Ray Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches and writes in tax law and policy, wills and trusts law, and estate planning. She is Co-founder and Director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, a non-partisan think tank that convenes scholars and practitioners to explore questions regarding whether the rules governing the charitable sector best serve the public good.
Madoff's most recent book is the critically acclaimed听 (University of Chicago Press),听exposes how the American tax system serves as a mechanism to consolidate wealth by creating two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.听The Second Estate was named a Best Book of 2025 by both The New Yorker and Boston Business Review. She is also the author of听听(Yale University Press), which looks at how American law treats the interests of the dead and what this tells us about our values for the living. The Financial Times called it "a sparkling polemic."
Madoff is the lead author on one of the top treatises on estate planning entitled听听(CCH), and editor (with Benjamin Soskis) of (Bloomsbury Publishing).
Madoff鈥檚 expertise includes philanthropy policy, the rights of the dead (including the ability of the dead to control their bodies, reputation, and property), estate taxes, comparative inheritance law, and wealth inequality and taxes. A regular commentator on a number of these topics, Madoff has appeared on dozens of national radio shows including听On Point,听Talk of the Nation,听All Things Considered,听Here and Now, and听Marketplace, among others. Madoff is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the听New York Times and has published op-eds in the听Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Boston Globe听and Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Among her professional activities, Madoff is a member of the American Law Institute, an academic fellow of the American College of Trusts and Estate Counsel, and past president of the American Association of Law Schools鈥� Trusts and Estates Section. She was named a 2014 Top Women of the Law by听Mass Lawyer鈥檚 Weekly听and Critic of the Year by听Inside Philanthropy.听She was also named to the听NonProfit Times听Power & Influence Top 50 in 2017 and 2018 for her work promoting reform of the tax rules governing philanthropy.听
An experienced mediator, Madoff is a leading authority on the use of mediation to resolve will and trust disputes. Prior to teaching, she was a practicing attorney for nine years in New York and Boston.
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RECENT MEDIA & APPEARANCES
