Fred Brown – Leading UBalt Law's Graduate Tax Program

Episode 6 of Cited Authorities. A conversation with Fred Brown, Director of the Graduate Tax Program at the University of Baltimore School of Law since 1990.
Fred started as an electrical engineer at Rutgers, went to Georgetown Law for his JD summa cum laude, then to NYU Law for his Tax LLM. He spent two years at Shaw Pittman in DC and taught as an acting assistant professor at NYU before joining UBalt in fall 1990. He has coached UBalt Law's tax moot court team for over 30 years and co-authored Understanding Taxation of Business Entities with Professor Walter Schwidetzky. In this episode, Fred and Alex discuss why engineers make good tax lawyers, how Fred recruited Tax Court judges and former DOJ Tax Division leaders to teach, Fred's year advising the Joint Committee on Taxation during the 2000-2001 simplification study, Glen Frost's ascent from UBalt Law to founding one of Maryland's fastest-growing law firms, and what running nine marathons has taught Fred about preparation.

Sign-up for the Cited Authorities Newsletter

SUBSCRIBE:

Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Website: citedauthorities.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What was it like telling Congress what's broken?

SPEAKER_00 0:03

I always tell people the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

What does distance running teach you that's useful in tax law or in building this program over decades?

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Diligence and preparation. Success breeds success, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:17

So, Fred, you started as an electrical engineer at Rutgers. What was the moment the law pulled you away from engineering?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

It actually pulled me away even before I started as an electrical engineering major. So when I went to college, I I sort of had it in my back of my mind I was going to go to law school after college. And I really can't tell you why. I don't know. Growing up, things were maybe not different, but there's only like a few professions that I sort of was thinking about. One was being a lawyer, one was being a doctor, possibly being an engineer. I can't tell you why. I don't know. Just maybe those were the professions that people looked at as far as being achieving some success. So I thought about, I guess I thought a little bit about being a doctor. My father's a pharmacist. My brother actually then became a medical doctor. But I don't know, it just maybe just as young people are, like fear of blood and that kind of stuff. So it seemed to me that law was probably the better choice among those different professions. But I also had a proclivity for like math and science. When I went to college, I said, well, I think I'd rather major in something more scientific. So I got into Rectors School of Engineering. And I and even though I didn't have enough foresight at the time to see whether that would be a good background for law, I've convinced myself over the years I think it's a very good background for law. Because engineering or any kind of hard science requires you to think analytically, to work your way through very dense material and problem solve. So yeah, I guess what I have one regret is that it might have been better if I actually tried engineering a bit afterwards, because I didn't. I just I got the degree and I immediately then enrolled in law school. So that's one bit of a regret that I have. There's been a lot of good that came out of it. I think overall it's been a good career. As far as like tax law, I think engineering and tax law, they there's a a lot of common elements there. You're dealing with complicated formulas all the time. And tax law is more or less like that. These code provisions are just a bunch of, I think, verbal formulas. And it takes a lot of the same skills, I think, that you need as an engineer to work your way through these complicated formulas and very dense material. And I've seen in my after I went into law school and then I started practicing and then in academia, I I I've seen it's not that uncommon to see tax lawyers having a background in math and science. A lot of them have background in accounting, but like people I worked with when I was practicing, one was an engineer, and the other one was a physics major. So these are people I worked very closely with. So I think it it it was more happenstance than anything, but I do think it it turned out to be a very good preparation for what I ended up doing.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

You graduated from NYU for your tax LLM. Then you chose U Ball.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

So choosing U Ball, first of all, I was excited by the fact that they had a graduate tax program. Whereas other schools that I was looking at, and let me say, when you're looking for a job as a law teacher, it's a little bit like I guess being a professional athlete. There's only so many jobs out there, right? There's 200 law schools, okay, so more than let's say Major League Baseball teams, but still there's 200. And in any given time, they're all not looking for new professors, and they're all certainly not looking for tax professors. So it is somewhat limited. And even though, yeah, I had a pretty good resume at the time, I think it was like seven callback interviews or something like that. And yeah, so UBalt's grad tax program excited me because it gave me the opportunity to teach multiple tax courses. Whereas your typical law school that doesn't have a grad tax program, they'll offer, like, say, basic tax, at that time, maybe corporate and partnership tax, but probably not much beyond that. So that was exciting. I mean, I like the people there, certainly. They were the people some of them were still there, and it seemed like a very good collegial atmosphere. And and I guess also, too, that i i it was close to home. That was another factor. So at that time I just got married, but no children, and my parents were still alive, my siblings are in the area, fairly close by New Jersey. So that was certainly a factor as well. So it was a combination of the ability to teach multiple tax courses, liking the people there, as well as proximity to my parents and siblings at the time. I joined UBault in fall of 90, and the program began in the LM and program began in fall of 87. And it and actually UBault actually had an MS and tax program, I think it was started like in the early 80s. So in fall of 87, they added the LM program, and then they made it this combined graduate tax program. It wasn't my doing. Although I do think it's a great thing to have accountants and lawyers and even law students in the same classroom. I think that it does allow for an environment where everybody can share ideas, and you know, most of course the learning is from the instructor. Students make really interesting points as well, especially the students that we have at UBault, almost all of them are working either part-time or full-time, most of them full-time, and they have a lot of experiences they could share. And so I do think it's a very enriching environment to have accountants and lawyers in the same classroom.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

You arrived in fall of 90 to the program. What was the first thing you knew that you wanted to change?

SPEAKER_00 6:23

I had prior teaching experience at NYU. So after I got my LM in tax, and actually during while I was getting my LM in tax, I discovered, I didn't even know this, that NYU will hire for temporary teaching positions people to teach for maybe a couple years after getting an LM. And they usually look to the current class. Not always, but the people in the current LM class are people that they're thinking about hiring, if they're interested, to work as what they called an acting assistant professor for either one or two years thereafter. So when this opportunity arose, I I applied and I was fortunate enough to receive it. So that was a learning experience, let me tell you. At NYU, they had the new professors teaching often a course, let's say that maybe the full-timers didn't want to teach, so it was tax practice and procedure. So I taught that, and then I taught another course called focused or more IRS administrative. It was everything. It was a full realm of tax practice and procedures. Following basically doing looking at all the deficiency procedures, the refund procedures, penalties, and and they're I'm surprised they didn't want to teach that. That was too dull for them. That's the thing. And they usually would have and I also got to teach another course my second year called, I think we called it tax one. It was like timing issues in federal income taxation. And that was interesting. And that was a course that not all acting assistants taught, but I got to teach that because I stayed on for not just taught for one full year, I also taught during the summer, and then I felt taught for the next full year as well. So I had some more opportunities to teach, and I got to teach that course. So anyway, but they were very helpful, the people at NYU. They shared, they would give me their notes and things like that. But I was more or less on my own for the first semester, and as far as just teaching and not really getting feedback, but I got tons of feedback on my student avows, and that really helped me a lot because I was, I really didn't know exactly what I was doing. And the student avows I felt were really invaluable. So I learned a lot about teaching in those two years. And by the time I got to my second year, I think I was pretty good. At least the avows indicated that I was good. So I learned when I was teaching there, so you're asking what to change. I don't know if change is the right word, but when I was in law school, law school was pretty much, as far as professor was concerned, it was more of an audio experience rather than a visual audio experience. That is, most professors did not use even the, we don't think we had whiteboards then, the blackboard. Yeah, they'd scribble something once in a while, but it was pretty much one-dimensional. They would talk, they would question us, we would listen, write down, but you didn't have the sort of visual experience. And that's something, at least in most courses. But in some of the courses, you had that. And that's something that I tried to incorporate right away. So I was right starting at NYU, I was really heavy with board use, diagramming things, writing out sort of shorthand the formulas. And that's something that I continued at Baltimore. And then around, I don't know, 15 years or so ago, I basically switched over to PowerPoint, but kind of using the same thing. But also still, if I'm teaching in the classroom, having some board use. So I don't know if to change because I think people maybe at Baltimore were doing the same thing. I'm not sure. As a young professor, you don't really visit other people's classes. But that was something that I tried to incorporate. I tried to make it a multi-dimensional experience, not just a talking head.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

How often do you reminisce about that first year of teaching at NYU?

SPEAKER_00 10:07

It was a learning experience. It wasn't great. So I do look back sometimes at some of the things I didn't do right. For example, I was doing a lot of lecturing, I was doing a lot of reading of my notes. I mean, today I almost never read notes, but as part of it was nerves and not exactly knowing what you're doing. So yeah, I look back sometimes of things that I certainly could have done better.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Fred, walk me through those early days of the program.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Walter Shredetsky, who's still teaching at the school, he was my prime mentor. And he was very helpful. I still have notes in my discussions with him about bouncing ideas off him as far as not just law, but but teaching as well. So he was extremely helpful. Another colleague of mine at the time was Wendy Gerzog. So we would have a lot of conversations as well about teaching tax. We used to have also Jack Lynch. He both Jack and Walter have retired now. But Jack was also very helpful as well because he taught some tax courses. And we used to have for a while, like sort of tax lunches, like the tax group would go out to lunch, and we would we would discuss teaching tax or tax in general. So that was all, I think, really good about getting me more knowledge from more experienced people about teaching, and and just too, like just talking about the law. I mean, tax law, the thing about it is that, and I remember when I was a summer associate back in this is I had a job in Atlantic City after my first year of law school, and there was like one tax person in this law firm. And I remember one time he said to us the difficulty about being the one tax person is there's nobody to talk to. And what he meant was there's nobody really to bounce ideas off of. And and taxes just, as you know, is it's a very difficult area. And it was really good to have. And that's another advantage you bought at that time was that you had multiple tax professors that you could just run ideas by and just sanity checks and and the like just to make sure that you were understanding things something well. So that was very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

And your faculty has included tax court judges, IRS chief counsel attorneys, the former head of OJ Tax Division. How do you pitch Baltimore to that?

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Well, part of it was uh historical. So the program was it it began in 1987, and actually the founder of the program was a tax court judge. His name was Howard Dawson. He passed away about 10 years ago, but he again I wasn't there, but I believe he took like a temporary leave of absence from the tax court, and he had some kind of professor status for a couple years, and he had a lot of credibility, and he basically he and I think Professor Shrodetsky were the ones that really put the program together, and I think Jack Lynch as well. But it was Judge Dawson, I think, who kind of took the lead there. And then so Judge Dawson taught on the program for a few years, and then I guess convinced some of his colleagues to do the same. So I think ever since 1987, we've always had a tax court judge that has taught in the program. So part of it is just that Judge Dawson started to start in this tradition, and other judges followed it as well. So it's really not my doing. It's just that it was started by a tax court judge, and and thank thankfully the tax court has continued. So today it doesn't matter as much because we have all of our classes now are online. But you know, going back even just a few years, we would have in-person classes. So having proximity to Baltimore was important, and it was convenient for not just the judges, but for IRS personnel to want to come to Baltimore to teach. So I think it was more, it was proximity that helped. And then I think that once you sort of get that pipeline going, I think we're well known now among, let's say, IRS Office of Chief Counsel. So it's been really surprisingly easy to get really good people from that department to teach in our program as far as being uh a head position in DOJ. So Caroline's a graduate of the program. So she graduated the LM program, I think it was right around the early mid-90s. She's been really very good to us as far as wanting to teach in the program, giving something back. So there's a lot of historical and proximity and other factors that allow us to really get excellent, not just judges, but IRS officials to teach in the program. Having very good faculty is real key. And, you know, not just people who are knowledgeable, I mean they're all extremely knowledgeable, but you know, people who can teach well. And, you know, I I try to make a strong effort to make sure that the quality of teaching is there. So I will review professors, review evaluations, and yeah, trying to maintain that high standard.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Aaron Powell There's someone out there listening, perhaps, who wants to be an adjunct professor in tax law. What would you advise them?

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Aaron Powell It depends on the area, but schools are usually looking for people to be adjuncts. So I think there are a lot of opportunities there. So initiative, reaching out to the law schools. Usually the people at law schools that make these decisions are the associate dean for academic affairs, reach out to those people, or if you're interested in teaching in a graduate tax program, obviously the director of the program. It's so I think that if if you're expert in a certain area and that school is looking, has a need, I I think apply, put your best case, best foot forward. I think that as far as what do we look for in adjuncts, not just interest and expertise, but if somebody has experience in doing CLEs or other sort of public presentations, I mean that's very helpful to give the people making decisions, you know, some information about your experience of presenting material. It's the thing about adjunct teaching is that it requires a tremendous amount of dedication. These people are all working full-time, and the very first time you teach a course, no matter how expert you are, there's a lot of preparation that goes into it. Because even if you're an expert in a certain area, there's an excellent chance that you don't know everything super well, so you have to make sure that you have the other things down. I always tell people the best way to learn a subject is to teach it, which I think is true, because you really you want to not just when you're teaching a course, in my opinion, you you just don't want to be prepared as far as teaching the material you expect to cover in class, but you want to try to anticipate as well, like other issues that maybe are tangential, that students are interested in, that you might get questions on. So you really do have to be fully into the material and I think prepare quite a bit beyond just what you intend to cover in class.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Aaron Powell And you've taught at Ubalt for over 30 years. Can you think of the most rewarding experience for you during that time?

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Aaron Powell Well, a couple things. I mean, it it's always rewarding when you have a student that's in your class, and especially students who maybe have a little more difficulty with material at first, who don't it doesn't come as easily to them. And if you work with a student and then use how you see the student proceed throughout the course and end up doing well, and maybe like sort of a cherry on top is that the student then gets a good job based on some of the teaching or some of the courses they took, that's always very rewarding to see that. I mean, I've had the students at UBAT in general are very admirable in that a lot of them are sometimes the first students in their family to go to college, maybe more often the first to go to law school. So they're really hardworking. A lot of them are even in law school, and you probably can share similar experiences, they'll be once they get past the first year, they'll be working and doing many other activities besides just doing law school. And I've often taught in the evening division. So all of our grad tax courses are during the evening, and even some of the non-tax JD courses I've taught have been in the evening. And watching evening students who work full-time or have, let's say, other responsibilities during the day, and then come to law school at night, go to think get a few hours' sleep and do a whole thing again, prepare for classes during the weekend. It's really admirable to watch students like that, and that the ability to be able to assist them to any extent in their studies is quite rewarding. Another thing I found very rewarding too is that one of the things I've done for, I guess, over 30 years now is I've coached the TaxMOCOR team for the school. And that has always been a really rewarding experience. So unlike the classroom, there you get to work really closely with a few students for like a few-month period. And I'm in the missive visit right now with my current Tax MOOCor team. And watching students really grow through that process. I've had students that at first they'd be nervous as heck, they can hardly say a word, but then they would just turn it around and really sometimes blossom at the competition. And I've especially seen this where I've had some students who were on the team for more than one year. Whereas the first year they're getting their feet wet, but they really grow, you know, say by the time of the second year. And just watching students, even if we always tell students is always a crapshoot as far as how the judges might evaluate you, it can be very subjective. But it but watching them, and in my view, seeing them really succeed has always been very rewarding.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

You advised the joint committee on taxation. On the overall state of the federal tax system. What was it like telling Congress what's broken? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

This was a simplification study that was mandated by the I think it was the Tax Reform Act of 1986. So the Joint Committee, the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation was required to do a simplification study every so many years. So I was lucky enough to be a part of a group of uh academic advisors to this. There was a big group, but there was like 40 of us or so. I attended the meetings, I made some contributions. It was really fascinating, you know, watching really all the tax luminaries at that time in the academia, along with the brilliant staff of the joint committee working and sort of thinking through different issues. The whole um task of this work was to bring on simplification. So the idea was not to make any substantive changes, just try to simplify things. And I think the ultimate product was was great. I think it made a lot of excellent recommendations. Unfortunately, I don't think anything ever really came of it. If anything, the tax law, and this was back in 2000, 2001, if anything, things have gotten, generally speaking, more complicated. I think that expanding the standard deduction has resulted in some simplification and that fewer people now have to itemize. But I don't even think that was even one of the things we recommended. We recommended sort of simple stuff sometimes. Like within the Internal Revenue Code, I'm sure you know about this and maybe some of the listeners do, that there are different rules on attributing stock ownership and to related entities and family members. So regarding family members, there are like I think three or four different definitions of members of a family for different attribution rules, stock attribution rules. And you know, we recommend it just. I think just one definition, but even that didn't happen. So some of the things we were just sort of just common sense recommendations, but the way Congress is today, everything is back then, even then, it's just so political and it's just hard to get three things through. I hope that I guess maybe they no longer do this. I've never heard any other simplification studies come out since this big project back in 2001, but it'd be a great idea to continue that effort.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Seems like in the international tax law domain, especially, that Congress, instead of subtracting, they will just add complexity.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Yeah, I'm teaching that course right now. And I I've taught that course now for about 30 years, and every year it's more difficult to teach the course just because of the amount of material you have to cover. You want to give a fair representation of what the law's like, but it's a tough balance to do that. You're exactly right. The latest thing that Congress did was back in in 2017, they changed the rule for sourcing the income when a taxpayer produces and sells inventory. And they made it a more straightforward rule. They just simply look to the place of production, as opposed to prior rules which would bifurcate income between production and sales, and had a lot of complexities as far as that's concerned. So for eight years or so, that was the rule. You look back at the place of production and you didn't concern yourself with any of the sales activities. But just recently, in the 2025 Act, they added back a rule that requires bifurcation. They did something for simplicity, but then they turned around and they just added it back. And you're right, as far as the new provisions that the former guilty rules, now they modify that slightly. It's is you're right. You're completely right. Once in a while they subtract, but even with that rule with divvying up income between production and sales, they decided to add it back, and then they continue to add further provisions that make things complicated. So it is difficult to, as a teacher and as a practitioner, I think at some point we'll reach a tipping point and we'll maybe go more towards simplification, but it I'm not sure it's going to happen in my lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Fred, I want to talk about Glenn Frost, who was your student. Now Glenn runs an 80-person firm and hires heavily from UBAL. When you watch that pipeline work, what does it confirm for you about how you built the program?

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Success breeds success, right? Glenn did this all on his own. First of all, Glenn was also a JD student at U Ball. That's when I first met Glenn. And then, and also Glenn, I don't know if you know this, but so at New Ball we have this Business and Tax Law Association. So it was actually Glenn and one of his classmates, Giovanni. They started the Business Tax Law Association. So I helped get things through the administrative process, but it was them. They started it, and that was sort of a preview of things that Glenn would do in his future. Glenn Starr is a JD student, he got his LM. You know, he was a really good student. I can still remember him asking good questions about things, just going beyond a bit the material that was covered, his initiative and his industry and in building this firm, which I've seen it go from, like you said, like a solo practitioner to now an 80-person firm that continues to grow. He's also grown it in different ways, too. So when I first started, I think they were just doing tax controversy. But now they have the full range of circle of tax services, and I think even beyond business planning as well. It just shows that if the school can do well in helping to make somebody a great lawyer, that results in further benefits to the school. Because there's many people are Glenn's great guys, loyal like a lot of people, wants to give back to the school and has done so very generously. Not that he's hired, he's hired great people from us, but there are many schools he could look to, and having so many U-ball grads working there as law clerks and also as associates and partners, it's a great thing to see.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Fred, you've run the Boston Marathon, the Marine Corps marathon, New York City marathon. What does distance running teach you that's useful in tax law and building this program over decades?

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Diligence and preparation. That's the thing. In order to run a marathon, there's so much, especially your first marathon, because the first one, it's not just you have to be physically fit, but there's also this psychological thing too, like 26 miles, you gotta be kidding. And uh so it's all about preparation. The first marathon I ran, and I ran with a very good friend of mine, his name is Don Stone, and he taught at UB for many years. He's still teaching at UB, although he officially retired a few years ago. And he had run some marathons before we actually met. And then we started running together, just three, five mile runs a lot. And then I knew he had run marathons, and one day I said, Let's run a marathon, right? So we trained for the Marine Corps marathon, and I think we ran three 20-plus practice runs in connection with that, because I was really nervous. So it's just putting the work in. Sometimes it could be really awful, right? Like you get up and it's especially here in Baltimore, because you have to train in the summer to run a fall marathon, and it's 80 degrees, even though you do it early, because there'll be 80 degrees and it's humid, and you're running through sometimes not even the greatest scenic areas. So it could be really laborious, but you just push forward, and that's I think something that I I don't know which came first as far as my years of education and teaching. It's all about preparation. I even had I even ran one marathon with my son. So I have twin sons. Right now they're 28, and when they were seniors in high school, we ran the Baltimore marathon together and we trained together. And I hope that was a good lesson for them as well, as far as preparation, because that's that's what it takes.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

Resilience, preparation. That's what it takes.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Putting up with some pain. I've done actually nine. I'm getting old now and hardly ever run anymore, but I keep thinking that maybe I will go back to it. I would like to get that tenth one, even if I have to walk it.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

What do you know about building a tax career that you wish someone would have told you back when you were at Georgetown?

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Well, depends what kind of tax career. Um so if you want to be a tax lawyer, what would I have done? What would I have done differently? Probably nothing, actually. That is, I think I took all the right steps to be a tax lawyer, in that I took, I think, three or four courses in law school, I got the LLM, that was a great experience, and I think that prepared me for being a tax lawyer. For being a tax professor, though, the one thing I think I would have done a little differently is that while I did practice for a few years, uh in hindsight, I wish I had done a little longer. I wish I'd done longer to be exposed to more just more things in practice. So I worked in a fairly narrow area, which I thought I really enjoyed. It was dealing with foreign corporations who do business in the U.S. But I only did it for a few years. And I think if I had stayed longer, I would have been exposed to more issues. I think also I would have learned more about being a lawyer, because I don't think I'd learned as much about actually the practice of law as much as I knew about being able to research and write memos and think through things. So I think the lawyering skills aspect, I as working as a junior associate in a very large firm, I don't think I had much exposure to that. And that's kind of the norm. So that's something I I would have done differently. And I wish I had known that then, because I probably would have practiced maybe for another three or four years. And I think that that would give me over the years I've picked it up, but in the beginning, I don't think I had a good grasp of just general lawyering skills to teach students as as well as just some of the greater experiences I could have obtained in practice. So that's something I would have done differently.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Fred, last question. Perhaps there's someone listening, they're at UBault as a JV student or elsewhere. They're considering whether they should attend UBault for their tax LLM or go straight into practice. What would you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 30:35

I would say probably do both. Right? I would say that that if they can get a good job that they're happy with, and assuming it's tax practice job and that's what they want, I would say take the job, and but I would also say to enroll in U-Bault or or some other excellent LLM and tax program. I would and to do it on a part-time basis. I think that as you know, tax law has just a really long learning curve. That's why the LM in tax has always been the most popular LLM for U.S. lawyers. And I think that combining both the practice as well as taking courses, and you bought law, I mean, you bought LM's programming, you could take, I mean you could take just one or two courses a semester and still graduate in time. So that's what I would tell students to do. If they got a tax job that they liked, take it and then do the program. You also might even get the added benefit of having your employer pay for it.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

This has been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for making the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

Oh, sure thing, Alex. And thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.