Current students, faculty, staff, and alumni are invited to join us in-person or virtually for a special lecture, "On Sixty Years of Teaching Tax at Wayne Law," featuring Prof. Alan Schenk. 

Thursday, March 26, 2026
5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Partrich Auditorium (and online)
Wayne State University Law School

Professor Schenk is going to talk about the law school, its student body and faculty when he arrived, as an untested teacher in 1966, just seven years after Wayne became a State University. He expected to stay at Wayne for only three years, but during those first years, the school hired a new dean with different goals for the future of Detroit’s public law school. He will discuss how teaching at Wayne Law was impacted by student protests against the Vietnam war and for Civil Rights, by the women’s movement, and by children of immigrants who populated diverse classes.

The courses he taught changed as the law school’s business curriculum expanded, catching the attention of growing Michigan law firms seeking new associates. He and a colleague developed a Business Planning course to provide students with tools for their transition to practice. The ABA later mandated law school skills training and clinics, so that skills previously learned in early years of practice were shifted back to the law school curriculum.

He will discuss how statutory interpretation and tax policy in his courses changed and yet remained the same. The structure of the federal income tax system remained surprisingly static, but the details changed almost annually as members of Congress started hiring their own tax staff. The creation of the Limited Liability Company affected how businesses were organized, and who paid the tax on individual income and business profits. What happened to Congress’s historic reliance on progressive federal taxes?

Professor Schenk’s accidental interest in value added tax provided him with opportunities to draft foreign tax laws and to teach at other law schools, both in the U.S. and around the world. Those experiences made him appreciate his students at Wayne Law even more.

A small reception will take place prior to the lecture, with the opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to congratulate Prof. Schenk on his career.

5:00 p.m. - light reception outside of Partrich Auditorium

5:45 p.m. - lecture begins

6:30 p.m. - lecture concludes, opportunity for Q&A

This event is sponsored by the Tax Law Society at Wayne State University Law School.

For those unable to attend in person, the registration form also has a virtual option to attend the lecture portion of the event.

The registration deadline is Thursday, March 12, 2026.

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About Prof. Schenk

Alan Schenk has devoted his academic career to tax law; in particular, he is regarded as an international expert on value added taxation (VAT). He is a member of the Michigan bar, the U.S. Tax Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a certified public accountant. Schenk received teaching awards from his students and the alumni. He also received, at the university level, the President’s Award for teaching. The university appointed him as a distinguished professor in 2011 and he was inducted in the university’s Academy of Scholars in 2019. In 2022, the Wayne Press published his history of Wayne Law School.

His regular academic appointment includes teaching Federal Income Tax, Business Planning, Accounting for Lawyers, and Consumption-Based Taxes. Schenk co-taught VAT courses at Harvard and the University of Michigan law schools and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke. He taught VAT courses at law schools in Canada and Australia, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and for the Academy of International Taxation in Taipei, Taiwan. He has spoken at conferences or conducted seminars on VAT in the United States, Africa and Asia.

He took a year off of teaching, serving as a professor-in-residence, in the IRS’s Office of Chief Counsel.

Schenk has written extensively about U.S. taxation of business and comparative taxation in the field of VAT. He authored or co-authored five books on value added tax, including the co-authored Value Added Tax: A Comparative Approach, 2d edition published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015. That book also was published in Chinese.

Schenk's articles on VAT include several involving the taxation of financial services. One was published in Japanese. Another, written for the American Tax Policy Institute conference on Structuring a Federal VAT: Design & Coordination Issues, was published by the Tax Law Review.

Schenk served as reporter for a model VAT statute prepared by the American Bar Association Tax Section VAT committee. Former U.S. Senator Hollings proposed that ABA model to serve as a federal revenue source to reduce the federal deficit or to fund a national health care system. Schenk testified on federal tax reform before the House and Senate tax-writing committees of the U.S. Congress.

Schenk served as a foreign expert on tax reform in the People's Republic of China. Schenk's professional work on value added tax included his service twice as chair of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation Committee on Value Added

Tax and Other Consumption Taxes. He served on the editorial board of The VAT Monitor published by the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation.

For almost two decades, Schenk served as technical advisor for the International Monetary Fund, drafting and revising sales and value added tax laws for many countries in Africa and the Caribbean, including Anguilla, The Bahamas, Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Gambia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. He prepared regulations to implement the laws that he drafted. Schenk served as an expert on value added tax in international arbitrations.

Degrees: LL.M. (Taxation), New York University School of Law LL.B., University of Illinois College of Law B.S., University of Illinois