Professor of Law
Michael A. Livingston
Rutgers Law School
611
217 N 5th St
Camden, NJ 08102
856-225-6368

Michael A. Livingston is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of taxation, comparative law, and legal history. He is faculty advisor for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. His scholarship emphasizes comparative tax law and Law and the Holocaust, including how the law failed to prevent the Holocaust and provided limited success in getting reparations to its victims.

  • Biography
  • Publications
  • Courses Taught
  • Expertise
Biography

Michael Livingston is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of taxation, comparative law, and legal history.   At Rutgers, Professor Livingston teaches courses on Federal Income Taxation, Business Planning, Comparative Law, Law and the Holocaust, and Statutory Interpretation and Legislation, and serves as faculty advisor for the law school’s VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) and tax-exempt organization programs.    In addition to Rutgers, he has taught at Cornell, Temple, and various foreign law schools, and served as a member of the comparative law commission of the Abilitazione Nazionale Scientifica (ASN), the Italian Government agency charged with the evaluation of new and continuing law professors.

Professor Livingston’s scholarship emphasizes comparative tax law and Law and the Holocaust, including the failure of law to prevent the Holocaust and its limited success in providing reparation to its victims.  His book, “The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938-1943,” is the definitive English-language study of the Italian antisemitic laws.    He has also supervised a comprehensive update of Cappelletti Merryman and Perillo’s treatise “The Italian Legal System;” written a highly regarded income tax casebook; and published articles in numerous journals, including the Yale, Texas, Cornell, Northwestern, and NYU Tax Law Reviews and the American Journal of Comparative Law.     Professor Livingston is currently at work on two books, one on Tax and Culture and the second on Holocaust Law and Memory in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

Before arriving at Rutgers, Professor Livingston worked at Proskauer and Rose in New York City and the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress.   In addition to his scholarly activities he writes fiction (primarily poetry and short stories) and served as an (unsuccessful) candidate for public office.  He lives in Cheltenham with his wife, Anne Weiss, and has two adult children. 

Publications

Books:

The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini's Race Laws, 1938-1941 (Cambridge)

Cappelletti Merryman and Perillo's The Italian Legal System (2nd ed.) (with Francesco Parisi and Pier Giuseppe Monateri)

Taxation: Law Planning and Policy (with David Gamaage) (Lexis Publishing)

Selected scholarly articles:

Book Review, Robespierre Meets the Tea Party: Thoughts on Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” and Its Implications for American Tax Policy (forthcoming 2015)

Criminal Law, Racial Law, Fascist Law:  Was the Fascist Era Really a “Parenthesis” For the Italian Legal System? in Fascism and Criminal Law: History Theory Continuity (Stephen Skinner ed.), Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014

Convergence, Divergence, and the Limits of Tax Globalization: The Canadian Experience in The Quest for Tax Reform Continues: The Royal Commission on Taxation 50 Years Later (Kim Brooks ed.) (Carswell Press 2013)

Rendering (Reluctantly) Unto Caesar: Religious Approaches to the Progressive Income Tax,” 2 J. Law, Religion and State (Bar Ilan University) 202 (2013).

From Mumbai to Shanghai, With a Side Trip to Washington: China, India, and the Future of Progressive Taxation in an Asian-Led World, 11 Theoretical Inquiries in Law (Tel Aviv University) 539 (2010)

From Milan to Mumbai, Stopping in Tel Aviv: Progressive Taxation and "Progressive" Politics in a Globalized But Still Local World, 54 American Journal of Comparative Law 555 (2006)

Tax Law, Tax Culture, and the Limits of Comparative Tax, 18 Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 119 (2005).

Blum and Kalven at 50: Progressive Taxation, Globalization, and the New Millennium, 4 Florida Tax Review 731 (2000)

Reinventing Tax Scholarship: Lawyers, Economists, and the Role of the Legal Academy, 83 Cornell Law Review 366 (1998)

Postmodernism Meets Practical Reason: Statutory Interpretation and Patterson's "Law and Truth" (Book Review), 107 Yale Law Journal 1125 (1998)

Practical Reason, Purposivism, and the Interpretation of Tax Statutes, 51 Tax Law Review (NYU) 677 (1996)

Confessions of an Economist Killer: A Reply to Kronman's Lost Lawyer (Book Review), 89 Northwestern University Law Review 1592 (1995)

Risky Business: Economics, Culture, and the Taxation of High-Risk Activities, 48 Tax Law Review (NYU) 163 (1993)

Congress, the Courts, and the Code: Legislative History and the Interpretation of Tax Statutes, 69 Texas Law Review 819 (1991), reprinted in part in Paul L. Caron, Karen C. Burke, & Grayson M.P. McCouch, Federal Income Tax Anthology 41-50 (1997).

Expertise
  • Comparative Law
  • Legal History
  • Statutory Interpretation and Legislation
  • Taxation ( Federal)