Benjamin Soskis Editor & Author

Ray Madoff is a Professor at Boston College Law School where she teaches and writes in the areas of philanthropy policy, taxes, property and estate planning. Professor Madoff is the author of: Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead (Yale), 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. "Professor Madoff is also the lead author on one of the top treatises on estate planning: Practical Guide to Estate Planning (CCH) (published annually from 2001-2017).Professor Madoff is the 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. She is a nationally recognized expert on matters of philanthropy tax policy.

Benjamin Soskis is a Research Associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute and the co-editor of HistPhil, a web publication dedicated to the history of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. He has also served as a consultant to the Open Philanthropy Project’s History of Philanthropy program. Soskis is a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Atlantic; his writing on philanthropy has also appeared in the Washington Post, New Yorker.com, the Guardian, the American Prospect, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Nonprofit Quarterly. He is the co-author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On (Oxford, 2013) and Looking Back at 50 Years of US Philanthropy (Hewlett Foundation, 2016). Soskis has taught at the George Washington University and the University of California, Washington Center and received his PhD in American history from Columbia University.