Ed McCaffery

An internationally recognized expert in tax law, McCaffery studies tax policy, tax structures, public finance theory including behavioral public finance, as well as property law and theory, intellectual property, and law and economics. He teaches Federal Income Taxation, Property, Intellectual Property, and Tax Law and Policy at the USC Gould School of Law, and Law and Economics and Law and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.

McCaffery's scholarship has been widely cited by economists, government officials, journalists and policy analysts. Among his publications are his rexcxcxcxcxccent books, Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler, which proposes a tax system based on taxing spending rather than income; and Taxing Women, which examines how working women suffer under current tax laws.

McCaffery has two books forthcoming: A New Ownership Society and Fiscal Confusion: How Citizens Misunderstand Tax and Spending Programs, and Why it Matters (with Jon Baron).

A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, McCaffery received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and his master's degree in economics from USC. He served as a clerk to Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court and was an attorney with Titchell, Maltzman, Mark, Bass, Ohleyer & Mishel before joining the USC Law faculty in 1989. He held the Maurice Jones, Jr., Professorship in Law from 1998 until 2004, when he was named the Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law. He served as dean and Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law on an interim basis from July 2006 to August 2007.

McCaffery also has served as a visiting professor of law and economics at the California Institute of Technology since 1994. He has chaired the USC Institute on Federal Taxation since 1997, and he founded the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics and served as its director from 2000 to 2003. He is an elected fellow of the American Law Institute (ALI) and the American College of Tax Counsel. Professor McCaffery also is of counsel to the Los Angeles office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP.