Professor of Law

Nan Kaufman honed her expertise in international law during her years of practice in Chicago and Washington, D.C. She handled international tax planning for U.S. and foreign-based multinational corporations and advocated in legislative and regulatory matters relating to international tax issues.

Professor Kaufman entered academia because she thought it would combine the opportunity to explore international law with the multilayered contact with people that teaching provides. She never regretted the decision. “This is not a boring job,” she says. “The more I teach and research the more I learn, and the students are sometimes astonishing. Many of our students are very interesting people.”

In her research, Professor Kaufman examines the eroding effect of economic globalization on national income tax bases and concludes that a high degree of international tax harmonization will be needed to preserve the world’s income tax systems. Her current research seeks to uncover the obstacles to tax harmonization.

More generally, Kaufman studies economic rights and the developing role of multinational enterprises in international law and international efforts to regulate their behavior. “Multinational enterprises can behave in ways we wish they wouldn’t,” she says. “Take, for example, the operation of sweat shops or tax avoidance and evasion. The law sometimes fosters that behavior. We shouldn’t expect law to regulate morality, but if we want the people who make decisions for multinational enterprises to behave differently, we should at least examine the laws that promote undesirable practices.”

A self-described “60s kid,” Professor Kaufman spent nearly a decade working with troubled adolescents as an inpatient psychiatric aide and a recreational therapist before entering law school. She intended to go into family practice but became intrigued with tax and international law. After five years of private practice, she joined Saint Louis University in 1989 and was director of the Center for International and Comparative Law from 2000 to 2002. In addition to her responsibilities at the School of Law, Professor Kaufman has taught a course on income tax treaties for the past 10 years at the Institute of International Taxation in Taiwan, which trains tax administrators for developing newly industrialized countries in international tax law.