Jeesoo Nam approaches tax law through the lens of moral desert — asking not only what redistribution looks like in practice, but whether it reflects what people are genuinely owed. He joined Gould’s faculty following a visiting position at NYU Law, and brings a distinctive philosophical perspective to a field rarely examined from that vantage point. His work has recently appeared in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Jeesoo Nam. I’m the Associate Professor of Law and Philosophy at USC where I teach courses on taxation and a seminar on law and philosophy.
What is your interpretation of law and philosophy? How would you describe it to someone who didn’t know about this specific niche?
Whether we ought to have the laws we currently have or some other set of laws depends on resolving difficult questions in the field of philosophy like which actions are morally wrong and what makes people morally responsible for a certain outcome. Law and philosophy tries to answer these foundational questions.
Can you briefly describe the focus of your research? What gap in existing knowledge do you hope to fill or add to with your scholarship?
In law, I write primarily in the field of taxation. I think about questions like what people deserve and how the tax law can redistribute financial outcomes to get us closer to that ideal. Because scholars rarely write from a desert-based perspective about tax law, I hope to offer a unique lens with which to analyze the issues.
Tell us a bit about your motivation for your specialty area and how you arrived at Gould.
I first became interested in tax law because tax law is the primary lever by which we redistribute economic outcomes in our society. Thus, if we want to know not only what it is that people deserve as a matter of distributive justice but also how to get there, we need to study the tax law.
I was hired by USC through the entry-level job market five years ago after completing a two-year position as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Tax Law at NYU.
What do you hope your students take away from your courses? What would success as a professor look like for you?
Through my courses, I hope to impart both a general knowledge of doctrinal tax law and the development of strong analytical skills. For the former, I think it is most important to learn the building blocks of federal income taxation and corporate taxation and to be able to think from a vantage point that we may consider as internal to tax law itself. For the latter, students need to learn strong skills in statutory interpretation, logical reasoning, and legal reasoning. This combination of knowledge and skill will be essential for resolving the difficult legal problems that lawyers can face on a regular basis.
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