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SMU Dedman Law Academic Program Spotlight

The list of high-profile graduates from Dedman Law’s Tax LL.M. program grows every year and includes national names such as Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, the largest U.S. charity; Bobby Patton, co-owner of the L.A. Dodgers; Christian Weiler, a judge on the United States Tax Court; Charles W. Hall, former chair of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation; and the late Robert H. Dedman, Sr., founder of ClubCorp, the largest owner and operator of private golf and country clubs in the country.

The program has a long history of preparing students to become proficient attorneys with specializations in tax practice, whether they go on to work for big prestigious firms in Texas and beyond, or go into public service to do important work on behalf of taxpayers. But a program is only as good as the people who lead it, and Dedman Law’s Tax faculty are some of the best and brightest.

Professor Christopher H. Hanna is the Alan D. Feld Endowed Professor of Law and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at the Dedman School of Law, and his passion for the Tax LL.M. program at Dedman Law is palpable. He teaches income taxation, international tax, advanced corporate tax, and partnership tax, and he has received nine Dr. Don M. Smart Teaching Awards (awarded each year by the graduating law students) while at Dedman Law. Professor Hanna has garnered a reputation for teaching often abstruse material with a rare zest for the subject matter. At least one of Hanna’s former students has described him as “the greatest tax lecturer ever,” and they may be on to something.

His unique skills in international tax law have made him a prized commodity for consulting firms, universities, and government entities all around the world, but above all, he is an exceptional ambassador for SMU’s Tax LL.M. program – one of the oldest and most influential programs in the country.

“As far as we know, it’s the second oldest tax program in the country,” said Professor Hanna. “Our tax program has had an incredible oversized influence on tax and business in the United States with our very limited number of graduates. Our law school is named after Robert Dedman, Sr. He was in the very first class of our tax program at SMU Law School in 1959. So, here’s a graduate who revolutionized country clubs around the United States with ClubCorp, and our law school is named after him.”

Professor Hanna glows about the quality of graduates who have come through the Dedman Law Tax LL.M. program, but he has an impressive résumé of his own. He earned a specialized degree from the renowned tax program at the NYU School of Law that kickstarted his early success with firms across the South and as a tax attorney with D.C. law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

Early, ground-level experience gave him deep insights into corporate tax law, tax accounting, and global tax philosophy and policy that would eventually lead him back to his home state of Florida to become a visiting professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, as well as law schools at the University of Texas and the University of Tokyo. He took on global notoriety as a preeminent tax expert beginning in 1998 when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, convened in Paris and invited Hanna to become a consultant in residence. After that, major opportunities began rolling in.

In 2000, he assisted the U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation in its complexity study of the U.S. tax system. A few years later he returned to assist the joint committee in its study of Enron. For seven years, beginning in 2011, he served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Tax Reform to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance and became a principal drafter of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 – the first major tax reform in 30 years.

“It’s incredibly satisfying to go and work on tax legislation,” said Professor Hanna. “It’s very daunting at first. You realize how important this is, the impact that it’s going to have on over 300 million Americans. It’s going to impact businesses and even foreign individuals and foreign businesses. “Fairness is a huge part of this as you think about drafting this legislation. What impact will it have on individuals, on lower income or middle-income individuals, as opposed to upper income individuals? You’re constantly looking at things like that.”

Professor Hanna is a big believer in government service and is proud of the graduates who have gone on to serve in government roles in the tax field, whether at the Internal Revenue Service, Treasury, or on Capitol Hill. A number of graduates currently occupy very senior government positions, said Hanna.

The two-semester Tax LL.M. program offers 28 specialized courses, everything from wills and trusts to criminal tax fraud to mergers and acquisitions. A popular variation of the Tax LL.M. program is the fast track option – the Accelerated Tax LL.M. – which allows students to earn both a J.D. and an LL.M. in Taxation in just seven semesters.

Professor Hanna is joined in the program by Orly Mazur, an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman Law, who teaches and writes in the area of tax law and policy. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of tax law and technology, international and comparative taxation, and taxation in the digital economy. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including the California Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Pepperdine Law Review, Columbia Journal of Tax Law, among other law review and peer- reviewed journals.

Professor Mazur is actively involved in the academic and legal community. In 2016, she received the university-wide Golden Mustang Teaching Award. In 2022, Professor Mazur was appointed to serve as Vice-Chair to the International Tax Committee of the Tax Section of the State Bar of Texas. She is also a fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation and has served as a member of the executive committee of the American Association of Law Schools’ Section on Taxation since 2019 and currently serves as its chair.

Professor Mazur has also been a guest blogger for TaxProf Blog’s Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review and Roundup and was featured in Forbes in 2020. Professor Mazur received her B.B.A. and M.P.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Texas at Austin and her J.D., summa cum laude, from SMU Dedman School of Law, where she graduated first in her class and was a member of the SMU Law Review. She holds an LL.M. in taxation from NYU School of Law.

Dedman Law’s commitment to tax specialization extends beyond the classroom. Since 1977, the Tax Clinic, located in Storey Hall, has offered representation to low-income taxpayers who have federal income tax disputes with the Internal Revenue Service. These taxpayers cannot afford representation and rely on the clinic to effectively argue their case before the United States Tax Court.

The clinic is operated by law students who are trained in tax law to offer services like protest letters, settlement negotiations, and installment agreements, all while keeping costs as low as possible for the client.Gregory Mitchell ’94, an alumnus of SMU Dedman Law and a full-time practicing tax attorney, is director of the clinic.

In fact, many of the tax faculty at Dedman Law are practicing tax specialists at law firms and corporate law departments throughout North Texas. Hanna himself served as counsel at an international law firm and currently serves as counsel at an international accounting firm.

When he isn’t focused on educating students about the tax system, you might catch Hanna learning a new magic trick or sleight of hand technique. He may be a member of secretive organizations like the Society of American Magicians and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, but his CV plainly states that his interests are tennis, golf, and conjuring.

“Magic is a big hobby of mine,” he confided. “I published an article in the spring of 2005 in the Virginia Tax Review, and it dealt with the intersection of magic and tax law. Much to my surprise, a writer named Adam Gopnik writes an article in The New Yorker magazine on magic, and sure enough, he quotes me in the article. He has read my article from three years earlier.“I’m like, are you kidding? I had no idea, and all of a sudden, friends around the country, and then law professors and tax law professors were contacting me, saying, ‘Chris, how in the world did you get cited in The New Yorker? I want to get cited in The New Yorker, too!’”

Hanna’s scholarship has become a standard reference for students all over the world who are looking to become specialized tax attorneys. His second book, which he co-authored, is now in its 15th edition: Corporate Income Tax Accounting.

But the connections he makes with students at SMU Dedman School of Law mean the most.

“I think the greatest satisfaction as a professor is when a student tells you after they’ve taken your class, ‘Professor, this class scared me,’ or ‘I really didn’t have any interest in tax; the only reason I took this is friends of mine told me to take it,’ or ‘I just thought I should take it while I was in law school.’ And then afterwards, they’re like, ‘Well, this is my favorite class.’

“It gratifies even more if they go into tax law as a profession, and they say, ‘The reason I went into tax law is I took Professor Hanna’s tax course when I was in law school. That’s why I’m a tax lawyer today.’ There’s a tremendous sense of satisfaction when you hear something like that.”