About the Director

---

JOHN F. DEAN PROFESSOR OF TAX LITIGATION AND U.S. TAX COURT TRIAL PRACTICE

Michael Stuart is a career student of United States Tax Court litigation and trial practice. He continues to learn from the judges who preside, legal scholars who write and practitioners to whom he defers. His strategic approach to successful courtroom practice has been utilized by bar-admitted FATPs in U.S. Tax Courts throughout the national jurisdiction. As a legal educator focused on the Washington DC United States judicial tax forum, he works closely with various federally-authorized tax professionals and judicial officers, including Tax Court judges, Federal tax scholars, law professors and legal authors, IRS enrolled agents, tax attorneys, CPAs and PhDs - all members of the Tax Court Bar and all of whom provide exceptional counsel, advice, criticism, and support. But he believes that the greatest contributions come from the bar applicants themselves. He is co-author and editor of the Guide to Admission and Practice in U.S. Tax Court, with contributions from former U.S. Tax Court Judge John F. Dean, Professor Joni Larson, Professor James H. Chapman, Professor L.B. Carpenter and others.

IRS-United States Tax Court Bar Education  & University of Alabama Contributions

Ten years ago, Professor Stuart negotiated and formed a four-year collaborative between the Tax Law Institute and the University of Alabama School of Law Graduate Tax Program. He chaired the joint program that granted open admissions for IRS enrolled agents to earn the Certificate in Tax Law (defunct) and prepared LL.M. students for trial practice in Tax Court. The year before, he persuaded a retiring United States Tax Court judge to provide judicial oversight for the legal education of non-lawyers training as United States Tax Court Practitioners. The judge, the Honorable John F. Dean, left the bench in 2014 and joined the Tax Law Institute as Distinguished Judicial Speaker. He lectured for three testing cycles (6 years), providing legal instruction to non-attorney bar applicants. Judge Dean team-taught tax evidence, litigation and trial practice with the eminent legal scholar and author, Joni Larson, who as the Distinguished Visiting Professor contributed for two years at the Tax Law Institute. Judge Dean became the first Dean of the Faculty at the Tax Law Institute in 2021 when the organization moved to its current Washington DC headquarters. He is presently Dean Emeritus and in full retirement.

Post-Wall Street Years

Immediately after completing his J.D., Michael Stuart re-entered public service in 2001 as an unpaid intern. Supervised by the head of the Bankruptcy Unit of the Consumer Division at the New York Legal Aid Society, he acted as liaison between the IRS and indigent clients, until their World Trade Center headquarters were temporary closed after September 11, 2001. Prior to attending law school, he had trained in international business relations and financial management at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts) and earned a master's degree in public administration (international relations) from Harvard (Kennedy School) in 1984. Before  going to Harvard, he was an interim aide to and courier for the North American Secretary at the Trilateral Commission and an aide to and member of the advance team of John V. Lindsay's U.S. Senatorial bid in New York. From 1978 through 1998, he maintained a small office at 80 Wall Street in New York's Financial District from where he planned, financed and developed $45 million of affordable housing in NYC, at the height of the homeless crisis. In the interim, he  worked with local banks, a parish church, the New York State Harlem Urban Development Corporation and New York City's Housing Preservation Department (HPD) to rehabilitate distressed apartment buildings then-recently removed from the 7A Program and situated on Manhattan's Morningside Heights at Columbia University and the Lower Eastside. After years of frustration attempting to restore historic brownstones surrounding national landmark, Hamilton Grange, home and land estate of Alexander Hamilton, he was invited to the Yale Architecture School to join the environmental design program, where he became a proponent of historic preservation(Class of '87). He then challenged and lost to an incumbent for a New York State Senate seat (1991). After his unsuccessful political bid, he was ushered into mainstream Washington politics as a special executive assistant to the minority member of the National Executive Committee of the RNC and was seated on the Domestic Policy Advisory Committee, where he served as advisor to the White House and spoke to matters of tax policy in a position paper he wrote for President George H.W. Bush.

Post-White House Years 

After the White House advisory, he was appointed visiting scholar of public policy (taxation) at Yale Law School (1993). He was also appointed to served on the NYC mayoral transition team, where he became an unsuccessful candidate for NYC Environmental Commissioner. The municipal vetting led to his placement as Executive Director of the Wildlife Trust, where he senior development officer he was charged to fundraise to protect the habitat of the mountain gorilla in Uganda and the rainforest in Brazil. The following year, 1994, he returned to Harvard to prepare to apply to the doctoral program in public administration. Denied admission, he ended his studies after one semester. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies then retained him in 1995 as special consultant to help launch the Saudi Royal Family-funded Harvard Islamic Banking and Finance Information Program aka Harvard Finance Project (HFP). He was an instrumental actor in the program and helped facilitate collaboration with faculty at the Harvard Law School Islamic Legal Studies Program and Harvard Business School Islamic Finance Program. He assisted the director, served as a senior researcher, manager and writer and helped compile the world's first Islamic financial database, over one and half years. He also helped organize the First Harvard Islamic Finance Forum, where the president of a Washington DC-Maryland bank, Enterprise Bancorp, commissioned him to create Islamic banking windows at its branches from 1997-1998. During the interim, he entered law school.

Post-Harvard-Yale-BAU-Cambridge Years

After 5 years of full- and part-time study, Michael Stuart completed his course requirements in Fall 2000 and received his law school diploma, cum laude. He was appointed tenured professor of law (Islamic banking and Shari'ah law) in August 2001, under the aegis of the BAU-University of Cambridge Partnership (UK) (Cambridge University program in English Common Law). Elevated to Academic Dean of Faculty in his second year, he undertook his most significant academic endeavor  and founded the Islamic Law Institute, which he established to educate Western bankers on basic tenets of Shari'ah law and principles of Islamic finance. In 2002, he was invited to lecturer on Islamic banking law at the Southern New England School of Law (rechartered as the University of Massachusetts School of Law). As he gained seniority within the BAU-Cambridge University Partnership he began building an independent international tax advisory, which he delivered electronically to select clients throughout the U.S.  Over time, the advisory waned as he began to focus on U.S. domestic tax litigation. Professor Stuart separated from the Partnership, with ownership rights to the Tax Law Institute and became an entrepreneur. He started  to exploit the then-still developing, technological phenomena known as the Internet and became an early proponent of industrial applications of AI. From then until now, Professor Stuart has operated the  Tax Law Institute, during which time he was approved by the U.S. Treasury Department Internal Revenue Service as CE Provider of Continuing Professional Education for Enrolled Agents. Presently, he is working to find new ways to utilize AI to improve the remote delivery of educational services to aspiring and newly admitted IRS-approved enrolled agents and United States Tax Court Practitioners.