Fred Brown: Leading UBalt Law’s Graduate Tax Program

ALEX POWELL: What was it like telling Congress what’s broken?

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

ALEX POWELL: What does distance running teach you that’s useful in tax law or in building this program over decades?

FRED BROWN: Diligence and preparation.

FRED BROWN: Success breeds success, right?

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

FRED BROWN: It actually pulled me away even before I started as an electrical engineering major. So when I went to college, I sort of had it in 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 were thinking about. One was being a lawyer. One was being a doctor, possibly being an engineer. So it seemed to me that law was probably the better choice among those different professions. But I also had 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 Rutgers School of Engineering.

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. As far as tax law, I think engineering and tax law, there’s a lot of common elements there. You’re dealing with complicated formulas all the time. These code provisions are just a bunch of, I think, verbal formulas. And it takes a lot of the same skills that you need as an engineer to work your way through these complicated formulas and very dense material. After I went into law school and then I started practicing and then in academia, I’ve seen it’s not that uncommon to see tax lawyers having a background in math and science. People I worked with when I was practicing, one was an engineer and the other one was a physics major. So I think it was more happenstance than anything, but I do think it turned out to be a very good preparation for what I ended up doing.

ALEX POWELL: You graduated from NYU for your tax LLM. Then you chose UBalt.

FRED BROWN: So choosing UBalt, 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 being a professional athlete. There’s only so many jobs out there. There’s 200 law schools. At 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. 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 will offer basic tax, maybe corporate and partnership tax, but probably not much beyond that.

I joined UBalt in fall of 90, and the program began in the LLM, and the program began in fall of 87. And actually UBalt actually had an MS in tax program, I think it was started in the early 80s. So in fall of 87, they added the LLM 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. Students make really interesting points as well, especially the students that we have at UBalt. 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. So I do think it’s a very enriching environment to have accountants and lawyers in the same classroom.

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

FRED BROWN: I had prior teaching experience at NYU. So after I got my LLM in tax, and actually while I was getting my LLM in tax, I discovered that NYU will hire for temporary teaching positions people to teach for maybe a couple years after getting an LLM. The people in the current LLM class are people that they’re thinking about hiring if they’re interested to work as what they call an acting assistant professor for either one or two years thereafter. So when this opportunity arose, I applied and I was fortunate enough to receive it.

At NYU, they had the new professors teaching often a course that maybe the full-timers didn’t want to teach. So it was tax practice and procedure. I taught that. And then I taught another course focused more on IRS administrative material. It was the full realm of tax practice and procedures, basically looking at all the deficiency procedures, the refund procedures, penalties, and not surprisingly they didn’t want to teach that. They were very helpful people at NYU, they would give me their notes and things like that, but I was more or less on my own first semester. But I got tons of feedback from my student evals and that really helped me a lot, because I really didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

When I was in law school, law school was pretty much, as far as professors were concerned, more of an audio experience rather than a visual audio experience. As most professors did not use even the blackboard. They’d scribble something once in a while, but it was pretty much one-dimensional. And that’s something I tried to incorporate right away. Starting at NYU, I was really heavy with board use, diagramming things, writing out shorthand the formulas. And that’s something that I continued at Baltimore. Then around 15 years or so ago, I basically switched over to PowerPoint, but kind of using the same thing. I tried to make it a multi-dimensional experience, not just a talking head.

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

FRED BROWN: 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. Part of it was nerves and not exactly knowing what you’re doing. So yeah, I look back sometimes at things that I certainly could have done better.

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

FRED BROWN: Walter Schwidetzky, who’s still teaching at the school, was my prime mentor. And he was very helpful. I still have notes from my discussions with him about bouncing ideas off him as far as not just law, but teaching as well. 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. Both Jack and Walter have retired now, but Jack was also very helpful as well because he taught some tax courses. We used to have for a while like sort of tax lunches, like the tax group would go out to lunch and we would discuss teaching tax or tax in general.

I remember when I was a summer associate, I had a job in Atlantic City after my first year of law school. And there was one tax person in this law firm. 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. Tax is a very difficult area. And that’s another advantage that UBalt at that time was that you had multiple tax professors that you could just run ideas by and just sanity checks and the like.

ALEX POWELL: And your faculty has included Tax Court judges, IRS chief counsel attorneys, the former head of the DOJ Tax Division. How do you pitch Baltimore to that?

FRED BROWN: Well, part of it was historical. The program 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. I believe he took a temporary leave of absence from the Tax Court. He had some kind of professor status for a couple of years. He had a lot of credibility. He and Professor Schwidetzky were the ones that really put the program together, and Jack Lynch as well. But it was Judge Dawson who kind of took the lead there. So Judge Dawson taught on the program for a few years and then convinced some of his colleagues to do the same. So ever since 1987, we’ve always had a Tax Court judge that has taught on the program. So part of it is just that Judge Dawson started this tradition and other judges followed it.

Today it doesn’t matter as much because we have all of our classes now are online. But 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. Once you sort of get that pipeline going, we’re well known now among IRS Office of Chief Counsel. As far as being a head position in DOJ, Caroline [Ciraolo]’s a graduate of the program. So she graduated the LLM 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 this historical and proximity and other factors that allow us to really get excellent, not just judges, but IRS officials to teach in the program.

ALEX POWELL: There’s someone out there listening perhaps who wants to be an adjunct professor in tax law. What would you advise them?

FRED BROWN: It depends on the area, but schools are usually looking for people to be adjuncts. So there are a lot of opportunities there. 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. So if you’re an expert in a certain area and that school has a need, apply, put your best foot forward. As far as what we look for in adjuncts, not just interest and expertise, but if somebody has experience in doing CLEs or other sort of public presentations. That’s very helpful to give the people making decisions some information about your experience of presenting material.

The thing about adjunct teaching is that it requires a tremendous amount of dedication. These people are all working full time. 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 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 prepare quite a bit beyond just what you intend to cover in class.

ALEX POWELL: And you’ve taught at UBalt for over 30 years. Can you think of the most rewarding experience for you during that time?

FRED BROWN: Well, a couple of things. It’s always rewarding when you have a student in your class, especially students who maybe have a little more difficulty with material at first. And if you work with a student and you see how the student proceeds throughout the course and ends up doing well, and maybe a cherry on top is that the student then gets a good job based on some of the courses they took. The students at UBalt 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. I often taught in the evening division. 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. Watching evening students who work full-time or have other responsibilities during the day and then come to law school at night, get a few hours sleep and do the whole thing again, prepare for classes during the weekend. It’s really admirable to watch students like that.

Another thing I found very rewarding, too, is that one of the things I’ve done for over 30 years now is I’ve coached the tax moot court team for this school. Unlike the classroom, there you get to work really closely with a few students for like a few month period. I’m in the midst of it right now with my current tax moot court 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. The first year they’re getting their feet wet, but they really grow by the time of the second year.

ALEX POWELL: 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?

FRED BROWN: This was a simplification study that was mandated by the Tax Reform Act of 1986. 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 academic advisors to this. There was a big group. There was like 40 of us or so. I attended the meetings. I made some contributions. It was really fascinating, watching really all the tax luminaries at that time in the academia, along with the brilliant staff of the joint committee, working and thinking through different issues.

The whole task of this work was to bring on simplification. The idea was not to make any substantive changes, just try to simplify things. I think the ultimate product 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, this was back in 2000, 2001. If anything, things have gotten 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 one of the things we recommended. We recommended sort of simple stuff, like within the Internal Revenue Code, there are different rules on attributing stock ownership to related entities and family members. So regarding family members, there are like three or four different definitions of members of a family for different attribution rules. And we recommended just having just one definition, but even that didn’t happen. The way Congress is today, everything is just so political and it’s just hard to get these things through.

ALEX POWELL: It seems like in the international tax law domain especially that Congress, instead of subtracting, they will just add complexity.

FRED BROWN: Yeah, I’m teaching that course right now. And I’ve taught that course 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 is like, but it’s a tough balance to do that. The latest thing that Congress did was back 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 simply looked to the place of production as opposed to prior rules, which would bifurcate income between production and sales and had a lot of complexities. So for eight years or so, that was the rule. 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. The former GILTI rules, now they modify that slightly. Once in a while they subtract, but even with that rule on divvying up income between production and sales, they decided to add it back. So it is difficult, 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 I’m not sure it’s going to happen in my lifetime.

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

FRED BROWN: Success breeds success, right? Glen did this all on his own. First of all, Glen was also a JD student at UBalt. That’s when I first met Glen. At UBalt we have this Business and Tax Law Association. It was actually Glen and one of his classmates Giovanni who started the Business and Tax Law Association. 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 Glen would do in his future. Glen started as a JD student. He got his LLM. 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 building this firm, which I’ve seen go from a solo practitioner to now an 80-person firm that continues to grow. He’s also grown it in different ways. When I first started, they were just doing tax controversy, but now they have the full range of tax services and 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. Glen’s a great guy, loyal, wants to give back to the school, and has done so very generously. Not just that he’s hired great people from us, but there are many schools he could look to. Having so many UBalt grads working there as law clerks and also as associates and partners, it’s a great thing to see.

ALEX POWELL: 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?

FRED BROWN: Diligence and preparation. In order to run a marathon, there’s so much, especially your first marathon. It’s not just you have to be physically fit, but there’s also this psychological thing too, like 26 miles. You’ve got to be kidding. And so it’s all about preparation. The first marathon I ran, I ran with a really good friend of mine. His name is Don Stone, and he taught at UBalt for many years. He’s still teaching at UBalt, although he officially retired a few years ago. He had run some marathons before we actually met. And then we started running together, just three, five mile runs a lot. One day I said, let’s run a marathon, right? So we trained for the Marine Corps Marathon. And I think we ran 320 plus practice runs in connection with that. Because I was really nervous. So it’s just putting the work in. Sometimes it can be really awful. Especially here in Baltimore because you have to train in the summer to run a fall marathon. And it’s 80 degrees, humid, you’re running through sometimes not even the greatest scenic areas. So it could be really laborious, but you just push forward.

I don’t know which came first as far as my years of education and teaching. It’s all about preparation. I even ran one marathon with my son. I have twin sons. Right now they’re 28. When they were seniors in high school, we ran the Baltimore Marathon together. We trained together. I hope that was a good lesson for them as well, as far as preparation, because that’s what it takes. Resilience, preparation. 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 10th one, even if I have to walk it.

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

FRED BROWN: It depends what kind of tax career. So if you wanted to be a tax lawyer, what would I have done differently? Probably nothing, actually. I took all the right steps to be a tax lawyer in that I took 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, in hindsight, I wish I had done a little longer. I wish I had done longer to be exposed to 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’d 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 learned as much about actually the practice of law as much as I knew about being able to research and write memos. The lawyering skills aspect, working as a junior associate in a very large firm, I don’t think I had much exposure to that. I wish I had known that then, because I probably would have practiced maybe for another three or four years.

ALEX POWELL: Fred, last question. Perhaps there’s someone listening, they’re at UBalt as a JD student, or elsewhere, they’re considering whether they should attend UBalt for their tax LLM or go straight into practice. What would you tell them?

FRED BROWN: I would say probably do both. If they can get a good job that they’re happy with, and assuming it’s a tax practice job, I would say take the job. But I would also say to enroll in UBalt or some other excellent LLM in tax program, and to do it on a part-time basis. Tax law has just a really long learning curve. That’s why the LLM in tax has always been the most popular LLM for U.S. lawyers. And combining both the practice as well as taking courses, and UBalt’s LLM program, 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.

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

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