Richard C.E. Beck

Professor of Law
Founding Director, Graduate Tax Program

A former Sanskrit professor at Brown University, Richard C.E. Beck finds that the tax code he now teaches, with its multitudinous rules and layers of exceptions, has parallels in the study of languages.
 

"Puzzle-solving enthusiasts gravitate to tax law because of the enormous number of rules which can intersect in complicated and unpredictable ways," Professor Beck says. "It is certainly the most intricate law we have."
 

An expert in federal individual income tax who has testified for reform of spousal liability for income taxes before the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways & Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, Professor Beck teaches Individual Tax, Tax Policy, International Tax, and the Taxation of Property Transactions. He has also taught Corporate & Partnership Tax.
 

While an assistant professor at the University of Denver College of Law, he taught in an LL.M. program in tax and he is now Co-Director of a similar program which he founded at New York Law School.
 

He says tax law involves all aspects of life, personal and business, and has an impact on every area of legal practice, from divorce and personal injury to bankruptcy and corporate law. It represents the "most continuous and important relationship we have with our governments."
 

"I'm very pro-taxpayer for an academic," he says. "I look at the way tax law and administration work in the trenches. It's often unfair to individuals who don't have the same resources as big organizations. I like to expose bad case law and misguided rulemaking. I see myself, in part, as sort of a gadfly."
 

Professor Beck coauthored a casebook on taxation of business enterprises, and has published numerous articles on a wide variety of income tax issues.
 

Professor Beck grew up in Chicago and earned a B.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago, where he also taught for a year. He then taught Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit at Brown for seven years before turning to the study of law at Yale.
 

After practicing in New York City for five years, Professor Beck published a tax article that reignited his academic interests, and he went back to teaching. He has also taught in Paris at the Sorbonne, at the University of Osnabrück, and at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna.
 

He loves New York City and lives with his wife in the Village.