Teaching Federal Income Tax to the Current Generation of Law Students

The following post is by Jeffrey l. Kwall, Kathleen and Bernard Beazley Professor of Law (Loyola-Chicago) and is sponsored by West Academic.

The basic Individual Income Tax course opens a new world to most law students. Our challenge as professors is to find ways to make this unfamiliar area of law accessible to students with a wide variety of backgrounds and learning styles.

To break down barriers, I begin the course by exploring income issues in the context of relationships with which all students are likely to be familiar (e.g., a business owner and an employee, a donor and a donee, a lender and a borrower). To accommodate students with different learning styles, it is helpful to supplement cases with explanatory text, detailed examples, and many practice problems, and to highlight applications to the practice of law, online references, points worth noting and insights.

One of my primary goals is for Individual Income Tax students to walk away from the course understanding that economic considerations are more important than tax considerations. Students can become so enamored with the art of tax planning that they lose sight of the fact that the amount of taxes paid is far less important than the amount of money left over after taxes have been paid. The importance of economic considerations is a valuable lesson for all law students.

Stressing the importance of economic considerations opens the door to exposing students to quality of practice issues. The vast majority of our students will be practicing attorneys. Regardless of their area of practice, they can learn much about the practice of law by reading not only the traditional tax cases familiar to all of us, but provocative, contemporary cases that illustrate good planning skills as well those that reveal poor planning.

The new Doctrine and Practice Series™ (Foundation Press®) is an ideal vehicle for teaching the basic Individual Income Tax course. Its features make tax law accessible to students with a wide variety of backgrounds and learnings styles. In addition to the problems in the text, this new series offers students significant practice opportunities with online quiz questions after each chapter and cumulative review questions. I encourage you to review THE FEDERAL INCOME TAXATION OF INDIVIDUALS: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH and determine if this new approach to teaching tax resonates with you.