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Tax Law Speaker Series and the Pugh Lecture

Annual Tax Presentations

Every year, the Tax LLM program hosts tax scholars from around the country for the Tax Law Speaker Series and the Richard C. Pugh Lecture on Tax Law and Policy. The tax speaker programming provides important learning opportunities for faculty and staff, students and members of the San Diego legal community. Such events fulfill the commitment by the University of San Diego School of Law to be a hub for quality legal research and education in Southern California.

Richard Crawford Pugh Lecture on Tax Law and Policy

The Richard Crawford Pugh Lecture on Tax Law & Policy brings a distinguished practitioner, judge or government official who has played a significant role in shaping U.S. and international tax policy to USD each year to discuss current and developing tax law and policy trends.

The endowed lecture was established in 2009 in honor of the long and illustrious career of USD's Distinguished Professor of Law, Richard Crawford Pugh. Before coming to USD, Pugh was a professor at Columbia Law School, a deputy assistant U.S. attorney general (Tax Division), and a partner at the international law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.

2027 Pugh Lecture Honoree

Ray Madoff

Professor Boston College Law School, Co-founder and Director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good

Ray Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches and writes in tax law and policy, wills and trusts law, and estate planning. She is Co-founder and Director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, a non-partisan think tank that convenes scholars and practitioners to explore questions regarding whether the rules governing the charitable sector best serve the public good.

Madoff's most recent book is the critically acclaimed The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy (University of Chicago Press), exposes how the American tax system serves as a mechanism to consolidate wealth by creating two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit. The Second Estate was named a Best Book of 2025 by both The New Yorker and Boston Business Review. She is also the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead (Yale University Press), which looks at how American law treats the interests of the dead and what this tells us about our values for the living. The Financial Times called it "a sparkling polemic."

Madoff is the lead author on one of the top treatises on estate planning entitled Practical Guide to Estate Planning (CCH), and editor (with Benjamin Soskis) of Giving in Time: Temporal Considerations in Philanthropy (Bloomsbury Publishing).

Madoff’s expertise includes philanthropy policy, the rights of the dead (including the ability of the dead to control their bodies, reputation, and property), estate taxes, comparative inheritance law, and wealth inequality and taxes. A regular commentator on a number of these topics, Madoff has appeared on dozens of national radio shows including On Point, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, Here and Now, and Marketplace, among others. Madoff is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the New York Times and has published op-eds in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Boston Globe and Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Among her professional activities, Madoff is a member of the American Law Institute, an academic fellow of the American College of Trusts and Estate Counsel, and past president of the American Association of Law Schools’ Trusts and Estates Section. She was named a 2014 Top Women of the Law by Mass Lawyer’s Weekly and Critic of the Year by Inside Philanthropy. She was also named to the NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50 in 2017 and 2018 for her work promoting reform of the tax rules governing philanthropy.

An experienced mediator, Madoff is a leading authority on the use of mediation to resolve will and trust disputes. Prior to teaching, she was a practicing attorney for nine years in New York and Boston.

2027 Pugh Lecture Details

Tax Law Speaker Series

The USD School of Law Tax Law Speaker Series brings high-profile tax scholars to USD to present papers on topics of current research interest. The speaker series is organized by Professor of Law Michelle Layser.

2026-27

Emily Satterthwaite

Georgetown Law

Georgetown University

Date: October 19, 2026

Time: Noon

Bio

Ariel Jurow Kleiman

Vice Dean for Academic Research and Intellectual Life, and Professor of Law

USC Gould School of Law

Date: November 2, 2026

Time: Noon

Bio

Conor Clarke

Associate Professor of Law

Washington University School of Law

Date: February 8, 2027

Time: Noon

Bio

Alex Zhang

Associate Professor of Law

Emory University School of Law

Date: March 1, 2027

Time: Noon

Bio

Brian Galle

Professor of Law

UC Berkeley Law

Date: April 5, 2027

Time: Noon

Bio

Past Tax Speaker Series