Anne Alstott was born in Indianapolis.  She received her A.B. in Economics, summa cum laude, from Georgetown University in 1984.  She ranked first among Arts graduates (and second overall) in the College of Arts and Sciences that year and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year.

Alstott graduated from the Yale Law School in 1987 and practiced in a Wall Street law firm for three years before serving as an attorney-advisor in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy.  In 1992, Alstott accepted an appointment as associate professor at the Columbia University School of Law. 

In 1996-97, she taught as a visiting professor at the Yale Law School, and in 1997, she joined the Yale law faculty as Professor of Law.  In 2004, Yale named Alstott the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation.  Alstott joined the Harvard law faculty in 2008.  At Harvard, she served from 2008-2011 as the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law.  She returned to Yale in 2011, where she again holds the Bierman chair.

Anne Alstott has won three teaching awards at the Yale Law School (in 2012, 2004, and 1998).  She also won the Willis L.M. Reese Award for Excellence in Teaching at Columbia Law School in 1995.

Alstott’s scholarship focuses on public policy, including taxation and welfare policy.  Her work with Bruce Ackerman on capital grants for young adults formed part of the intellectual underpinnings of Britain’s Child Trust Fund.  She has also written about the earned income tax credit, wage subsidies, inheritance taxation, and intergenerational justice.  Her latest work focuses on family law and family policy.