Beverly Moran ’76 and Ezekiel Edwards ’95

Beverly Moran ’76

Occupation: Legal scholar and Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

Accomplishments: During a four-decade legal career that has taken her around the world, Beverly Moran has focused her teaching, research, and writing on the U.S. federal income tax code and how it perpetuates inequalities in American society. In her groundbreaking 1996 Wisconsin Law Review article, “A Black Critique of the Internal Revenue Code,” she and a colleague empirically demonstrated that Black people pay more federal income tax than White people at the same income levels—a disparity that persists to this day, along with other inequities. “If you talk to anybody who feels themselves to be in any way knowledgeable about federal income taxation, one thing they will say and believe is that rich people are taxed more than poor people under the federal income tax; that it is progressive. And we have never had a progressive tax system,” Moran says. “One of the reasons that it’s so important to lie about that is because it’s so in conflict with our stated values.”