Michael L. Schler is a tax partner in the New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. He practices in the areas of mergers & acquisitions, corporate tax, consolidated returns, financial products, and asset-backed securitization. He joined the firm in 1974 and was elected a partner in 1982.

Mr. Schler has long been active in the New York State Bar Association Tax Section. He was chair from 1994 to 1995, and has been a member of the Executive Committee since 1985. Mr. Schler is a trustee and vice president of the American Tax Policy Institute. He is also the chair of the New York Tax Forum. He is a member of the American College of Tax Counsel. He has been a consultant to the American Law Institute Federal Income Tax Project on Integration of the Individual and Corporate Income Taxes, and to the Institute’s Project on Taxation of Private Business Enterprises. Mr. Schler is the author of numerous published articles, including recent articles on consolidated returns, spin-offs, section 1032, and the dividend exclusion.

Prior to joining Cravath, Mr. Schler was a clerk for the Honorable Max Rosenn of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in 1970, and earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. He also earned an LL.M. in taxation from New York University in 1979.

Professor Jeffrey Kahn’s scholarship focuses on the federal tax area. He has published articles in law reviews and tax journals, including pieces on tax policy and horizontal equity, the taxation of gifts, the charitable contribution deduction, the tax expenditure budget and personal deductions, and the tax consequences to a reality television candidate. He is also the co-author of a leading income tax student treatise and the nutshell on the taxation of S corporations. His work in progress includes an article on the taxation of insurance proceeds and a student treatise on corporate taxation.

Professor Kahn attended Duke University, where he double-majored in classical studies and Latin. He then attended the University of Michigan Law School. He graduated, cum laude, in 1997 and went to work for three years as a tax associate in the Chicago office of McDermott, Will & Emery. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law School in 2006, Professor Kahn was an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, Stanford Law School, University of California Hastings College of Law and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

Samuel C. Thompson Jr. joined Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law in July 2007 as a professor of law and the founder and director of Penn State’s Center for the Study of Mergers and Acquisitions. The Center examines corporate, securities, tax, antitrust, and other legal and economic issues that arise in mergers and acquisitions and hosts continuing legal education programs addressing these issues.

Professor Thompson, who previously was a professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law and director of the UCLA Law Center for the Study of Mergers and Acquisitions, is a highly regarded scholar of corporate and international tax, corporate governance, and antitrust and is the author of 16 books and more than 75 articles. His teaching interests focus on the corporate, securities, tax, and antitrust aspects of mergers and acquisitions as well as international tax, investment banking, taxation of business entities, and economic growth policy.

Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Thompson has held a number of notable positions, such as head of the tax department of Schiff Hardin & Waite in Chicago; tax policy advisor, on behalf of the U.S. Treasury Tax Assistance Office, to the South African Ministry of Finance in Pretoria, South Africa; Attorney Fellow in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Merger and Acquisitions Office; consultant on merger and acquisition issues to the Federal Trade Commission; and professor in residence at the European Commission’s Antitrust Merger Taskforce in Brussels. On several occasions he has testified about tax policy before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means and the House Judiciary Committee. He formerly served as dean of the University of Miami School of Law and has been a professor and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and the Jacquin D. Bierman Visiting Professor of Taxation at Yale Law School.

As a law student, Professor Thompson worked on a university-sponsored civil rights project near Leland, Mississippi, before beginning service as an officer in the United States Marine Corps, where he rose to captain and received the Navy Commendation Medal for service in Vietnam. He played varsity football at his undergraduate school, West Chester University.