Fleischer, 43, is the son of two English professors in upstate New York and grew up bagging groceries and delivering pizza. He has pushed Congress to change the code for a decade, after learning about carried interest in private tax law practice at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Not until he started teaching, at the University of Colorado and now at University of San Diego, did Fleischer take a more slanted approach.

The now-famous paper “Two and Twenty: Taxing Partnership Profits in Private Equity Funds,” was published in 2008 in the NYU Law Review, drawing its name from the 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of profits taken by private equity fund managers.

That’s when he got his first taste of politics, addressing a closed meeting of nearly 100 Senate staffers. Carried interest is taxed at the top capital gains rate of 20 percent, as long as the asset has been held for more than a year. The other type of compensation managers receive, a performance fee, is taxed as ordinary income at the higher rate.

Fleischer told staffers that carried interest should be treated as compensation and be taxed at ordinary rates, which now top out at 39.6 percent. Although he said he viewed that work as scholarly, it put him under a microscope.

“I felt very alone,” Fleischer said. Lobbyists for investment funds criticized his analysis. Fleischer said he suggested other witnesses who might agree with his views -- and they contradicted him. “I don’t think I appreciated the theater aspect of it.”

As Lily Batchelder, a New York University professor who was on the staff of the Senate Finance Committee when Fleischer presented his views, said: “There was a huge lobbying effort to oppose it. People just got deluged with tax lawyers from around the country coming in to talk about it.”

In Fleischer’s talk about capital gains -- one of the pillars of tax policy -- he says the rules unfairly tax income as just capital when it more closely resembles labor income. Congress should repeal the preference, with some caveats like a million-dollar lifetime exemption and new treatments of gifts or bequests.

The proposal is part of a bigger project he’s doing on inequality in the tax code. “The old arguments for a capital gains preference were pretty weak,” he said in the speech.

To his critics, Fleischer hasn’t learned what it sounds like every taxman should know: The devil is in the details. Fleischer hasn’t spelled out enough about how dramatic changes in tax policy would affect partnerships, said Eric B. Sloan, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP who specializes in taxation of partnerships and private equity funds.

“It is really, really complicated to figure out how the things that Vic talks about would filter through” the full list of partnership codes known as Subchapter K of the tax code, Sloan told Bloomberg BNA. “I would have hoped that a tax academic would have done that stitching.”