Assistant Professor of Law. (Tax Policy; Federal Income Tax;
Economics, Social Science, and the Law; Contracts.) Professor Buchanan
has been teaching at Rutgers since fall 2003. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from
the University of Michigan Law School in 2002, where he was elected to
the Order of the Coif. After law school, he clerked for Judge Robert H.
Henry of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to
attending law school, Professor Buchanan was an economics professor. He
earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, specializing
in macroeconomics, the history of economic thought, and economic
methodology. His received his B.A. from Vassar College, earning highest
honors as an economics major. He has held full-time faculty positions
at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
Barnard College, Goucher College, and Wellesley College. He has also
held visiting or adjunct faculty positions at Bard College, Towson
University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the
University of Utah. He has served as the director of the Center for
Advanced Macroeconomic Policy in Milwaukee and as a research associate
at the Levy Institute, a public policy think tank in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is the author of several scholarly
articles that explore and critique U.S. tax policy.
Before Professor Buchanan attended law school, he wrote an article that
critiqued the economic theory that is the basis of the so-called "Law
and Economics" approach to law. In that article, he recommended that
legal scholars be wary of the normative assumptions and policy
implications of orthodox economic theory. His current research is
focused on the long-term tax and spending patterns of the federal
government, and he recommends that the federal government adopt a
system of capital accounting to capture the effects of our current
policy choices on the living standards of future generations. As part
of that broad research agenda, Professor Buchanan is engaged with a
Rutgers project to assess the social and economic implications of New
Jersey`s proposed sentencing reforms. His other research projects
include an appraisal of a plan to replace the annual income tax with a
lifetime accumulated income tax system, an extension of his critique of
orthodox economic theory to assess its use in the Law and Economics
school of thought, as well as other projects. In addition, Professor
Buchanan is an occasional contributor to the online legal magazine
FindLaw`s Writ, where he has written articles analyzing the Microsoft
antitrust case, the Bush v. Gore decision (from a contract law
perspective), social security privatization, and other issues.
