William H. Byrnes, IV
Professor William H. Byrnes, IV, appointed Assistant Dean to Thomas Jefferson School of Law, pioneered distributive legal education in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Byrnes is the founder of the Walter H. & Dorothy B. Diamond program, which he started teaching in 1998. He received tenure and full professor status from St. Thomas University School of Law (Miami) in 2005, before that achieving Associate Professor status in 1998 from Regent University School of Law (Virginia Beach). From 1996, Professor Byrnes has held a Visiting Professor title at Witwatersrand University, teaching the international component of the Masters of Commerce in Taxation, during which time he crystallized the online pedagogy and curriculum of the LL.M. program. Before 1996, he lectured international tax at Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg). For AALS, he was elected Chairman of the Graduate Programs Committee in 2005, and for 2007 served on the Teaching Methods Committee
Professor Byrnes pioneered distributive legal education through creating the first Internet-delivered legal degree in the United States, offered by a School of Law and accredited by the American Bar Association. In 1994, he created the three and five day training program, International Taxation and Offshore Financial Centers, partnering since 1997 with EuroMoney-Institutional Investor, which he has taught in-house to banks, exchanges, and governments, in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Miami, Lisbon, Mauritius, Dominica and South Africa. He has also chaired, as well as presented at, many corporate and private banking conferences globally, including Malaysia, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, India and South Africa. His presentations have included topics as diverse as forecasting economics of B2B integrated supply chains to the discriminatory U.S. implementation and affect of transfer pricing regulations to Indian/Pacific Rim States.
Besides authoring and editing several case books for the program published in cooperation with Kluwer Law International such as, Principles of International Taxation and also Offshore Financial Centers, he co-authored the book Tax Reform for South Africa and served as Managing Editor of the Exchange Control Encyclopedia, which was amalgamated into Butterworths’ Exchange Control Encyclopedia. For Thomson Tax, he is the author for the U.S. Chapter for International Tax Systems and Planning Techniques, a series by Roy Saunders and Miles Dean published in loose-leaf and on Checkpoint. He served as an editor to Walter Diamond of the Diamond loose-leaf series: Tax and Trade Briefs, Matthew Bender (New York) as well as an editor to Barry Spitz for the Lexicon in the Butterworths’ loose-leaf Spitz’s Tax Havens Encyclopedia. He is Co-Author of the forthcoming loose-leaf series, Offshore Trusts & Companies Laws, Analysis and Tax Planning. He was a consultant editor for Kluwer Law International (London) for many years before he was a consultant editor for Richmond Law & Tax. He also worked on the International Fiscal Association’s (IFA) methodology of categorization of taxation.
Before full-time teaching, Professor Byrnes was a senior manager, then associate director of international tax for Coopers and Lybrand, which subsequently amalgamated into Price Waterhouse. His primary clients at Coopers and Lybrand were multinational investment and also private banks, insurance companies, technology companies and company service providers. Over the last ten years, he has lived in Asia, Europe, Africa and The Americas.
Professor Byrnes has been employed as a consultant to a number of governments on their tax policy, including South Africa, Botswana, The United Kingdom, The British Virgin Islands, The Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla and Montserrat. He is the primary author and team leader of the UK commissioned Byrnes Report, on the Economic and Socio-Economic Impact of the Tax Savings Directive and EU Code of Conduct on Business Taxation upon Selected Offshore Financial Centers as well as a Competitiveness Report for Selected Offshore Financial Centers.
He serves on the board of various 501(c)(3) tax exempt charities and in 1989 founded the Last Hope Recovery Center (d.b.a. Abstract Bookshop & Café) in New Orleans, a 40 person residential center dealing with dual diagnosis. The Abstract has been mentioned in several press articles, one of which received the American journalism award for its pictorial portrayal of the suffering of residents with AIDS.
In 2002, he was one of six founding board members of the Royal Society of Fellows, which has grown to several hundred members and is now recognized as presenting the leading intra-governmental-professional conference on the subject of anti-money laundering and international tax planning. Conferences have been held in Bahamas, Cayman Islands and Miami.
He holds a degree in Political Economics of the law track from the Murphy Institute of Tulane University and a Juris Doctorate from Loyola University School of Law. His LL.M., specialized in European Business and Taxation, is from the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law and the Europa Institute. His fellowship was granted by the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in conjunction with the University of Amsterdam after presenting his thesis in the field of inter-company cross-border pricing.
