the education benefit before paying tuition, rather than waiting to get money back on the next year’s tax return. “Maybe you could claim it based on your previous year’s income, or we could give it to the university,” Batchelder ponders. “How could we build it into the sticker price that prospective students are facing, rather than them having to build a spreadsheet to figure out what tax benefits they might be able to claim?”

A related issue, which Batchelder explored in a 2009 Tax Notes paper, “Estate Tax Reform: Issues and Options”—written as the federal estate tax was approaching its one-year disappearance in 2010—is changing the way we tax the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next. In her paper she argued that not only could the estate tax be improved, simplified, and potentially expanded, but it could also be replaced with an inheritance tax. (Don’t expect that to actually happen in Washington, where the year-end tax agreement kept the estate tax with a generous $5 million exclusion.) “What interested me about that was focusing on opportunity and privilege, and making sure people’s tax burden reflected how well off they were,” Batchelder says. “You might have two people earning $40,000, but one of them has a $4 million inheritance. That person is better off, but the tax code doesn’t differentiate.”

For Batchelder, her time at NYU has informed her work in Washington, just as she expects that her work for the Senate Finance Committee will affect her teaching and research when she returns. In Washington, for example, Batchelder has become used to talking about tax policy in lay terms—most congressmen and congresswomen, after all, don’t know the ins and outs of the tax code beyond their talking points—and she has become more pragmatic about the way tax law is actually created. “There are some provisions I would speak about in tax class with this attitude of ‘Why are they doing this? It’s the stupidest thing ever.’ I’ve learned that some of these things are more sophisticated than I would have thought,” she says. “And sometimes it does come down to trying to reach a deal with certain members of Congress. It may not be the perfect policy, but you do not want to make the perfect the enemy of the good.”

While Batchelder spent 2012–13 immersed in tax policy discussions in Washington, David Kamin—who had been Batchelder’s student and crossed paths with her in Washington—escaped the day-to-day grind of writing position papers in order to join the NYU Law faculty. “I really loved working on tax and budget policy for the Obama administration,” Kamin says. But after three and a half years, Kamin—who is married and has a young daughter—was ready for a change from the late nights and constant battles of fiscal policymaking. “I wanted to work on larger pieces, versus the memos and fact sheets that are the lifeblood of policymaking in DC,” he says. “I want to think on a larger scale.”

Kamin has a bachelor’s in economics and political science from Swarthmore College, and worked for the Committee for Economic Development and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities before getting his JD magna cum laude at NYU Law. Even then, he was on the fast track: He became special assistant to Orszag, then the newly appointed director of the OMB, before even finishing his law degree. In a 2008 NYU Law Review article he wrote while still a student (that was excerpted in this magazine that year), “What Is a Progressive Tax Change?: Unmasking Hidden Values in Distributional Debates,” Kamin asked what it meant for a tax change to be considered progressive or regressive, concluding that measures of progressivity are often used in misleading or incoherent ways.

At the National Economic Council, as special assistant to the president for economic policy, Kamin made a significant impact on important policy legislation, including Obama’s healthcare law, the continuation of the payroll tax cut (through 2012), and the resolution of the debt crisis (in 2011).

Kamin is currently working on a Tax Law Review paper, “Poverty, Not Inequality: Federal Taxes and Redistribution,” about how the tax system cannot be used well to reduce inequality, though it can be used effectively to reduce poverty, and how pulling apart those two ideas can help create more effective policy. “If you look at the practical limits of the tax system, it is not going to have much impact on overall income tax distribution,” Kamin says. “But it can have much more effect on the welfare of people at the middle or bottom income levels. That’s different from inequality. If you distribute even a little to the bottom, it has a big impact.”

Another area of interest for Kamin is baselines, the seemingly simple concept of measuring where we are now that raises thorny policy questions. “In budget and tax, this creates a controversy: What’s a tax increase, and what’s a tax cut? Is what we agreed to [in the fiscal cliff deal] a $600 billion increase, or a $4 trillion tax cut?” Kamin asks. “If you look at the official score, it looks like a $4 trillion tax cut because the tax cuts were supposed to expire, but relative to current policy it’s a $600 billion tax increase.”

Kamin’s scholarship often shows how budget and tax metrics deeply influence policy debates, even as they are frequently misunderstood. He delves deep into the numbers to come up with original arguments that, typically, counter the conventional wisdom. Nowhere is this more true than with an idea he’s now exploring on the distributional impact of tax and spending policy. The common wisdom is that you can look at a tax bill and figure out its distributional impact—for example, that the Bush tax cuts benefited everyone but disproportionately benefited the wealthy. Kamin argues that because the common perception looks only at a particular time, it misses a bigger and more nuanced story. “Whenever you increase spending and cut taxes, you either have lower spending or higher taxes in the future,” Kamin explains. “In figuring out the actual effect, I can tell a plausible narrative that the end result of the Bush tax cuts is a tax system that is more progressive—however unintentional that may have been. At the same time, the tax system is producing less revenue, and that is now resulting in cuts to federal programs with regressive distributional consequences.”

The way Kamin sees it, part of the payback occurred in the year-end tax legislation, with the first major tax increase on high earners in 20 years (marginal tax rates for married couples making over $450,000 rose from 35 percent to 39.6 percent). Meanwhile, tax cuts which benefited all taxpayers but especially helped those at middle- and low-income levels, including the carving out of the 10 percent tax bracket, remained. The result: Over the long term, tax rates at the top of the income scale largely returned to their old levels, while tax rates at the bottom are lower. Programs like Head Start, however, are facing significant cuts due to fiscal pressures. “We now ironically have a more progressive tax system, but there are also less government services and a weaker safety net than would otherwise be the case,” Kamin says. “It may seem like splitting hairs, but it is a more accurate way to look at the net impact.”

[SIDEBAR: A Field of Dreams]

In addition to his scholarship, Kamin is teaching a federal budget seminar, which he designed. And he hopes that he and Batchelder will be role models to students who are interested in the policy world. Tax lawyers, perhaps more so than others because of the technical expertise required, often create careers that span both private practice and government service. “Having Lily and me here will hopefully give people entrée into a different career path if they are interested,” Kamin says.

While he was in Washington, Kamin recalls, he would sometimes call Shaviro—his professor at NYU Law and one of the country’s top tax policy experts—to walk through some arcane analysis that he was struggling with. “Now I can just knock on his door,” Kamin says with a laugh. “For me, it’s been very exciting to be a student in the program and then come back to teach.”

While Batchelder and Kamin are relative newcomers to NYU Law, the shift from practice to policy has been underway for more than two decades, built up by longtime professors Schenk, Shaviro, and others.

Deborah Schenk, Ronald and Marilynn Grossman Professor of Taxation, was unusual in many ways when she joined the tax faculty 30 years ago. She was one of the first women (along with Laurie Malman) in a clubby, male environment, and the first woman tax professor to get tenure. She took charge of the quarterly Tax Law Review, and as editor-in-chief for the past 25 years has made it the foremost publication for tax policy research. And she has mentored hundreds of students, particularly those interested in becoming tax academics themselves, many of whom completed the acting assistant professor program.

“Deborah is the most amazing mentor. She tells it how she sees it,” says Sarah Lawsky LLM ’06, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an adjunct professor at NYU Law. “She’ll go to bat for you, but you have to live up to her standards. There are so many tax professors in this country who owe their jobs, and their work, to Deborah.”

Schenk’s own research runs the gamut, including a treatise on Subchapter S corporations and a number of pieces about low-income taxpayers and small businesses. Her article “Exploiting the Salience Bias in Designing Taxes” (Yale Journal on Regulation, 2011), for example, looked at the issue of salience—that is, things that are disclosed visibly—and how that relates to taxpayers’ cognitive biases. The idea of looking at cognitive biases in decision making, generally, dates to the pioneering work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, but only more recently have researchers begun to consider how those biases play out in tax policy. Simplistically, income tax rates are relatively easy for taxpayers to see, and they will notice if Congress raises rates. But other provisions that have a similar effect of raising revenues—for example, the phaseouts on personal exemptions and deductions for the wealthy—may be harder to see, or less salient. Likewise, the failure to index tax brackets for inflation has the effect of changing a taxpayer’s marginal tax rate without altering the tax brackets.

Schenk argues that while such provisions often get criticized as hidden taxes, that criticism is misdirected; low-salience taxes might be both effective and justified. “Tax scholars are starting to think about how to adopt behavioral economics in tax,” Schenk says. “Can we use behavioral economics to shape compliance? Some people think that’s devious. There are a few of us who say we ought to take this into account.”

A dozen years after Schenk came to NYU Law, Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation, joined from the University of Chicago Law School. Shaviro, whose background includes stints at the elite tax firm Caplin & Drysdale and at the Joint Committee on Taxation (where he worked on the 1986 tax reform), has wide-ranging interests spanning tax policy, budgets, international tax, corporate tax, and more. He has written eight books on topics that range from budget policy to corporate tax—including Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax; Taxes, Spending, and the U.S. Government’s March Toward Bankruptcy; Making Sense of Social Security Reform; and Do Deficits Matter?—and he pens an influential tax blog called Start Making Sense, in which he was outspoken in his criticism of Mitt Romney’s tax proposals during the recent elections. His rich body of work even includes a satirical 2010 novel with a young, morally challenged litigator as a protagonist.

Shaviro’s big project at the moment is a forthcoming book on international tax policy, Fixing U.S. International Taxation, that will try to frame the issues regarding taxation of multinational companies in a global economy at a time when Washington has been considering corporate tax reform. Among the issues the book will explore is how to think about a territorial system of taxation, in which offshore profits would not be taxed in the US (which, corporations argue, would make them more competitive in a global economy), versus the current system in which overseas profits of US-based entities are taxed when they come back home, but those companies receive a credit for foreign taxes paid. Ultimately, Shaviro argues, the US lacks the market power to levy as much tax on US companies’ foreign-source income as it does on domestic income, and should use a lower tax rate for overseas income, instead of relying on foreign tax credits and deferral. (The current tax system, he notes, is what induced Apple to borrow in the US rather than bringing home more than $100 billion in offshore profits.)

While Shaviro has been working on the book, he has published numerous other papers, many of which have grown out of the research for the book. In “The Rising Tax-Electivity of US Corporate Residence” (Tax Law Review, 2011), which was first presented as the David R. Tillinghast Lecture at NYU Law, Shaviro looks at the ability of US corporations to elect a different residence for tax purposes and what that might mean to the current US system of international taxation. “In an increasingly integrated global economy, with rising cross-border stock listing and share ownership, it is plausible that US corporate residence for income tax purposes, with its reliance on one’s place of incorporation, will become increasingly elective for taxpayers at low cost. This trend is potentially fatal over time to worldwide residence-based corporate taxation, which will be wholly ineffective if its intended targets can simply opt out,” Shaviro writes. If the US were to shift its system of taxation, he argues, the US could assess a one-time transition on existing US multinationals’ foreign subsidiaries’ profits, which might raise $200 billion, to avoid giving a windfall to them.

Shaviro’s arrival at NYU heralded an increased depth of focus on tax policy, a shift from the earlier days of looking at tax doctrine. “That really took off with Dan,” says Noël Cunningham, whose own focus is on partnership taxation. “I think it’s fair to say that now, as a group, we’re more policy than doctrine.” For example, the work of Joshua Blank, who joined in 2010 as professor of tax practice, and Mitchell Kane, Gerald L. Wallace Professor of Taxation, who arrived in 2008, touches on repercussions for tax scofflaws, environmental policy, and economic development.

“Collateral Compliance,” Blank’s recent University of Pennsylvania Law Review article, looks at collateral sanctions for tax noncompliance. Such sanctions are imposed in addition to monetary tax penalties, revoke non-monetary government benefits and services, and are often administered by agencies other than the taxing authority. In Kawashima v. Holder, for instance, the Supreme Court in 2012 upheld an immigration judge’s decision to deport a Japanese immigrant couple who had previously pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns and been sentenced to four months in prison. States also are trying to use collateral sanctions. In California, for example, tax delinquents may lose their driver’s license; in Louisiana, it’s their hunting license that’s at risk.

Blank argues that collateral sanctions should only be applied when there’s a violation of a clear tax rule, when the taxing authority identifies the offense, and when taxpayers view the sanction as proportionate to the offense—standards that aren’t met when incorporating the Kawashima holding into federal deportation policies. “I argue collateral sanctions offer a lot of benefits,” says Blank. “But if people view the penalty as disproportionate, they may not cooperate.”

In addition to projects involving individual tax compliance, Blank is also pursuing a long-term empirical study of the factors that influence judges’ decisions in corporate tax abuse cases with Nancy Staudt, a tax policy scholar at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. “Corporate Shams” in the NYU Law Review (2012) reviewed more than 100 years of US Supreme Court decisions. The two are now immersed in thousands of federal appellate court decisions as they focus on the role of tax penalties in judicial decision making.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Kane is an international law expert who engages in cross-disciplinary research. His “Strategy and Cooperation in National Responses to International Tax Arbitrage” (Emory Law Journal, 2004) looked at the opportunities created by arbitrage—the structuring of transactions to take advantage of variations in tax laws across jurisdictions—for governments as they battle to attract capital in a global economy.

Kane is currently energized about work that spans tax and climate policy. At a conference in Europe, he realized that efforts to create carbon markets—which should have a single price to reduce emissions—have been hampered by the lack of a harmonized system for a carbon tax across jurisdictions. “All of the economic models are built on a pre-tax basis,” Kane says. “So I’ve been struggling with the general problem of how the tax system should be structured.” Kane’s “Taxation and Multi-period Global Cap and Trade,” published in the NYU Environmental Law Journal in 2011, tried to create a framework for the taxation of a greenhouse gas emissions permit market that encompasses multiple periods and jurisdictions.

Puzzles within puzzles

Despite the glitziness of talking tax policy, for most students the core reason to study tax law remains professional education in difficult and highly specialized tax issues. And it doesn’t take a lawyer to realize that as the tax code has gotten ever more complex, the amount of knowledge required to understand it has expanded exponentially. Over the last dozen years, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has consistently cited the complexity of the tax code as one of the biggest problems facing American taxpayers. Not only does the thicket of rules and regulations make compliance difficult, but it undermines trust in the tax system, too. The burden on the tax lawyer is that much greater as well. “You cannot begin to know it all. It’s wildly out of control,” Schenk says. Adds John Steines: “If you’re going to remain technically proficient, it’s much more demanding now. And as each decade rolls by, it becomes that much more demanding.”

Mastery of the tax code inspires such passion in members of the NYU Law tax faculty that, for many years after Marta closed, they would regularly gather at Volare, a cozy Italian restaurant near Washington Square Park known for its burlesque paintings by the Broadway set designer Cleon Throckmorton, and debate its arcane details. While friendly, those tax discussions occurred so often, and got so heated, that the restaurant allowed them to keep a copy of the entire Internal Revenue Code behind the bar to settle disputes quickly and definitely.

More seriously, the tax professors have used that refined and battle-tested knowledge to produce numerous treatises and casebooks that are at the core of teaching the practice of tax law. The B&E treatise on corporate taxation is the gold standard in that area and the most prominent example.

[SIDEBAR: The Most Influential Person in the Tax World]

Schenk wrote Federal Income Taxation: Principles and Policies (co-authored with Michael Graetz). Cunningham and his wife, Laura LLM ’88, a tax professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and adjunct at NYU, penned The Logic of Subchapter K: A Conceptual Guide to the Taxation of Partnerships, the definitive book on partnership tax law, a particularly abstruse subject. Brookes Billman, who has been teaching at NYU since 1979, co-wrote a casebook on tax procedure, Federal Tax Practice and Procedure: Cases, Materials, and Problems. Malman co-authored The Individual Tax Base: Cases, Problems, and Policies in Federal Taxation.

Blank credits Schenk and Graetz’s book on federal income taxation, which he first read in his dorm room during his JD studies at Harvard, with getting him excited about taxation, a subject many young law students don’t think they’ll enjoy. “After reading the first few pages, I was hooked,” he says.

The tax code, for students who are interested in it, is a brainteaser, creating puzzles within puzzles to work through. At NYU Law, as the tax code itself has grown more intricate, the number of tax courses has proliferated; there are now roughly 100 classes, more than any one student could possibly take. While the Graduate Tax Program caters to LLM students, JD candidates can take graduate-level courses, and those who want to focus their studies can pursue a joint JD/LLM degree. Classes range from the straightforward (Income Taxation, Taxation of Property Transactions, Estate and Gift Taxation) to the complex (Advanced Corporate Tax Problems, Taxation of Subchapter S Corporations) to the esoteric (Taxation of Affiliated Corporations). And while the 14 fulltime faculty (plus two acting assistant professors each year) teach many of the courses, adjuncts, who are often practicing attorneys at elite firms, handle some of the most complex topics—taxation of financial instruments, say, or taxation of private equity. “Unless you’re dead set on something else already, it’s such a good idea to try tax,” says Vivek Chandrasekhar ’11, LLM ’13, who clerked for Judge Rosemary Pooler of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the 2012 term, and now works at Roberts & Holland, a boutique tax firm in New York.

Still honoring the collegial model that Wallace and Lyon created, the tax program offers students a dizzying array of colloquia, programs, and networking events outside of the classroom. Each year, Blank hosts roundtable lunches that feature prominent alums talking about how they became interested in tax and what led to their success in the field. “It’s our version of Inside the Actors Studio,” Blank says. Students also attend the annual David R. Tillinghast Lecture on International Taxation, the NYU/KPMG Tax Lecture Series, and even an annual tax movie night, which this year featured episodes from The Honeymooners and The Simpsons.

As tax becomes more complex and the legal market changes, the Graduate Tax Progam has been adding even more classes that will better prepare students for jobs as tax lawyers. There are now more in-depth classes on issues in state and local taxation, for example, and specialized courses that focus on transactional tax planning. In a new course on tax deals, students read merger agreements and try to understand how the deal was structured and why. Another new offering focuses on accounting for tax consequences, a nod to the closer relationship between accountants and tax lawyers. “We are working with the faculty to incorporate a level of practical training into the substantive classes,” Blank says.

The faculty is also moving rapidly into online education, making sure that tax classes are available for time-pressed attorneys across the nation. Since 2008, NYU Law has offered the Executive LLM in Tax in an entirely digital format. “Our online program is thriving,” Blank says. It currently has roughly 100 students, several of whom are experienced partners in law firms and high-ranking lawyers in accounting firms. Blank and Graduate Tax Program Director John Stephens have worked closely with the faculty to expand the number of online courses offered. With streaming software that’s used by some of the most popular movie services, the online classes give the feel of being in the classroom, with chalkboard scrawls turned into detailed graphics. Adjunct Professor Sarah Lawsky, for example, created the online Tax Deals course. Tax ramifications are an increasingly important consideration in mergers and acquisitions, and the course seeks to give students real-life experience reading deal documents and exploring the tax provisions in them. The final exam is a deal document with questions.

Like many law students, Hayes Holderness ’11, LLM ’12 wasn’t initially interested in tax. But Schenk’s 1L income tax course changed that. After a tax policy fellowship at the Joint Committee on Taxation and an LLM in tax, he is now an associate at McDermott Will & Emery in New York focused on state and local tax issues. “The environment at NYU helped me to form not only a good understanding of the tax law,” he says, “but also a love for it.”

While students who will practice in the US hunker down in deals documents or learn the ins and outs of employee benefits law, an increasing number of foreign students choose to study tax in the US. A select few foreign students will study in the International Tax Program, launched in 1997. Director H. David Rosenbloom, James S. Eustice Visiting Professor of Taxation and member at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, describes it as a tightly knit intellectual oasis with a maximum of 30 students from around the world. “It’s very intensive,” says Rosenbloom, who is an expert in tax treaties, some of which he helped negotiate during his time as international tax counsel at the Treasury Department’s Office of International Tax Affairs in the late 1970s. “It’s an education in tax and in internationalism.”

Tax policy might be more in vogue and intellectually interesting than tax practice, but the reality is that most tax lawyers will wind up at law firms. And as the legal market gets squeezed, having more specialized knowledge up front is not just an advantage but also a necessity. “It’s important for grads today to show prospective employers they can deliver immediate value,” Steines says. “Particularly in view of the economic condition of the legal profession, it is important that law schools not forget that most people view them as professional schools.”

Looking Forward

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Paying taxes, however much you may personally grumble about it, is part of the social contract. And as last year’s presidential debates heated up over the taxes paid by the one percent and what type of social safety net we as a country want to have, the critical role of tax policy was impossible to ignore.

While the fiscal cliff deal at the end of last year settled tax policy for individuals, both Democrats and Republicans have continued to talk about the possibilities for major tax reform, something that has not happened since 1986. Since last fall, both Senator Baucus (who has announced he will retire in 2015) and Congressman Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, have been working up their proposals and have issued 10 bipartisan options papers.

“We’re going full steam ahead,” Batchelder says. “The chairman really wants to do tax reform. It’s an extremely ambitious goal, and there are a lot of challenges, but we’re going to work as hard as we can to make it happen.”

The debates in Washington echoed back at NYU Law with a series of evening discussions called Pathways to Tax Reform, to look at ideas that range from the possible to the radical. What sort of tax reform should happen? What might it mean?

Interesting questions worth pondering, and studying.

—Amy Feldman is a New York-based business journalist. She writes a tax column for Reuters, and contributes to Fortune and Barron’s.

—

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At the reception, Dean Niles asked Lipton what he was working on. Lipton said he was preparing an SEC registration statement for a client. Niles mentioned that there was an opening on the NYU faculty; Chester Lane, former general counsel of the SEC and an adjunct professor at NYU who taught securities regulation, had passed away. Niles needed an interim professor. He offered Lane’s old class notes to Lipton, along with the job, and said: “Don’t worry, Marty. By next week I’ll have someone who knows how.”

Next week came and went. Niles never found a replacement. Lipton would spend the better part of the 1960s and 1970s teaching securities regulation and corporate law part-time. Later, he would continue his association with NYU by serving as chairman of the Law School board and then of the University board, a post he holds today, more than 60 years after arriving on campus from the University of Pennsylvania. Law school students and fellow attorneys might know Lipton for his creation of the “poison pill,” an important innovation in corporate law that’s used to defend against takeovers. Less well known, however, is Lipton’s lifelong association with NYU, where alumni and administrators credit him with raising crucial funds and captaining NYU’s ascent from a small commuter school for working-class students into a premier global university.

The rise of NYU and the School of Law over the past half-century is particularly impressive when considering how static the world of higher education tends to be. In the constellation of great centers of learning, the stars move mostly in imperceptible ways. There have been a handful of exceptions, such as the trajectory of Stanford in the second half of the 20th century, although that was fueled heavily by money from Hewlett-Packard. NYU has a smaller endowment than its peer schools. Over the past 40 years as a trustee of both the University and Law School boards, Lipton has helped NYU leverage its non-financial assets, such as its location in the heart of New York City, as well as the loyalty of its alumni, typified by people like Evan Chesler ’75, chairman of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Stern alumnus Kenneth Langone, a founder of the Home Depot. But nowhere is that loyalty more evident than at Lipton’s own firm. Two of his partners, Herbert Wachtell and Eric Roth ’77, serve on the Law School board. Partner David Katz ’88 has taught a Law School course on M&A for the past 20 years, while another partner, Lawrence Pedowitz ’72, co-chairs the board of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“The Law School has had an established trajectory over the past 60 years,” says Richard Revesz, who ended 11 years as dean this May, “and I see it as connected to the emergence of Marty and his firm as major players. Wachtell Lipton is very much an NYU story.”

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, in his day job at the Seligson firm, Lipton handled new issues of securities for smaller companies, represented clients in SEC enforcement proceedings, and worked on friendly acquisitions in the $5 million to $10 million range. In 1964, the firm broke up, leaving Lipton, Rosen, and Katz to form a new firm. Wachtell, formerly an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, had already struck out on his own as a litigator. In January 1965, the four men, joined by Jerome Kern ’60, hung out a shingle, though Kern would leave in a few years to become an investment banker. All of the original men, including two young associates, had gone to NYU Law.

They started with $110,000 in capital, about $800,000 in today’s money. It was enough for seven lawyers to get along for one year, assuming no business came along. But some business did come along, and Lipton, confident of the future, developed a vision for what kind of firm he wanted it to be. It was Lipton, say his contemporaries, who was most responsible for establishing the firm’s culture and value system. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz would pursue only the highest-caliber matters. When it came to work and profits, the lawyers would share and share alike. There would be no eat-what-you-kill policy, with each lawyer out for himself. Internal competition was frowned upon. No one spoke of clients in terms of “my client.” All clients were “firm clients.” This tightknit culture of trust was built into the structure of the firm.

A couple of years into Wachtell Lipton’s existence, a disagreement arose between the firm and one of its biggest clients, Metromedia. The firm differed with Metromedia’s founder, John Kluge, on a matter of strategy. Rather than kowtow to Kluge, Lipton simply resigned the account. “He said they could take their business elsewhere,” recalls Bernard Nussbaum, a longtime Wachtell Lipton partner who served as White House counsel to Bill Clinton. “I couldn’t believe it. Here was a client that accounted for maybe 40 percent of our revenue. So I approached Marty and said, ‘What are you doing?’ Marty just laughed. He told me not to worry, that we’d do better next year than we had this year, and of course it was true.” Lipton refused to sacrifice the firm’s freedom of judgment, Nussbaum says, and that integrity led to the success of the firm. “Wachtell is known for making a lot of money,” he added, “but money was never the driving force.”

That integrity quickly became part of the firm’s brand and a reason many corporate leaders would feel comfortable putting their business in Lipton’s hands. “High-powered CEOs are used to manipulating people to get the answers they want,” says Kenneth Langone, a longtime friend of Lipton’s. “You’re not going to get that from Marty. If what he thinks you want is wrong, or borders on unethical, you don’t get him. Everyone’s out there kissing someone’s ass. That’s not Marty’s style.”

Lipton says clients don’t care if you play golf or are entertaining at dinner. “What they’re interested in is whether you’re dedicated to giving them the advice they need to get their deals done on terms that make sense,” he says. “You can’t cater too much to a client and expect to be successful.”

By the mid-1970s, starting attorneys at Wachtell Lipton were earning $22,500, making it one of the few firms paying lawyers more than the going rate at Wall Street firms. Daniel Neff, now a well-known M&A partner and co-chair of the executive committee at Wachtell Lipton, joined the firm in 1977. Neff says Lipton has kept in place a compensation system that has Lipton “dramatically under-compensated” relative to his value. “If,” says Neff, “the 82-year-old senior partner, the guy who had the most to do with creating the firm, is going to be continually underpaid in order to maximize the chance of having a lasting institution, well, that creates a real sense of firm, that we’re in it together, and it becomes pretty clear how you should conduct yourself.”

“We work harder than most firms,” says Jodi Schwartz LLM ’87, a tax partner. “It’s different here. For one thing, you don’t have six dedicated associates to do all your work. We’re at the office doing it with them. Marty has infused this firm with the idea that law is above all a profession, not necessarily a business. Giving back to your school and to the city—these are parts of the profession. He’s someone who leads by example.”

Today, Wachtell Lipton employs about 250 attorneys, making it tiny compared with other firms of its stature. Wachtell Lipton may be a firm of devoted professionals, but it’s a pretty good business, too. In 2012, the American Lawyer ranked it No. 1 in profits per partner, with a “PPP” of nearly $4.5 million, about three times the average among top 100 firms.

Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1931, Martin Lipton was the son of a factory manager and a housewife. Lipton’s father wanted him to go to the Wharton School and become a banker. But when Lipton graduated from Penn with a degree in economics, entry-level Wall Street jobs were different than they are today. “You didn’t just walk into an investment bank and say, ‘I want to be an associate,’ as you do now,” Lipton recalls. “There weren’t these great jobs for aspiring bankers. All you could get was being a registered rep or salesman of one kind or another. I thought what I’d really like to be is a lawyer. I did OK on the LSAT, and there I was.”

For an Ivy League graduate, NYU School of Law was not an obvious choice. Back then the Law School had only about 600 students in total. Its reputation was that of a commuter school for kids from working-class families. Lipton chose NYU partly because Arthur T. Vanderbilt, its visionary former dean, was the chief justice of the Supreme Court in Lipton’s home state of New Jersey. When Lipton started at NYU in the fall of ’52, Vanderbilt Hall, the school’s main building on the south side of Washington Square, had been open for one year. But Vanderbilt, who had been dean from 1943 to 1948, wanted more than physical expansion. His ambition had been to transform the Law School into a top national institution. So focused was Vanderbilt on ensuring the school’s future that he purchased the C.F. Mueller Company in 1947 on the Law School’s behalf, with the intention that the pasta maker’s profits would sustain the Law School. “I didn’t know it then,” says Lipton, “but I would in the future fit as a cog into Vanderbilt’s dream.”

One key aspect of that dream was the Root-Tilden Scholarship Program (now Root-Tilden-Kern, after Jerry Kern, one of the original WLRK partners). It provided full tuition plus room and board to two exceptional college graduates from each of the country’s then-10 federal judicial circuits. During his first year at the Law School, Lipton lived at home and commuted. In his second year, he was taken into the Root-Tilden program and moved to Hayden Hall.

Vanderbilt conceived of the Root-Tilden Scholarship Program in the 1940s because he was troubled that some of the best students and lawyers had become more concerned with making money than they were with participating in American democracy. He wanted to create leaders of the bar who would give unselfishly to serve the public. He named the program for alumni Elihu Root and Samuel Tilden. Root, class of 1867, had been secretary of war under President William McKinley and secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912 he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to international law. Tilden, class of 1841, was governor of New York and ran for president against Rutherford B. Hayes.

The program at inception was designed to build the reputation of the Law School while also bolstering legal education. So, the scholars were required to take special courses in the humanities, social sciences, history, and natural sciences. They also had to live together and to have lunch and dinner as a group five days a week. To instill Vanderbilt’s values of public service, scholars met regularly with leaders in government, industry, and finance. “The original idea was to bring in people who would have the highest respect for the laws of the country, and who would uphold them in the most ethical manner,” said Thomas Brome ’67, a Root alumnus, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the birth of the program in 2002. “These men would live together and dine together, forming a community of scholars who were infused with interests beyond the mechanical practice of law.”

These were heady, inspirational times to be a law student at NYU. Until then, NYU had been a little-noticed school. But Lipton began seeing his peers benefit from its rising status. In 1954, when the inaugural Root-Tilden class graduated, it was the first time in years that NYU students were hired by major Wall Street law firms. Cravath hired two Root-Tilden Scholars in the class ahead of Lipton. “That was a big deal,” he remembers. “It was some combination of everyone thinking, We’re going to break into the big time and be one of the major law schools. You’d read things about how competitive law schools were. That was not NYU. Everybody was working toward a common goal of providing a professional education and helping other people get along in life.”

Herb Wachtell was a member of that first class of Root-Tilden Scholars. “I remember a tall, skinny guy who wrote a Law Review piece that I proceeded to edit,” says Wachtell, of meeting Lipton. Lipton, likewise, remembers: “My lifelong friendship with Wachtell got off to a rocky start when he took the first note that I wrote for the Law Review and completely rewrote it, pounding away on an old manual typewriter amidst a constant stream of criticism.”

Lipton says his early years of teaching were a catalyst for his future involvement with NYU at increasingly higher levels. Had Dean Niles not targeted Lipton to come back and teach, it’s possible that NYU, without Lipton’s leadership, would look very different today. Evan Chesler, the chairman of Cravath, graduated from NYU and its law school and now sits on the boards of both. He recalls taking Lipton’s class as a third-year law student. “His firm had been having a meteoric rise,” says Chesler. “Marty was already an extraordinarily successful lawyer around town. I remember thinking that it was a big deal to learn securities law from him.”

Chesler adds: “My own view is that Marty feels about NYU the same way I do. He believes the school gave him a life. He’s been one of the leading corporate lawyers in America for half a century. And without that piece of paper from that little commuter law school, which was always hitting above its weight, it might not have been.”

In addition to being an adjunct professor, Lipton added the roles of Law School trustee and president of the Law Alumni Association in 1972. As trustee, Lipton was reunited with his old boss Judge Weinfeld (who would soon become chairman of the Law School’s board) and began consulting closely with Dean Robert McKay on strategy and alumni matters.

These were dire years for the University—and for the city. In 1971, NYU was running a deficit of almost $7 million and hemorrhaging money. Two years later, NYU sold its University Heights campus in the Bronx for $62 million, but by then the NYU budget deficit was around $10 million a year.

“When Marty first got involved, the University was facing hard times,” says William Berkley, founder of W.R. Berkley Corp., the $5 billion insurance company. Berkley got his undergraduate degree from NYU in 1966 and is now a vice chair of the University’s board. “We had given up the engineering school along with lots of other things, shrinking in order to survive.”

One more lucrative asset remained—the C.F. Mueller Company. Vanderbilt had intended its profits to support the Law School, and Lipton believed it was time to sell it for the school’s sake. But there was one snag: The Law School had not been a separate entity from NYU when it purchased the pasta company. So the title to Mueller had been taken in the name of the University, with ownership “for the exclusive benefit of its School of Law.”

On the Law School’s behalf, Lipton tried to negotiate with the University president, James Hester, to obtain direct ownership of the macaroni giant. He was stonewalled, however, until a new University president, John Sawhill, took over in 1975 and appointed Laurence Tisch, then a member of the University board, to negotiate the sale of Mueller on behalf of the board of trustees. Lipton and Tisch sold Mueller to Foremost-McKesson for $115 million. The proceeds were divided between the Law School ($67.5 million) and the University ($47.5 million). An ensuing agreement between the Law School and the University—known to this day as the Treaty—provided that the Law School would not be disproportionately taxed for University overhead and that it would be able to nominate four trustees for election to the University’s board. Lipton, meanwhile, deepened his involvement with his alma mater by becoming one of those University trustees in 1976. In 1978, Lipton was instrumental in Tisch’s being elected chair of the board.

Around the same time, another major institution called on Lipton for help: New York City itself. During the city’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, its comptroller, Harrison Goldin, retained Wachtell Lipton as an adviser. For the final six weeks of 1975, the firm drew on every lawyer in its ranks to work with investment banker Felix Rohatyn and obtain federal financing to restructure New York City’s debt, ending the fiscal crisis. Lipton’s reputation grew.

In 1982, Lipton was in conversation with Arthur Fleischer and Stephen Fraidin, partners at rival law firm Fried Frank. Fleischer and Fraidin represented Burlington Northern, the railroad conglomerate, in its bid to acquire El Paso, a natural gas producer. El Paso’s board of directors hired Lipton to defend against the takeover. “Marty told us that he was going to deploy what would become known as a ‘poison pill’ to deal with our takeover bid,” recalls Fraidin, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. “I listened to him describe it and thought to myself, There’s absolutely no way a court is going to uphold this.”

To understand the evolution of Lipton’s career, and why he holds the beliefs he does about how companies should be managed and merged, it’s necessary to know a little about the way the world of mergers and acquisitions morphed during the second half of the 20th century. When Lipton began practicing corporate law, M&A had been limited mostly to so-called strategic deals: If it made good business sense for one company to buy another, then the prospective buyer would approach the board and seek 90 percent of the shareholder vote. In the 1970s, a new approach to taking over a company, considered déclassé by New York’s older white-shoe firms, came into vogue: Corporations were using hostile takeover bids and proxy battles to win control of other public companies. These deals were “hostile” because they excluded the board of the target company and coerced the target’s shareholders. The dominant technique was the front-end-loaded tender offer, in which the hostile bidder makes an offer for 51 percent of the shares, with a statement that if the bidder acquires 51 percent within 10 days, then it will force a merger. Those shareholders who don’t tender their shares on the “front end” will get a lower price, or might just wind up holding debt, an IOU.

“In a sense, this made the transaction involuntary, because shareholders had to get in on the front end,” explained William Allen, Nusbaum Professor of Law and Business, who in the 1980s and 1990s sat on Delaware’s Court of Chancery, a leading trial court for business law. At the same time, says Allen, evolution in the money markets had made large pools of capital available to entrepreneurs. The new breed of company buyers, typified by T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, worked outside the establishment of big investment banks. Known as financial buyers, these new entrepreneurs looked to buy companies based not on their strategic relevance but on the financial return to be made if they could buy the company with borrowed money, fix its capital structure, and flip it for a profit.

These corporate raiders upset two powerful groups: corporate management, who were losing control of their firms, and labor unions, who often saw jobs slashed and factories closed when financial buyers moved in. Political power amassed on the side of wanting to slow these hostile tender offers. In this new environment, lawyers came to the foreground, offering either offensive or defensive tactics. Lipton frequently tussled with the legendary offensive lawyer Joseph Flom of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Eight years Flom’s junior, Lipton had won attention in 1974 for an offensive role, representing Loews in its hostile acquisition of the CNA insurance company. But the following year, Lipton established his reputation as a defender of corporate boards when squaring off against Flom on a high-profile deal, Colt Industries’ $151 million takeover of gasket-maker Garlock. The Garlock deal was documented in detail in a 1976 New York article, “Two Tough Lawyers in the Tender-Offer Game.” The piece was written by Steven Brill, who would later create a legal-media empire that included American Lawyer and Court TV. Comparing the two attorneys, Brill described Lipton as “huskier and slightly better tailored, in his habitual white shirt and black suit, and wearing bottle-thick glasses.”

As a defender of companies in hostile deals, Lipton sought to return power to management by slowing the takeover process and forcing bidders to negotiate directly with the board. His signature invention was the aforementioned poison pill, which he developed between 1980 and 1982. The pill is triggered when a shareholder—a potential bidder for the company—acquires 20 percent of the shares. At that point, the other shareholders have the right to buy up more shares at a discount. This in turn dilutes the bidder’s interest and raises the cost of acquisition. It’s called a poison pill because it makes the company temporarily “sick,” unattractive to the bidder.

When Lipton explained his idea during Burlington Northern’s bid for El Paso, Fraidin figured a court would deem it illegal because the poison pill, after all, required that a board exclude the bidder from the self-tender. Critics also argued that it interfered in a transaction among shareholders and would be used by boards to entrench themselves in management. But in 1985, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the poison pill as a valid takeover defense, sealing Lipton’s reputation as a brilliant corporate M&A strategist.

What’s unique about Lipton’s stewardship of NYU is not just the depth of his involvement—it’s not unusual for successful alumni to become benefactors and trustees of their alma maters—but also that he has managed to put his dealmaking prowess to work at so many decisive junctures for the university. Two decades after he helped sell off the Mueller company, buttressing the financial security of the Law School and the University, Lipton turned his attention to the problems of the NYU School of Medicine and Tisch Hospital, caused, he says, by the growth of managed healthcare.

In 1997, Lipton attempted a merger of Mount Sinai Hospital and the NYU Medical Center, which encompasses four hospitals and the medical school. By this time, he had further ascended the NYU ranks. In 1988, Lipton was elected to succeed Judge Weinfeld as chairman of the Law School board after Weinfeld died. Then, when Larry Tisch retired as chair of the University board in 1998, he recommended Lipton as his successor. “It’s not that I think I’m too old to continue as chair,” Tisch said at the meeting, “it’s that I’m afraid Marty is getting too old to succeed me.” (Tisch passed away in 2003.) The proposed hospital merger, Lipton’s first major test as leader of NYU, was critical for the future of the medical school, but it soon became problematic. First, the faculties of the medical schools of both organizations opposed the merger, and the plan was abandoned. Eventually the merger went through, but then the entities had to be de-merged, in 2001, when financing that had been promised by Mount Sinai fell apart. Lipton faced the possibility of an embarrassing failure.

For another NYU chair, the situation might have been overwhelming. For Lipton, drawing on four decades of M&A experience, it was nothing new. When the hospital merger caved, he approached his friend Kenneth Langone about taking on the chairmanship of the Medical Center and working to resolve its problems. “We were facing considerable difficulty,” Lipton remembers. “When you’re in a situation like that, you try to think who it is that you could turn to to be effective. I thought, If I could get Ken to put the kind of enthusiasm into this that he puts into everything else he does, it’d be perfect.” Langone said he
wasn’t interested.

“Ken, let me level with you,” Lipton recalls saying to Langone at the time. “I’m desperate. Will you at least come down to the Medical Center and meet some of the people?”

Langone visited the Medical Center—twice—and then Lipton paid him another visit at his office. “He said to me,” remembers Lipton, “‘I decided I’m going to do this. And you know, Marty, I never put time into something I can’t invest in.’” Langone handed Lipton a check for $100 million.“Why did I do that?” Langone asks. “Simple: Because Marty Lipton asked me to. If the tables were turned, he would have done the same for me.”

Of course, this sounds too simple in the retelling, but as William Berkley, the insurance mogul who sits on the NYU board with both men, explains: “You trust Marty for a couple reasons. First, he’s balanced. He says, ‘What does the other side need and what do we need, and how do we move forward?’ He’s not about pie in the sky. He’s about reality. Second, he’s got this strong emotional commitment to NYU. No one can debate that. He’s so committed because of his experiences at the Law School, which were clearly just really extraordinary for him. Marty thinks of it as his family, something he’s indebted to. He believes it’s an absolutely integral part of his life.”

In the past, Lipton has said that he never questions what he’s doing with his life, or how he chooses to spend his time. “You don’t have to plumb to the depths of my psyche,” he told the New York Observer in 2005. “There’s nothing there.” It’s not surprising, perhaps, that someone who has worked so hard at the same tasks for so long isn’t prone to much existential angst. But the epic course of Lipton’s career, split between his firm and his school, suggests a deep soulfulness that he probably would never admit to.

University President John Sexton, whose ascendant career at NYU parallels Lipton’s—Sexton became dean of the Law School shortly after Lipton became chairman of the Law School board—says the two men “consider each other brothers” who share an “extraordinary friendship” that has spanned nearly 30 years. “It’s fair to say there isn’t a single person who has entered Marty’s life, either in a personal or professional way, who hasn’t felt enhanced by his presence. He is an extraordinary embodiment of the ideal of care and caring.” Sexton also expresses appreciation for his and the University’s partnership with Marty. “He’s one of the busiest people in the world,” says Sexton, “and yet never has a call from me or anyone associated with NYU gone for more than an hour without an answer. When he’s asked to do something, it’s done immediately.”

Over the decades, that commitment amounted to incalculable and invaluable non-billable hours. But asked about his legacy, one of the most famous corporate lawyers in America looks away and shrugs, a little embarrassed. “There’s nothing else more important in life,” he says, “than what one achieves by contributing to the welfare and the benefit of those who come after us.”

—Dan Slater, a former litigator, is a freelance journalist and author of Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating.

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The son of a teacher, Morrison did his utmost to set the new students at ease, welcoming them, reviewing material he’d already taught, and taking questions. At one point, he mentioned turtles in passing, and only half the class laughed. Morrison quickly described the reference to the newcomers: An old woman explains to a scientist that the earth is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle. When the scientist pushes back, asking what the turtle is standing on, he’s told, “It’s turtles all the way down.” The punch line became a bonding point throughout the semester. Morrison did much more than tell jokes, however. He held weekly review sessions, hired three teaching assistants (the first he’d ever used) to offer extra hours, hosted a series of happy hours, and agreed to grade the original and transplanted students on separate curves.

By semester’s end, Morrison had won over skeptics like Unger. “Professor Morrison was an absolutely incredible professor, among the best I’ve ever had,” he enthuses. “He’s clear, organized, engaging, and interesting.” Henry Monaghan, a professor of constitutional law and federal courts who taught Morrison when he was a student at Columbia, praises Morrison for his “lightning-like willingness” to merge the classes, adding, “He is somebody who pitches in for the school.”

Morrison was collecting fans at NYU as well. When the Law School began looking for a dean last November, it cast a wide net, interviewing non-academics, CEOs of corporations, and entrepreneurs, among others. The committee eventually winnowed the field to four candidates and Morrison emerged as the clear favorite. “We found no one else who commanded the kind of universal respect and devotion that Trevor does from an amazingly wide range of people, both inside and outside the academy,” says Daryl Levinson, David Boies Professor of Law, who headed the search committee. “Everyone who has ever met him or worked with him talks about his judgment, wisdom, and ability to bring people together.”

The new dean has accomplished that feat across a range of impressive career moves. Upon graduating from Columbia Law School in 1998, he clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and, four years later, another trailblazing female judge: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He then entered academia, joining the faculty at Cornell Law School and, five years later, Columbia. He took a year’s leave of absence to work on issues of national security for the White House counsel during President Barack Obama’s first year in office. (He also found time to help vet the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.) At 42, Morrison has already grappled with some of the most urgent legal challenges of our time. He is considered one of the nation’s foremost scholars on constitutional structure and executive powers. “He’s been a first-rate legal scholar whose work shows the kind of intellectual power, subtlety, and sophistication that he will bring to the role of the dean. He’s deeply thoughtful and able to see down the road at an appropriate distance to make decisions that will endure as the correct ones over time,” says Richard Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law. “He was destined to become the dean of one of the top law schools in the country, and we were very fortunate to be able to persuade him to come here.”

MORRISON’S FATHER, from New Zealand, and his mother, from California, met in college in Seattle, married, and followed jobs to Port Alberni on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Port Alberni is a city at the head of the Alberni Inlet, surrounded by mountains and forests of red cedar and Douglas fir; many of the parents of Morrison’s friends worked in the paper mills or logging divisions that constituted the small town’s main industry. His father, Hugh, taught elementary and junior high school, and his mother, Anne, did a combination of social and community-building work. Other than one distant cousin, there were no lawyers in the family.

Morrison went to the only public high school in town and excelled at parliamentary debate, thanks largely to prep sessions with his father, who pushed him to think critically. When not studying or working or practicing piano, he ran, choosing the University of British Columbia in part because it had track and cross-country teams with some of Canada’s best middle-distance runners. He made varsity on a seven-person cross country team in which the top runner qualified for the Olympics. (Golf, he admits, is his new obsession.)

He planned to get a law degree and a PhD in Japanese history at Harvard, but a conversation with a graduate student in Japanese studies at Columbia—Beth Katzoff—convinced him to choose the New York City school. After completing a year of the doctoral coursework, Morrison started the JD program there. He became fascinated by virtually everything about the law, which seemed to offer much greater scope for engagement in the world than the narrow set of legal historical questions he was exploring for his PhD. “He was the most frequent attender of my office hours,” says Deirdre von Dornum, who was his TA at Columbia Law School. Von Dornum recently left the Federal Defenders of New York to become the new assistant dean of the Public Interest Law Center at NYU. “He always had a million hypotheticals and he was generally interested in playing out each one far beyond what everyone else was, to understand every aspect of it.” Morrison abandoned the PhD but gained a wife in Katzoff.

After getting his JD, he began clerking for Fletcher and quickly became an expert among the clerks in the knotty questions raised by the law of habeas corpus, which guarantees a prisoner the right to be brought before a judge to determine whether his or her detention is lawful. “The whole group looked to him, and the judge quickly recognized that he could be relied upon for the most cogent and trustworthy of analysis,” says Alison Nathan, a US district judge for the Southern District of New York who also clerked for Fletcher and who later worked with Morrison in the White House. Among the habeas cases, he was drawn to those involving the death penalty, an interest he maintained while teaching at Cornell Law School years later.

Fletcher was an inspiration to Morrison. After having four children, she enrolled in law school, graduating at the top of her class. No law firm wanted to hire a woman—“Prejudice came down on me like a ton of bricks,” she later wrote—but she finally convinced one to hire her, becoming its first partner, the first woman to head the local bar association, and the second woman appointed to the Ninth Circuit. She went on to write some 700 opinions, including one in 1984 approving affirmative action for women in Santa Clara’s transportation department and another in 2007 tossing the Bush administration’s fuel-efficiency requirements for light trucks and SUVs because Fletcher found that the rules failed to adequately account for global warming. Her liberal record made her a target of conservative senators, who forced her to take senior status in 1998 after Bill Clinton appointed her son to the same court. Unlike most senior judges, however, she never reduced her caseload, ruling in more than 400 cases a year before her death last year at the age of 89.

Her work ethic left a lasting impression on Morrison, who said she expected equally dedicated service from her clerks: “The judge taught me that a progressive approach to the law can often just be a matter of working very hard. It doesn’t just matter how smart you are.”

Morrison never forgot the lesson. After stints at the US Office of Legal Counsel, the Solicitor General’s Office, and Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Morrison returned to clerking in 2002, for an admirer of Fletcher’s, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg. At the same time, he went on the teaching market for law professors and juggled the demands of his newborn daughter, Clio. (Daughter Sophia was born five years later.) “I’m not sure he slept,” says Toby Heytens, his co-clerk who is now a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Despite the grueling schedule, Morrison nearly always made time for the pickup basketball games that took place on a court above the courtroom. As Heytens puts it: “No matter how busy he was, Trevor was always in. There were a couple instances where Trevor was playing basketball and the justice was looking for him. He went down to talk to her about a case while wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt.” Ginsburg hasn’t held it against him. As she told the New York Times: “NYU Law School has snared a prize. Trevor possesses in abundance all the qualities needed to make a great dean.”

IN 2008, MORRISON SPENT CHRISTMAS helping to draft executive orders for the newly elected Barack Obama. His work impressed Greg Craig, Obama’s first White House counsel, who asked him to join the office. Morrison had just moved from Cornell to Columbia and had taught only one semester at his new school, but he was drawn to Obama’s ambitious agenda and agreed.

Morrison worked on orders banning torture, including water-boarding, and calling for the closure of Guantánamo Bay. The first was successful; the second, less so. He spent much of his time on a task force charged with figuring out how to reform detention policy, deciding whether, for example, enemy combatants should be tried in military courts or Article III courts. When the president opted to keep the military commissions, Morrison worked to reform them. “He’s able to find common ground between vastly different points of view,” says Brigadier General Mark Martins, who was the Defense Department’s representative. “I remember identifying some really difficult aspect of policy we were going to deal with. I laid out the tensions on all sides. After about a 20-minute rundown of the difficulties, he said, ‘That’s just the needle we have to thread.’” And thread it, they did. Morrison became a regular presence on Capitol Hill, talking to staffers and helping to find the votes for the White House’s vision. At a time when not a lot of legislation was passed, the Military Commissions Act of 2009 did.

At year’s end, Martins invited him to spend a year in Afghanistan to help implement detention reforms similar to those they had addressed on the task force. Morrison felt compelled to decline. Commuting between Washington, DC, and New York City had already imposed enough of a burden on his wife, a librarian at Columbia who specializes in Japanese history, and their two young daughters; Morrison wanted to be home. But when Martins invited him to spend a week in Afghanistan assessing the work of the military boards charged with reviewing enemy combatant detentions there, Morrison readily agreed. He flew to Bagram Airfield, observed the boards, and was largely impressed. As Morrison puts it, “One indicator that the boards’ scrutiny was real was that a lot of people were released.”

Upon returning to Columbia, Morrison didn’t leave government life behind. He helped start a colloquium on national security law and policy, which hosted current and former lawyers in government, including those who had served as general counsel to the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department, and the White House.

Morrison’s scholarship reflects his experiences as a lawyer. In 2010, for example, he wrote an article published in the Columbia Law Review analyzing the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel. Drawing on opinions from the Carter administration through the end of Obama’s first year in office, Morrison found that OLC largely followed its own precedents, or the rule of stare decisis. That and other articles by Morrison respond to scholars such as Bruce Ackerman at Yale, who has argued that in the absence of routine judicial review of their work, executive legal offices like OLC cannot reliably place any meaningful check on presidential power. Morrison argues that such critiques are insufficiently attentive to the subtle but important dynamics of government lawyering, and that offices like OLC can and do provide real constraints on the president. The infamous “torture memos” written by OLC lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee in the years immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Morrison argues, are anomalous abuses, not business as usual, as Ackerman contends. “This is a very high-stakes debate,” says Samuel Rascoff, an associate professor of law at NYU specializing in national security. “What you think about these kinds of lawyers matters for whether you believe the US is practicing national security under the rule of law. The stare decisis article is classic Trevor in that it’s a defense of the best of what the legal profession has to offer.”

More recently, Morrison co-wrote with Curtis Bradley an article in the Harvard Law Review titled “Historical Gloss and the Separation of Powers,” which challenges the assumption of courts that congressional silence in the face of an assertion of executive power amounts to acquiescence. Morrison also co-wrote an amicus brief defending the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. In it, he made the argument that the individual mandate to buy health insurance is a tax and falls under Congress’s tax power. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the mandate on that ground.

Morrison takes on these sober concerns with a cheerful and energetic spirit. “There’s a wonderful lightness in the way he goes about doing his heavy and important work,” says Olatunde Johnson, a Columbia Law professor who specializes in civil procedure and civil rights. “He will just crack jokes in situations, which helps defuse any bad feelings in the room and helps bring the best out of people.” Ariela Dubler, a Columbia Law professor who taught a seminar on executive power with Morrison, says: “There’s not an academic thought that I’ve not run by Trevor. He reads everything I write. I read everything he writes. He’s gracious and intellectually generous and fun to talk to about ideas and great to teach with.” Sarah Cleveland, a professor of international and human rights law, concedes: “I think he was probably the leading internal candidate to be our dean, if he had stayed here.”

So what’s the secret to Morrison’s success? The ability to thrive on little sleep, with some help. He has skills as a barista that are a fitting testament to his Pacific Northwest roots. “I have a very elaborate espresso machine, and Trevor has tutored me every step of the way,” Dubler says. “He can make the hearts in the milk. He can make that leaf in your foam. I can only aspire to that leaf.” Morrison has had years of practice; every morning, he says, he makes a latte for Beth. (During an icebreaker lunch with NYU Law administrators in the spring, Morrison also confessed that he and Beth watch the romantic comedy Love Actually several times a year.)

IN EARLY APRIL, Morrison e-mailed his students to tell them that he had just accepted the deanship at NYU. “I want to assure all of you that this development will not diminish in any way my complete commitment to our class and to you, my students,” he wrote. Shortly after the official announcement was made, he headed up to Amsterdam Café for a planned happy hour with his students.

Morrison enjoys teaching to such a degree that he refers to it as a “selfish” pleasure. His students at Columbia have responded to his enthusiasm. In 2011, Morrison, who taught federal courts in addition to con law, won the school’s top teaching award. And at a recent auction to raise money for public-interest law, the opportunity for a group of students to have lunch with him and two colleagues was among the top-selling items. This fall at NYU Law, even as he’s learning the ropes of his new position, he plans to teach a con law class to signal his commitment to students.

The new dean will be taking the helm at a time when applications to law schools nationwide have declined amid profound concerns about whether a legal education justifies its cost. Many graduates of the 203 ABA-accredited US law schools cannot find high-paying jobs that will allow them to repay the debt most accrue for their schooling. “There is a general oversupply of law schools structured on the traditional model and, tragically, an undersupply of legal services to the poor, especially in rural parts of the country,” Morrison says. “These are large systemic challenges, but a leading school like NYU continues to have an incredibly important place in American public life and law.

“What our graduates do in the first year after they leave here may not be what they’re doing 10 years later,” he says, emphasizing the portability of the skills law students gain. “They may even move beyond the formal practice of law, but they will still rely on the training they received here in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and problem solving. Law schools do better than any other graduate program in training their students for a wide range of careers.”

Morrison, whom Columbia Professor Monaghan refers to as a “first-class energizer,” has excited just about everyone he has met at NYU. His academic credentials are beyond reproach. Or as Rascoff puts it, “He does his work with enormous intelligence, the best academic values, and a highly credible golf game.” But how will he fare with the more pedestrian demands of the job?

Jeannie Forrest, a vice dean who was on the search committee and was once associate dean of development, decided to test him. “In the company of several trustees, I said, ‘Ask me for money,’” she recalls. “You have to be nimble to respond to a question like that and to make an ask.” Morrison paused, thought about it, and launched into what Forrest describes as a reasonable pitch. She was impressed. “But what was really remarkable to me was that afterward, when we walked downstairs, he said, ‘How could I have done that better?’” When Forrest relayed his comment to the trustees, they said, “That’s our dean. That’s who we want.”

—Nadya Labi is a writer based in New York.

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