Professor Erin Adele Scharff

Erin Adele Scharff joined the ASU College of Law faculty in 2014. Previously, she was a visiting assistant professor of tax law at New York University School of Law, where she served as an editor of the Tax Law Review.

Scharff’s scholarship focuses on fiscal federalism, including the allocation of revenue authority between state and local governments, local government law, and state tax law. Her publications have appeared in Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal,New York University Law Review, and the Tax Law Review, among other journals. As an expert on local fiscal authority, Scharff has written several amicus briefs on the legal authority of local governments to raise revenue under state constitutions.

Professor Scharff is the coauthor of casebooks in both taxation and local government law: Cases and Materials on State and Local Government Law (9th ed, 2022) and Federal Income Taxation (19th ed., forthcoming 2023). She is a past chair of the AALS Tax Section.

She graduated magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she was a Furman Scholar and a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar. After graduation she clerked for the Honorable William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In addition to her academic work, Scharff serves chair board of the Phoenix Legal Action Network, a legal services non-profit. She is the mother to three rambunctious children.