Brian Galle is a professor of law at Berkeley, primarily teaching courses on taxation and nonprofit organizations. He joined Berkeley in 2025 from Georgetown, where he was the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Tax Policy. Before Georgetown, Prof. Galle was also on the full-time faculty at Boston College and Florida State University. In 2022 and 2023, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Securities & Exchange Commission, in the Division of Corporation Finance, where he helped draft and strategize major rulemaking for the Commission. Prior to the academy, he was a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section at the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; a law clerk to the Hon. Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and a law clerk for the Hon. Stephen M. Orlofsky of the District of New Jersey.
Prof. Galle writes on a broad range of subjects including tax law and policy; charity and philanthropy; and the design and implementation of incentive systems. His legal scholarship has appeared in such outlets as the California, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Stanford Law Reviews and the Duke and Yale Law Journals. He has also published quantitative studies of tax systems and philanthropic organizations in the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, the Journal of Health Economics, and the American Law & Economics Review, among other venues. Web sites that study such things generally list Prof. Galle as one of the ten most-cited scholars in tax law. Two news stories citing him as a source have won Pulitzer Prizes.
In addition to his work drafting regulations, Prof. Galle has also contributed to a series of bills aimed at taxing the accumulated fortunes of America’s very richest, including the federal Billionaire Minimum Income Tax and the Fair Trusts Act as well as wealth-tax or mark-to-market bills in California, New York, Vermont, and Washington State. His monograph from the Roosevelt Institute, “How to Tax the Rich,” summarizes the rationale and design choices behind many of these efforts.
Prof. Galle has also helped author a number of amicus briefs cited by the Supreme Court in tax cases. Most notably, in 2012, he joined a brief arguing that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional as an exercise of Congress’ taxing power, a rationale the Court followed closely in its majority opinion.
Education
JD, Columbia Law School (2001)
LLM - Taxation, Georgetown Univ. Law Center (2006)
AB, Harvard College (1995)