Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia School of Law recently won the 13th Annual American Bar Association Law Student Tax Challenge, a nationwide contest where approximately 90 teams from law schools across the country competed in solving a cutting-edge and complex business problem that might arise in everyday tax practice.
Third-year law student Morgan L. Klinzing and second-year law student Benjamin “Ben” Newell represented UGA. Camilla E. Watson, law professor, coached the pair.
According to Watson, this is the first year Georgia Law has had a team in this competition. “When I announced this opportunity to my class, Morgan and Ben responded,” she said. “The competition judges were highly complimentary of their performance, and I am very proud of them.”
In the ABA Tax Challenge, two-person teams are given a real world complex business planning issue with tax consequences to solve. The pairs are judged on performance in two areas-a memorandum to a senior partner and a letter to a client explaining the result. Based on these written materials, the field is narrowed to just six teams, which are invited to defend their submissions before a panel of judges consisting of some of the country’s top tax practitioners and government officials, including tax court judges.
Other law schools represented in the contest were from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kansas, Florida International University and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
UGA School of Law
Consistently regarded as one of the nation’s top public law schools, the School of Law at the University of Georgia was established in 1859. With an accomplished faculty, which includes authors of some of the country’s leading legal scholarship, Georgia Law offers two degrees-the Juris Doctor and Master of Laws in U.S. Law-and is home to the renowned Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy. The school counts six U.S. Supreme Court judicial clerks in the last nine years among its distinguished alumni body of more than 9,700. For more information, see www.law.uga.edu.
