By Suzi Morales
Alice Abreu is changing perceptions about tax law.
As the Honorable Nelson A. Diaz Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, Abreu is known for challenging assumptions about the U.S. tax system and who benefits from it, and helping her students fall in love with the subject.
According to Abreu, there is a misconception that tax law is “for the rich and only for the rich” and many students who attend law school with a public interest focus aren’t enrolling in tax classes. But she points out that tax law is inextricably intertwined with the U.S. social safety net. “It really is where the rubber hits the road, about what our values are. Who are we going to tap to get the money that the government needs to run? Who do we as a society value, and who do we not value, and what activities do we value and what activities do we not value?”
Uncovering a mystery
And while Abreu recognizes the U.S. tax system for its influence on society on society as a whole, she also credits her career in the field with an extremely personal revelation.
Abreu grew up in Cuba. She was a child in the 1950s when Fidel Castro came to power. Her father was a manager of an Esso – now ExxonMobile – refinery and refused to refine crude oil delivered by a Russian tanker even when ordered to do so by the new government.
Even as a nine-year-old, Abreu grasped the danger to her father of resisting the revolutionaries. One night, the family drove to the middle of a sugar cane field, where Abreu’s father got out of the car and walked onto an airplane. He left for the United States, where the rest of the family later joined him.
Her father didn’t talk much about that period of his life and Abreu often wondered how he had managed to safely escape to the United States. Years later, while doing research about a tax law issue on LexisNexis, Abreu stumbled onto a case about the tax implications of an Esso subsidiary in Havana. When she read in the facts of the case that the Eisenhower administration had ordered the refinery not to refine Russian crude, Abreu immediately picked up the phone and called her father. After some cajoling, he admitted that he had received orders from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who then helped the family leave Cuba.
“I’m very glad I became a tax lawyer,” says Abreu, “because if I hadn’t become a tax lawyer, I would never know the story.”
In high school, Abreu was educated in Catholic all-girls schools. When she graduated, she chose to attend Cornell University because it seemed like a world away from her prior education.
At Cornell, Abreu majored in psychology and planned to go on and earn a doctorate. As she was working on her senior capstone paper, she became disillusioned that the work seemed disconnected from serving people.
Tax values
After completing her undergraduate degree, Abreu was working for a nonprofit. The organization’s board was supposed to apply for a tax exemption but the head of the board, who happened to be a lawyer, did not follow through. Instead, Abreu successfully applied for the exemption. The tangible impact of the experience empowered Abreu to take a chance on law school, again at Cornell. She took tax law during her second year and fell in love with the subject because she saw that it was about far more than numbers.
Abreu practiced in the tax group at the Dechert firm’s Philadelphia office until she was offered a faculty position at Temple Law, where she has taught since 1985.
In her teaching and scholarship, Abreu has drawn attention to biases in tax policy and also advocates for greater diversity in the tax bar. She is currently developing a new course on tax and implicit race and gender bias. In 2019, she founded the Temple Law Center for Tax Law and Public Policy, a hub for tax-related activities at Temple Law.
As an example of her work on biases in the system, Abreu points out that the tax rate on capital gains is substantially more favorable than the rate on income from labor. “If you have a system that that so heavily favors capital and the owners of capital, and you superimpose on that the fact that the distribution of capital in our society by race is heavily slanted towards white folks, … it has to be the case that the tax system favors the owners of wealth, who are disproportionately white,” she says. “The tax system is racially blind, but it’s not racially neutral.”
In the fall of 2024, Abreu took office as chair of the American Bar Association Tax Section, where she is continuing her efforts to change perceptions among lawyers and the public about tax law.
“I want to move the needle on some of the things that I feel strongly about, that I have written about, like rebranding tax and trying to get out there in the broad community that tax is about more than just numbers, and it’s about more than the government taking money from people,” she says. “It reflects important core values. It’s about social justice.”