Faculty Bio

Professor Fleischer recently joined the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Law. His primary areas of research are federal income tax, venture capital and private equity, and the structuring of corporate transactions. He recently presented a draft of Two and Twenty: Taxing Partnership Profits in Private Equity Funds to a Senate Finance Committee roundtable. The article was highlighted in a New York Times editorial and will be published in the NYU Law Review in 2008.

Before joining the Illinois faculty, Professor Fleischer was an Associate Professor of Law (tenure-track) at the University of Colorado and Acting Professor of Law (tenure-track) at UCLA. He has also taught at Georgetown as a Visiting Professor of Law and served as the Research Fellow in Transactional Studies at Columbia Law School.

Before entering academia, Professor Fleischer was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. He clerked for the Hon. M. Blane Michael, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the Hon. Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He graduated from Columbia College in 1993 and Columbia Law School in 1996.

Teaching

Professor Fleischer has taught courses and seminars in Deals, Federal Income Tax, Executive Compensation, Venture Capital and Private Equity, Innovation Policy, and Tax Policy. In the Spring of 2008, he will teach Corporate Taxation and Partnership Taxation.

You can download a recent CV by clicking here.

Recent publications include:

Options Backdating, Tax Shelters, and Corporate Culture, Va. Tax Rev. (forthcoming 2007)

The MasterCard IPO: Protecting the Priceless Brand, 12 Harv. Neg. L. Rev. 137 (2007).

Brand New Deal: The Branding Effect of Corporate Deal Structures, 104 Mich. L. Rev. 1581 (2006).

The Missing Preferred Return, 31 J. Corp. L. 77 (2005).

The Rational Exuberance of Structuring Venture Capital Start-Ups, 57 Tax L. Rev. 137 (2004).

Research Agenda

Professor Fleischer's current research projects include:

(1) "Two and Twenty," an article on the taxation of partnership profits in venture capital and private equity funds,

(2) "The Blackstone IPO," which examines the tax classification of Blackstone's proposed publicly-traded partnership and considers whether Congress should amend the relevant statute,

(3) "Sweat Equity," which examines how the tax Code treats entrepreneurial activity in sole proprietorships, partnerships, and privately-held corporations.