Professor Ann F. Thomas Answers the NYLS 10: A Retrospective
Throughout our 135-year history, our faculty has been a driving force in building on a legacy of innovation and excellence in legal education. For this special edition of the NYLS 10, we spoke with Otto L. Walter Distinguished Professor of Tax Law Ann F. Thomas, who celebrated her 31st year as a full-time faculty member and retired at the end of the Spring 2026 semester. As a national leader in tax law and social justice, she views tax law as fundamental to how societies function. While teaching tax law to future lawyers and practitioners, she also uses her research to uncover the ways in which tax policies may reinforce inequality and how policy might be changed to better reflect the needs of all citizens. At New York Law School, she directed the School’s Graduate Tax Program and has taught a variety of subjects, including contracts, corporate taxation, and tax research. She also serves as the Chair on the Board of Directors of the African American Policy Forum.
In this NYLS 10 Retrospective, Professor Thomas reflects on 10 questions about her career, her interests, and the past, present, and future of law and New York Law School.
1. What is the focus of your work?
Looking back, I would say that the through lines in my work have been tax law and social justice. I have been fortunate to be able to make contributions to these fields through private practice, law teaching, scholarship, and service on not-for-profit boards.
Although I went to law school to become a civil rights lawyer, I discovered that my talents lay not in litigation or constitutional theory but in tax law, not-for-profit governance, and transactional work. In law school, I found out that I was not meant to be a litigator when I was working in a live client clinic representing people held in state psychiatric facilities. This was the early 1970s when the struggle for deinstitutionalization was gaining ground, and although I won many cases, I was frustrated that my clients didn’t have resources that could help them flourish back in the community. Too many of my clients were stuck in the revolving door of civil commitment and ended up back in the state hospital within weeks. When, in my last semester, I was asked to help the staff of a psychiatric halfway house set up a not-for-profit to provide social enrichment for the residents, I felt that I was making a more positive difference in the lives of the people whom I wanted to help. This experience showed me that I could serve social justice by working through not-for-profit organizations and by using the skill set of a tax lawyer.
After law school, I had the opportunity to join the board of Altro Health and Rehabilitation Services, an organization that provided social and vocational rehabilitation and habilitation for people leaving psychiatric hospitals. I came to see that I had more impact helping this organization provide for its many clients than I could have had representing a few clients at a time. I think of board service like this as a multiplier. I found that the board could support a staff of 30 people serving dozens of clients when as individuals, board members would only be able to serve a few at a time. And I was able to make this contribution while working full time as a tax associate in a Wall Street law firm.
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to serve on the boards of four other not-for-profit organizations, including the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women and a Quaker school. Since 2014, I have been a member of the Board of Directors of the African American Policy Forum, where I now have the honor of serving as Chair. Without question, board service has been one of the most important and fulfilling parts of my career.
I found my way to tax law in my first year of practice. When I started at the law firm Fried Frank, I soon saw that the corporate lawyers sometimes worked for months on a single transaction involving endless meetings and hundreds of pages of agreements and exhibits. On the other hand, the tax lawyers might work on two or three deals at the same time, and their work focused on structuring the transactions rather than drafting a hundred-page merger agreement. And they did talk about substance over form, finding creative solutions to problems, and other exciting things. So, I became a tax lawyer, and I can say that for the past 50 years, there has rarely been a dull moment.
I practiced at Fried Frank for 17 years, focusing on corporate, finance, international, real estate, and not-for-profit tax law. But after some 10 years as a tax partner, I realized that I wanted to have greater impact on tax law than I could from private practice. I resigned my partnership and became a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and also taught as an adjunct at Yale Law School. In 1995, I was thrilled to join the full-time faculty at New York Law School.
2. How have your scholarship and interests changed over your career?
In my teaching, my basic goal has been to help students master tax concepts and analysis—one might say to think like a tax lawyer. But since New York Law School started the Graduate Tax Program, I have also been focused on teaching both J.D. and LL.M. students how to work like a tax lawyer. The core skills that tax lawyers need, in addition to analysis, are research and writing. To do effective research, one must understand the sources of tax law, how to find tax authorities, and how to evaluate and use them. I am proud of the tax research and writing course that we developed initially for LL.M. students and now also offer to J.D. students.
Although I have explored different issues, fundamentally my scholarship is about the social ideas and structures reflected in and perpetuated by the federal income tax. For practicing tax lawyers, the focus is on the technical aspects of tax law, understanding the immediate tax policy goals of a provision, and predicting how courts will decide issues in the future. What has interested me as a scholar is the impact of tax law on the lives of individuals and in particular, the role of tax law in creating and maintaining inequality. From this perspective, it is not the tax policy goal but the actual social outcome that is important.
When I left practice, the first area that I wanted to explore was the impact that tax law has on the economic and personal lives of women in the United States, particularly married women. I organized a symposium in 1999 entitled “Women, Equity and Federal Tax Policy: Open Questions.” My own contribution looked at the marriage penalty/marriage bonus. At that time, when a two earner couple with similar income levels married, they usually found that their tax aggregate liability went up. But for a couple in which one person had a market income and the other little if any income, reduced their aggregate tax burden. Whether or not these outcomes were intentional, I argued that they were inequitable for married women, in effect taxing them at higher rate, discouraging their labor force participation and increasing their future financial insecurity. Further, the “marriage bonus” was doubly unfair because household production of the homemaker was untaxed and the “marriage penalty” couple in effect subsidized the marriage bonus couple. I urged Congress to reject proposals that would reduce the penalty but also increase the bonus. I argued for a tax credit solution for the dual earner marriages. Sadly, Congress did exactly what I argued against, rewarding so-called traditional families with even more tax subsidies than before.
More recently, I looked at the impact of the tax benefits of homeownership on the racial wealth gap. Even today, the median racial wealth gap between white families on the one hand and Black families on the other hand is close to 10:1. The racial homeownership gap is similarly stark—some 75% of white families own their own homes while less than 40% of Black families are homeowners. This disparity fuels the racial wealth gap as Black taxpayers who rent subsidize white families who can claim a home mortgage interest deduction, deduct real property taxes, and tap into the equity in the house to further build generational wealth. My article on the subject focused attention on the billions of dollars of tax expenditure that homeowners have enjoyed since 1913 at the expense of renters.
3. How do people respond to your work?
I am happy to say that there is increasing interest in examining the social impact of tax law and its role in maintaining racial inequality. I was thrilled to see on the NYLS Digital Commons that more than 1,000 people have downloaded my article on the tax benefits of homeownership and the racial wealth gap.
4. What’s a problem you wish you could solve with a snap of your fingers?
Very few societal problems can be solved with a snap of the fingers, but I would start with overturning Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Louisiana vs. Callais, and SSFA vs. Harvard to restore women’s rights to control their own bodies, the right to vote with meaningful political participation, and the right to equitable educational opportunity.
5. What is the most exciting or impactful question you have answered through your work, and what drew you to the question(s)?
Of my work at NYLS, I am especially proud of two things. The first is our Graduate Tax Program, which Professors William P. LaPiana, Richard C.E. Beck, and I started in 2003. It has been my privilege to be the Director of this program. Our goal has been to help our students become the tax lawyers they want to be and to offer the opportunity to gain the competence to better serve their clients, whether in a large firm or a community-based practice.
The second thing that gives me great pride is the Community Days orientation program that NYLS started in Fall 2020. In the summer of 2020 after the public murder of George Floyd, there was widespread recognition that education, and legal education in particular, did not adequately address structural racism, that is to say, the unexamined and often invisible ways in which the status quo and societal institutions perpetuated inequality.
Professor Kirk Burkhalter and I, as Co-Chairs of the Faculty DEI Committee, were struggling to find a place in which students could learn about the racial history of the United States and have the difficult conversations about the impact of racism on law and institutions. Professor Penelope Andrews suggested that we set aside time during 1L orientation to talk about these things as a community, and we ran with it. We called upon faculty members to teach in it and alumni to share their own stories. One of our primary goals has been to show the new students that whatever their background, they belong at NYLS and have an honored place in our community. NYLS was the first law school in the country to have such a program, and it has served as the model for many others.
Professor Ann Thomas (far left) and Dean William LaPiana (far right) with 2011 graduating LL.M. students.
NYLS Trustees Emerson S. Moore II ’99 and John D. McMahon ’76, Professor Ann Thomas, Dean of Faculty William P. LaPiana, Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Institutional Strategy Matt Gewolb, and Dean and President Anthony W. Crowell at the 2026 Commencement Exercises.
6. How do you approach teaching law?
I am fundamentally a tax lawyer and have spent most of the last 30 years teaching tax law of one kind or another. But about 10 years ago, when a colleague was on sabbatical, Professor LaPiana asked me if I would teach the first semester Contracts course. I guess I was ready for a new challenge because I said “Yes.” In all candor, Contracts was my least favorite course in law school. But I knew from my years in tax practice how foundational this knowledge of law is, and I resolved to give my students a better start. Professor Arthur Leonard had been talking for years about using the case file method in his Contracts classes. This approach casts students in the active role a being an associate in a law firm who is asked to find the answer to various contracts problems. For each class, the students are given a case file setting out the facts and the client’s dilemma. The file also contains the cases, UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) and Restatement of Contracts provisions, and secondary sources that will help the student answer the question. Professor Leonard generously shared his class notes and materials with me, and I set off. This method resonated deeply with my own practice experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed walking 1Ls through their first encounter with the responsibility of having clients who depended on their knowledge of the law.
7. What’s the next year like for you? What plans do you have for your next chapter?
My next chapter is retirement! My husband and I (and our dog Hero) have moved to San Francisco to be closer to our two sons. We raised both boys in Greenwich Village, and they both moved to California decades ago, wanting to make their own way in a new place. But in recent years, they have urged us to join them, and we have succumbed.
I will still be involved with NYLS, especially in connection with the Graduate Tax Program, but I won’t be teaching. And I won’t be idle. I have a book to finish—a history of the enactment of the 1913 income tax—and an article to finish about the tax lawyers and accountants who won the acquittal of Martin Luther King Jr. from a criminal tax case in Alabama and saved the civil rights movement. And I will have more time to devote to the African American Policy Forum.
8. What advice would you give to law students, legal scholars, and others following in your footsteps?
To law students, I would say use your time in law school to start finding out who you are as a lawyer. Because of my own experience—starting law school with the intention to become a civil rights lawyer and ending up as a tax lawyer—I always encourage students to find a clinic or internship in which they can see what lawyers actually do in the practice area that they think they want. The work and life of a litigator is so different from that of a lawyer doing environmental regulatory work or real estate or internet law. I am very proud that New York Law School provides so many opportunities for this kind of self-discovery for our students. This is an essential part of legal education, and as New York's law school, NYLS really excels.
To everyone who has had the privilege of a legal education, I would say find time to give back. Find an organization that is making the change or community you want to see happen. Put your special skills and special understanding of law, government, and society to work in its service. Every not-for-profit needs to have lawyers on its board. For example, you can contribute the skill of rigorous analysis that you worked hard to attain. You can ground the organization in the ethos of equal protection and steer it away from arbitrary treatment of employees. In other words, by helping to lead an organization, you can help it practice justice every day.
9. What are you reading, watching, or listening to?
I have been reading two books written by friends: Hollow Spaces by Victor Suthammonant ’05, and Backtalker: An American Memoir by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Hollow Spaces, which was featured on The New York Times 2025 Best Mystery list, is a legal thriller that follows the family of a lawyer acquitted of murder and at the same time reopens the past. Victor is now a litigation partner at Kostelanetz LLP. Backtalker: An American Memoir, a New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller, is the personal backstory of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal theorist and scholar who gave critical race theory (CRT) its name and developed the frame of intersectionality as well as the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. The memoir is a page turner
I also have a weakness for Italian detective shows. Right now, I am binging on the new season of Commissario Ricciardi. Last year, it was Commissario Montelbano. They are intriguing, the acting is very strong, the scenery is lovely, and they help me keep up my Italian language skills.
10. Since this year marks both the 135th anniversary of NYLS and your 31st anniversary as an NYLS professor, what would you consider to be some of the most impactful changes that NYLS has undergone during your tenure? What would you say to NYLS community members looking forward to the next 31—or 135 years?
The most impactful change at NYLS since I arrived here 31 years ago is Anthony Crowell. As Dean and President, he truly has transformed NYLS into New York’s Law School, a forward-looking resource for our students and our city.
Looking forward to the next 31 years and to the next 135 years, I would say to the NYLS community of the present and the future that the rule of law is the foundation of our society. This was true in 1215 when the Magna Carta established limitations on the arbitrary actions of a king. It is true today, and it will be true in 135 years. We, as lawyers, have a special obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect our precious democracy.