Edward McCaffery

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Edward McCaffery (born around 1959) is an American tax law professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a visiting professor of Law and Economics at Caltech. He studies tax policy, tax structures, public finance theory (including behavioral public finance), as well as property law, intellectual property, and law and economics.

Education: Yale University (undergraduate), J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Master’s in economics from USC.

Career highlights: He clerked for Chief Justice Robert Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court, then worked as an attorney in Los Angeles before joining USC Law in 1989. He held the Maurice Jones, Jr. Professorship in Law from 1998 to 2004 and has been a visiting professor at Caltech since 1994. He has chaired the USC Institute on Federal Taxation since 1997 and founded the USC–Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics, directing it from 2000 to 2003. He is a fellow of the American Law Institute and the American College of Tax Counsel, and has worked as Senior Counsel at Seyfarth Shaw LLP in Los Angeles.

At USC, McCaffery holds the Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law and is a Professor of Law, Economics, and Political Science. He teaches federal income taxation, property, intellectual property, and tax policy. At Caltech, he teaches courses on the intersection of law and economics and on law and technology. He served as interim dean of the USC Gould School of Law in 2006.

Publications: He wrote two books—Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler (advocating a progressive consumption tax based on spending) and Taxing Women (discussing gender inequity in the U.S. tax code). His other works include Cognitive Theory and Tax, Framing the Jury: Cognitive Perspectives on Pain and Suffering (with Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Spitzer), and Slouching Towards Equality: Gender Discrimination, Market Efficiency, and Social Change.

Other work: He has served as a consultant to the Russian government to help design a tax code. He also coined the phrase “Buy, Borrow, Die” to explain how the wealthy can use the tax system to their advantage: buy an appreciating asset, borrow against it to live, and hold it until death to avoid capital gains taxes, passing the asset to heirs.