Taxation & Estate Planning

Shanske: An Agenda for a California Constitutional Convention?

Posted on April 07, 2010
Darien Shanske (UC-Hastings) has posted What Would the Delegates Talk About? A Rough Agenda for a Constitutional Convention, 38 Hastings Const. L.Q. ___ (2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This short article outlines a possible agenda for a California Constitutional Convention...

Slemrod Presents Buenas Notches and Car Notches Today at Penn

Posted on April 07, 2010
Joel Slemrod (University of Michigan, Ross School of Business) presents Buenas Notches: Lines and Notches in Tax System Design and Car Notches at Pennsylvania today as part of its Center for Tax Law and Policy Seminar Series hosted by Chris William Sanchirico and Reed Shuldiner...

NY Times: Treasury Department Plans to Review TurboTax After Retired Federal Workers Finds Double Deduction in Software

Posted on April 07, 2010
New York Times, Taxpayer Could Have Kept the $600, but He Put His Country First: A flaw in the most recent version of TurboTax, the nation?s most popular tax-preparation software, may have caused thousands of retired federal employees to overstate their medical deductions and unwittingly underpay the IRS, according to...

Avi-Yonah: We Should Tax Banks on Risky Debt

Posted on April 07, 2010
National Law Journal op-ed, We Should Tax Banks on Risky Debts, by Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan): The Obama administration's proposal to tax banks on their risky debts has drawn predictable fire from banks and Republicans. They argue that such a tax is misguided because it uses the power of taxation for...

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Dozing Law Prof Gets Left on Plane, Wakes Up in Hangar

Posted on April 07, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education, Law Prof Gets Left on the Plane: The head of sports law at England's Staffordshire University is fuming at Air Canada for leaving him asleep on a plane last month. The professor, Kris Lines, says he awoke in a hangar 90 minutes after the flight landed...

WaPo: The Rich Call for Higher Taxes -- On Themselves

Posted on April 07, 2010
Washington Post, For the Wealthy, Less in Taxes Is Not Always More, by Dana Milbank: You thought only conservatives got mad about taxes? Tea partiers, eat your hearts out: A group of liberals got together Tuesday and proved that they, too, can have a tax rebellion...

Report: Faculty Comfortable With Online Research, Not Online Publishing

Posted on April 07, 2010
Ithaka has released Faculty Survey 2009:Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies, with these three key findings: Scholarly Workflows and the Evolving Role of the Academic Library: Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years and, as a result, the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from...

SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

Posted on April 06, 2010
SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 629 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base. Here is the new list (through March 18, 2010) of the Top 25 U...

The U.S. International Tax System at a Crossroads

Posted on April 06, 2010
Barbara Angus, Tom Neubig, Eric Solomon & Mark Weinberger (all of Ernst & Young and former officials in the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy) have published The U.S. International Tax System at a Crossroads, 127 Tax Notes 45 (Apr. 5, 2010). Here is the abstract: In a special report...

A Harvard 3L Refuses to Contribute to His Class Gift

Posted on April 06, 2010
A Harvard 3L has refused a request to donate $20.10 for his class gift for a variety of reasons, including: "[I]nstead of giving to some meaningless class gift where most of the money will surely be wasted, I think the best thing I can do is give nothing so that...

WSJ: More Americans Are Fleeing U.S. to Avoid Rising Taxes, More Aggressive IRS

Posted on April 06, 2010
Wall Street Journal, More Americans Give Up Citizenship As IRS Gets Aggressive Overseas, by Martin Vaughan: The number of American citizens and green-card holders severing their ties with the U.S. soared in the latter part of 2009, amid looming U.S. tax increases and a more aggressive posture by the Internal...

Bloomberg: Wealthy Lack Loopholes to Avoid Obama's Tax Increases

Posted on April 06, 2010
Bloomberg, Wealthy Lack Loopholes to Offset Obama?s Taxes: Economist Arthur Laffer, 69, took a radical approach to rising income taxes four years ago: he moved to Tennessee from California Laffer, who was an adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said he?ll stay in Nashville, Tennessee, which doesn?t tax earned income,...

Ken Starr: A Call to Serve

Posted on April 06, 2010
I previously blogged my enormous gratitude for the opportunity to spend spring break in Malibu, California, teaching a one-week short course at Pepperdine University School of Law as the Strauss Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law. Following up on my post on Pepperdine Dean Ken Starr's imminent departure to become President...

Galle: The Constitutionality of Health Care Reform

Posted on April 06, 2010
Brian Galle (Florida State; moving to Boston College) has posted Conditional Taxation and the Constitutionality of Health Care Reform, 119 Yale L.J. Online ___ (2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This brief essay argues that the recently-enacted tax on individuals who fail to purchase health insurance is constitutional...

Tax Implications of Visits and Sabbaticals

Posted on April 06, 2010
John A. Miller (Idaho) & Robert Pikowsky (Georgia Institute of Technology) have posted Taxation and the Sabbatical: Doctrine, Planning, and Policy, 63 Tax Law. ___ (2009), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: It is common practice for faculty who go on sabbatical leave to take up temporary residence at another...

Kirsch Presents The Role of Physical Presence in the Taxation of Cross-Border Personal Services Today at Michigan

Posted on April 06, 2010
Michael Kirsch (Notre Dame) presents The Role of Physical Presence in the Taxation of Cross-Border Personal Services, 51 B.C. L. Rev. ___ (2010), at Michigan today as part of its Tax Policy Workshop Series coordinated by Reuven S. Avi-Yonah. Here is the abstract: This Article addresses the role of physical...

Chronicle: Outsourcing Grading

Posted on April 06, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education, Some Papers Are Uploaded to Bangalore to Be Graded: Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began...

Why I Lost My Secretary: The Effect of Endowment Shocks on University Operations

Posted on April 06, 2010
Jeffrey Brown (University of Illinois, Department of Finance), Stephen G. Dimmock (Michigan State University, Department of Finance), Jun-Koo Kang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) & Scott Weisbenner (University of Illinois, Department of Finance) have posted Why I Lost My Secretary: The Effect of Endowment Shocks on University Operations on NBER...

Howie Carr: Why Don't Pro-Tax Taxpayers Pay More Taxes?

Posted on April 06, 2010
Boston Herald, Moonbats Wing it When it Comes to Paying More Taxes, by Howie Carr: Hey moonbats of Massachusetts -- why won?t you pay more taxes? You?re always lecturing the rest of us how taxes are an investment in the future, the price we pay for civilization, etc...

The 15 Most-Cited Tax Faculty

Posted on April 05, 2010
Brian Leiter (Chicago) has released a ranking of the Highest Impact Faculty in 13 Areas of Specialization, including tax, as measured by citations during the past five years (Jan. 1, 2005 - Jan. 15, 2010): Rank Tax Prof Citations Age 1 Michael Gratez (Yale) 370 66 2 Daniel Shaviiro (NYU)...

WaPo: Obama's 17-Minute, 2,500-Word Response to Woman's Claim of Being 'Over-Taxed'

Posted on April 05, 2010
Washington Post, Obama's 17-Minute, 2,500-Word Response to Woman's Claim of Being 'Over-Taxed': Even by President Obama's loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy. Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood...

NY Times: Law School Clinics Face a Backlash

Posted on April 05, 2010
New York Times, School Law Clinics Face a Backlash: Law school students nationwide are facing growing attacks in the courts and legislatures as legal clinics at the schools increasingly take on powerful interests that few other nonprofit groups have the resources to challenge...

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Posted on April 05, 2010
Saturday: WaPo: Five Myths About Your Taxes 2009-10 Moot Court Rankings Homemakers and Social Security The Disparate Treatment of Similarly Situated Taxpayers Under § 104(a)(2) Sunday: Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads WSJ: Last-Minute Tax Help § 2703, Valuation Discounts in FLPs & Holman Elliffe Posts Tax Papers on SSRN

Is There a Tax Prof 'Superstar Effect?'

Posted on April 05, 2010
Wall Street Journal, The Superstar Effect: From the playing field to the boardroom, when one competitor is clearly the best, the others don't step up their game?they give up. As Tiger Woods returns to golf, Jonah Lehrer looks at the nature of competition...

Thuronyi Presents A VAT for the US? Today at Northwestern

Posted on April 05, 2010
Victor Thuronyi (Senior Counsel (Taxation), International Monetary Fund) presents A VAT for the US? at Northwestern today as part of its Advanced Topics in Taxation Series organized by Tom Brennan and Charlotte Crane: Victor's paper (which will be published once bureaucratic clearance is obtained at IMF) argues that the VAT...

Tiley Presents Tax Avoidance -- The Never Ending Search Today at Case Western

Posted on April 05, 2010
John Tiley (Queens College, University of Cambridge) delivers the Norman A. Sugarman Tax Scholar in Residence Lecture today at Case Western on Tax Avoidance: The Never Ending Search for Resolving Clashing Principles: What is the definition of avoidance? Would principles based drafting help our tax legislation? It is possible to...

Schmalbeck & Soled: It's Time to Limit the Luxury Box Tax Deduction

Posted on April 05, 2010
New York Times op-ed, Throw Out Skybox Tax Subsidies, by Richard Schmalbeck (Duke) & Jay Soled (Rutgers Business School): Until the 1970s, Major League Baseball was a populist sport. Bleacher seats cost as little as a dollar, meaning middle- or even working-class fans could afford to take their families to...

ABA Tax Section Accepting Nominations for 2011-2013 Public Service Fellowships

Posted on April 05, 2010
The ABA Tax Section is accepting applications for Public Service Fellowships for 2011-2013: Applications must be received by October 4, 2010 to be considered. Applicants selected for interviews will be invited to attend the Section?s meeting in Boca Raton on January 20-22, 2011, and asked to participate in interviews on...

WSJ: Small Bras and the VAT

Posted on April 05, 2010
Wall Street Journal op-ed, Small Bras and the Value-Added Tax, by Irwin Stelzer (Hudson Institute): Taxing consumption sounds easy. Wait until government starts to carve out the political exceptions. o we are to have a European-style value-added tax (VAT)...

§ 2703, Valuation Discounts in FLPs & Holman

Posted on April 04, 2010
Alden Koste (J.D. 2010, Catholic) has published The IRS Fished Its Wish: The Ability of Section 2703 to Minimize Valuation Discounts Afforded to Family Limited Partnership Interests in Holman v. Commissioner, 59 Cath. U. L. Rev. 289 (2009). Here is part of the Introduction: Family limited partnerships (FLPs) have become...

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