The Tax Law Concentration provides students with an in-depth course of study in the area of tax law.  The concentration emphasize skills by teaching students specialized tax research techniques, culminating in the students’ preparation of a request for a private letter ruling to the Internal Revenue Service, and focus on client interviewing and counseling techniques in a substantive tax area.

Students will:

• Master the ability to read and interpret complex statutes and regulations;
• Gain an understanding of how to interview clients and make oral and written presentations to them in a clear and concise manner;
• Learn how to research the tax consequences of complex transactional and/or estate planning deals;
• Become familiar with procedural rules governing tax law; and
• Understand the historical underpinnings of federal tax law and learn how to use that background to formulate tax arguments.

Course Requirements

Total credits required: 14-17

Required courses

Credits Required: 9-10

• Basic Federal Income Taxation (3)
• Business Organizations (3-4) of Estates and Trusts (3)
• Tax Planning (3) or Estate Planning (3) (capstone)

Advanced Tax Elective

Credits Required: 5-7

Students must choose two courses from the following list, and at least one of those courses must be either Corporate Taxation or Partnership Taxation.

• Bankruptcy (3)
• Contract Drafting (3)
• Corporate Taxation (3)
• Commercial Real Estate Leasing (3)
• Deal Skills (3)
• Elder Law (3)
• Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic (4)
• Fiduciary Administration (2)
• Estate Planning (if not taken as a capstone) (3)
• Intermediate Taxation Law (3)
• International Business Transactions (3)
• International Taxation (3)
• Partnership Taxation (3)
• Publicly Held Corporations (3)
• Real Estate Finance (3)
• Secured Transactions (3)
• Securities Regulation (3)
• Tax Planning (if not taken as a capstone) (3)
• Tax Policy (3)
• Tax Research (2)
• The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (2-3)
• Will and Trust Drafting (2)

Capstone Course (one of the following two courses is required)

Credits Required: 3

Tax Planning (3) OR Estate Planning (3)

Honors Certification

If a student obtains a cumulative grade point average of at least 90 in all courses taken for the tax concentration, he or she will receive a designation of “Tax Concentration with Honors.”

Note: If a student takes more than the required courses within a certificate category, they may designate which course to count toward the honors designation.

All presentations will be from 2 – 3:15 p.m. Central Time via zoom.  Anyone who would like to join as a guest participant should e-mail Professor Gamage at dgamage@missouri.edu for details and the zoom login.

• Jan. 27: Andy Grewal (Iowa Law) — “Tax Regulations After Loper Bright”
• Jan. 29: Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern Law) & Leandra Lederman (Indiana University Maurer School of Law) — “Deductions’ Reasoning” 
• Feb. 5: Leigh Osofsky (UNC Law) — “Wellness and the Tax Law”
• Feb. 12: Ari Glogower (Northwestern Law) & Andrew Granato (Yale) — “Reforming the Taxation of Life Insurance”
• Feb. 19: Jeremy Bearer-Friend (George Washington Law) & Sarah Polcz (UC-Davis Law) — “Sharing the Algorithm: The Tax Solution to A.I.”
• Feb. 26: Brian Galle (Georgetown Law) — “How to Tax the Rich: Options for 2025 and Beyond”
• March 5: Shannon W McCormack (Washington Law) — “America’s Failure to Rescue Parents: A Narrative of Inequitable Tax ‘Reform’”
• March 12: Goldburn Maynard (Indiana University Kelley School of Business) — “Penalizing Precarity”
• March 19: Alex Zhang (Emory Law) — “Fiscal Autonomy in Subnational Taxation”
• April 2: Ariel Jurow Kleiman (USC Law) & Shayak Sarkar (UC-Davis Law) — “Taxing Nannies”
• April 9: Adam Kern (San Diego Law) — “The Hole in the Global Minimum Tax”
• April 16: Conor Clarke (Wash U Law) — “Apportioned Direct Taxation”
• April 23: Shu-Yi Oei (Duke Law) — “Tidying up with the OECD (and the EU): The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering”
• April 30: Daniel Hemel (NYU Law) — “Formalism, Functionalism, and Nonfunctionalism in the Constitutional Law of Tax”