Graduates Choose Professor Alex Raskolnikov as Teacher of the Year

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Graduates Choose Professor Alex Raskolnikov as Teacher of the Year

 

Media Contact:          Nancy Goldfarb, 212-854-1584  [email protected] or [email protected]
 
 
New York, May 10, 2010—Alex Raskolnikov, the Charles Evans Gerber Professor of Law, has been named winner of the 2010 Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, an annual acknowledgment by the graduating classes for gifted teaching. Students chose Raskolnikov by a large margin, after a vote involving both J.D. and LL.M. candidates. He will speak at the Law School’s graduation ceremony May 14.
 
Raskolnikov is one of the nation’s leading tax experts and has earned a reputation among students for his skill in making complex topics understandable and accessible. He teaches a popular introductory course on federal income tax and an advanced course on taxation of financial instruments. He also co-teaches a tax policy colloquium with David M. Schizer, Dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law.  He joined the Law School in 2004 from Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where he specialized in taxation of financial instruments and financial institutions. His scholarship addresses tax enforcement and tax administration, combining economic analysis of deterrence with public economics and transaction cost economics. He has testified before Congress on the tax treatment of derivatives and has lectured on this subject in Brazil, Israel, and Japan. 
 
Recent scholarship includes: “Revealing Choices: Using Taxpayer Choice to Target Tax Enforcement” (Columbia Law Review); “Relational Tax Planning Under Risk-Based Rules” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review); “The Cost of Norms: Tax Effects of Tacit Understandings” (University of Chicago Law Review); and “Crime and Punishment in Taxation: Deceit, Deterrence, and the Self-Adjusting Penalty” (Columbia Law Review). 
 
Raskolnikov is a member of the advisory boards of the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, the Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship, and Revista Tributaria das Américas. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and his B.S. and M.S. from Moscow Mendeleev Chemical Engineering Academy.
                                                                               
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Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins its traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, criminal, national security, and environmental law.