Catherine E. Livingston

Catherine Livingston is the Chief Legal Officer for AIR, overseeing all internal and external legal matters for the institute, including compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies related to all institutional interests, including contracts, workforce and employment matters, and intellectual property. She also serves as AIR’s in-house ethics officer and as secretary to the AIR Board of Directors. 

Livingston is a leader in the field of tax policy and nonprofit law, with more than 30 years of experience in the nonprofit, governmental, and private sectors. She has advised hospitals, universities, research institutions, public media organizations, and other large nonprofit entities on tax and corporate law matters affecting transactions, compliance, and disputes. Before joining AIR, she served as general counsel and board secretary for the Open Society Foundations, providing strategic direction and guidance to the organization’s board and leadership and leading its centralized legal team to support its mission and global operations. She also served for nine years as a partner at Jones Day, a global law firm, where she advised nonprofit and tax-exempt organizations, as well as their boards, on navigating the complexities of the U.S. tax code and corporate governance. 

Prior to her time at Jones Day, Livingston led all legal work on tax-exempt organizations in the United States Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Chief Counsel. She was also the IRS’s first health care counsel, the principal legal advisor to IRS leadership on all aspects of the enactment and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  Livingston also served in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy where she drafted legislation and regulations and helped develop and implement higher education tax incentives such as the Hope and Lifetime Learning credits and section 529 tax-favored education savings plans.  She began her legal career as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Sporkin.

Livingston is a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School and is based in Washington, D.C.