Alyssa DiRusso is the Whelan W. and Rosalie T. Palmer Professor of Law at Cumberland School of Law, where she specializes in wills, trusts and estates, taxation, and related areas. Before joining the Cumberland faculty in 2005, she spent six years practicing as a trusts and estates attorney in Boston, where she advised clients ranging from individuals of modest means to those with net worth approaching a billion dollars on sophisticated wealth transfer strategies including GRATs, QPRTs, ILITs, and charitable trusts.

In Boston, DiRusso served as in-house counsel to Bank of America (and its predecessor Fleet National Bank), where she was responsible for legal issues in nine states and advised the bank's $66 million corporate private foundation and $82 million donor advised fund. Before joining the bank, she was an associate in the Trusts and Estates department of Choate, Hall & Stewart, a top-tier Boston law firm, where she created estate plans, administered estates, and advised nonprofit organizations on complex tax matters.

DiRusso teaches Wills, Trusts and Estates, Estate and Gift Tax, Estate and Trust Administration, Taxation of Nonprofit Organizations, and Elder Law. She has received the Harvey S. Jackson Teaching Excellence Award twice and the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award four times, most recently in 2025. She is also a Certified Financial Planner®.

DiRusso is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC). She served as editor in chief of the peer-reviewed ACTEC Law Journal from 2020 to 2022 and chaired the Association of American Law Schools Trusts & Estates Section in 2016-17.

She is the co-author of two widely used law school textbooks: Wills, Trusts, and Estates in Focus (2nd ed., Aspen 2025, with Naomi Cahn and Susan Gary) and Federal Taxation of Wealth Transfers: Cases and Problems (5th ed., Aspen 2024, with Stephanie Willbanks). Her scholarly work spans more than two dozen publications in journals including the Vanderbilt Law Review, Tulane Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, Utah Law Review, and Indiana Law Review, as well as popular outlets including CNN, the Chicago Tribune, and The Hill.

DiRusso earned her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law, graduating in the top 10% of her class, Order of the Coif. She holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology and professional writing from Carnegie Mellon University, where she graduated in the top 5% of her class, Phi Beta Kappa. She is admitted to practice in Massachusetts (inactive) and Alabama, and before the United States Supreme Court.