As a law student who flirted with a career in social work, Norman Stein expected to practice in the civil rights arena or perhaps to represent indigent clients with Legal Aid.

Aiming to do "great stuff for ordinary people," Stein never expected to fall in love with tax law.

Oops.

"I had a wonderful tax professor," said Stein, who earned his J.D. from Duke University School of Law. "I thought it was terrifically interesting. People think of it as a very dry subject, but it has enormous philosophical implications for society. It's really about deciding how to apportion the cost of government."

One of the newest additions to the faculty, Stein is an expert on tax law and pension law who is frequently quoted in the press and invited to testify before Congress.

Most recently, he testified in May about multi-employer pension plans before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and in December, he appeared before the House Health, Employment, Labor and Pension Subcommittee to discuss revisions to employee benefits and bankruptcy law.

At that hearing, Stein discussed the collapse of the Delphi Corp's pension fund and the impact on retired employees, which he called "a heart-wrenching human story."

Stein developed a penchant for tracing the human stories beneath the surface of tax and pension law decades before.

When the United Mine Workers settled a lawsuit with rank-and-file union members who were entitled to pension funds, Stein was one of 40 law students who traveled to Appalachia to conduct hearings of individual miners' claims.

"It was fascinating to be in these little coal-mining towns and hear miners tell stories of the struggle for unionization," he said. "And I realized then how important pensions were to people."

After graduating, Stein got his first job with Arnold & Porter, a Washington, D.C. firm founded by Abraham Fortas, who would go on to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Stein worked with Fortas' wife, Carolyn Agger, whom he called "a brilliant, feisty, 4-foot-10-inch, cigar-chomping tax attorney and maybe the best writer and teacher I ever met."

Bit by bit, Stein became one of the nation's leading experts on the intersection of pension law and tax policy. He has served on the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Advisory Board and a General Accounting Office panel of retirement security advisors; he is currently senior policy advisor to the Pension Rights Center.

Most recently, Stein served on the faculty of the University of Alabama School of Law, where he held the Douglas Arant Professorship of Law.

With the power to affect the entire economy, pensions and tax "are so inherently interesting," Stein said.

Since that discovery tends to surprise students, Stein said he feels lucky to teach a subject that most equate with castor oil.

"People end up thinking you must be a great professor to make a dry subject so interesting," he said. "I'm happy to take the credit, but the credit really belongs to the subject."

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