Joseph Bankman

Career

Joseph Bankman is a tax law lecturer and Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School. ² Bankman is the author of two tax casebooks including Federal Income Taxation. ³ Bankman’s writings on tax policy include topics such as tax progressivity, consumption taxes, filing simplification, and the influence of tax rules on the structure of Silicon Valley start-ups. ²

Bankman earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his law degree from Yale Law School, as well as a doctorate in clinical psychology from Palo Alto University. ⁴ Bankman was previously a co-host for the Stanford Legal podcast along with Pamela Karlan. ⁵

Advocacy

Bankman previously advocated for California’s ReadyReturn program, a pilot program intended to simplify the state’s tax filing process, for which he spent over $30,000 of his own money to campaign. ⁶ The program was ended after tax-preparation software company TurboTax sued and the state legislature failed to obtain the votes to make the program permanent. ^{7 2 8}

In 2022, it was reported that Bankman had supported and helped draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) Tax Filing Simplification Act in 2016, a bill intended to simply the nation’s tax code. Bankman and roughly 54 law professors and economists signed a letter supporting Sen. Warren’s legislation. As of 2022, the legislation failed to move to a floor vote but it had received support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), former Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA), and former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN). ⁹

FTX Scandal

On December 12, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of defunct cryptocurrency futures exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas after criminal charges were filed by federal prosecutors including counts of fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and violations of campaign finance laws. ^{10 11}

Joseph Bankman was a paid FTX employee who allegedly promoted the company through facilitating partnerships and appearing at corporate events. Barbara Fried, Joseph’s wife and mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, though not employed by FTX, was still connected through her political advocacy efforts with Mind the Gap, which received donations from her son. Following FTX’s bankruptcy on November 11, 2022, Barbara Fried resigned from Mind the Gap. ¹²

As of March 2025, Bankman, along with his wife Fried, have reportedly lobbied for the second Trump administration to secure a pardon or commutation of Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence. ¹³