Francine J. Lipman
How does your research and scholarship influence your teaching and service and vice versa?
My research and scholarship have been focused primarily on tax issues for vulnerable individuals and their families. For example, tax system relief for victims of disasters, people with disabilities, struggling seniors, unauthorized immigrants, college students, farmworkers, and lower-income working families. With the welfare-to-work movement, Congress has restructured social benefits from a means-tested system to a means-tested system contingent upon work, often using federal and state income tax systems to calculate and deliver wage subsidies or antipoverty relief. As a result, my tax research and scholarship has focused increasingly on measurements of poverty and relief delivered through income tax systems. I have been fortunate to be able to use this knowledge through my pro bono efforts on the frontlines working directly with taxpayers to ensure they access critical tax benefits or economic-tax justice.
What is the most important thing you are working on right now?
Most recently, thanks to generous donations, the law school has launched the Rosenblum Family Foundation Tax Clinic that formalizes my work with vulnerable taxpayers. The Tax Clinic coursework will include a substantive tax seminar and clinical training for Boyd law students who will learn how to represent and serve tax justice to qualifying taxpayers throughout Nevada. I am also looking forward to working with Boyd law school tax and business law alums who I hope will support the Tax Clinic as volunteers and donors. These contributions of time and money will ensure that we can maximize matching grants.
When students ask you what they should read outside required textbooks and other law-related books, what do you suggest?
The business section of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or local newspapers. The practice of law is a business and many clients are also business owners. Lawyers should have a good sense of how businesses and markets function and the current state of the local, U.S., and world economies. Transactional lawyers are often relied upon to serve clients beyond narrow legal analysis as wise and trusted counselors. Therefore, business lawyers should be comfortable discussing business matters and transactions with their clients as well as with accounting, banking, and finance experts and advisors. I teach a course titled “Accounting and Finance for Lawyers” that is intended to achieve these goals for any Boyd law student especially those students who have had no business training or experience. Indeed, the law students who I most enjoy having in the classroom for this shared, often challenging, experience are the students who most fear numbers, math, and financial concepts.