Taxation & Estate Planning

Blank Presents A Behavioral Theory of Tax Privacy Today at Indiana

Posted on February 24, 2011
Joshua D. Blank (NYU) presents Not Seeing Is Believing: A Behavioral Theory of Tax Privacy at Indiana-Bloomington today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series. Here is the abstract: The debate over whether tax privacy promotes individual tax compliance is as old as the income tax itself...

Borden: A Middle-Class Movement May Destroy the Middle Class

Posted on February 24, 2011
Tax Prof Bradley Borden (Brooklyn), Getting What You Ask For: How a Middle-Class Movement May Destroy the Middle Class (Huffington Post): Last fall the Tea Party flexed its muscles and helped send many new faces to Congress. Now the news is filled with talk of budget-cutting, and House Republicans threaten...

Health Care Spending Growth Could Led to 70% Marginal Tax Rates by 2060

Posted on February 24, 2011
Katherine Baicker (Harvard University, Department of Health Policy & Management) & Jonathan S. Skinner (Dartmouth College, Department of Economics) have posted Health Care Spending Growth and the Future of U.S. Tax Rates on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The fraction of GDP devoted to health care in the United States...

Christians Presents International Tax Dispute Resolution Today at NYU

Posted on February 24, 2011
Allison Christians (Wisconsin) presents Hard Law, Soft Law, and No Law: The World of International Tax Dispute Resolution at NYU today as part of its Colloquium Series on Tax Policy and Public Finance convened by Daniel Shaviro (NYU) and Mihir Desai (Harvard Business School)...

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9th Circuit: Estate's Settlement of Palimony Claim Is Not Deductible Under § 2053

Posted on February 23, 2011
The Ninth Circuit yesterday, in a 2-1 decision, held that the district court wrongly concluded that an estate could not deduct the amount paid in settlement of a palimony claim under § 2053. Estate of Shapiro v. Commissioner, No. 08-17491 (9th Cir. Feb...

Sitkoff & Schanzenbach: An Empirical Analysis of the Prudent Investor Rule

Posted on February 23, 2011
Robert H. Sitkoff (Harvard) & Max M. Schanzenbach (Northwestern) have published The Prudent Investor Rule and Trust Asset Allocation: An Empirical Analysis, 35 Am. C. Tr. & Est. Counsel J. 314 (2010). Here is the abstract: This article reports the results of an empirical study of the effect of the...

Taxation, Property, and the Market: The Case of the Corporate Income Tax

Posted on February 23, 2011
Miguel Correia (Católica Global School of Law) has posted Taxation, Property and Market: The Case of the Corporation Income Tax on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This paper builds on the insight that there is a profound interconnection between taxation, property, and the market by analyzing the nature of these...

Infanti: Anonymous Tax Publishing

Posted on February 23, 2011
Anthony C. Infanti (Pittsburgh) has published Foreword: On Publishing Anonymously, 8 Pitt. Tax Rev. 1 (2010). Here is the abstract: In this foreword to the fall 2010 issue of the Pittsburgh Tax Review, I explain the troubling set of circumstances that led to our decision to publish one of the...

Cooper: Applying the Benefit-the-Beneficiaries Rule to Trust Investment Directives

Posted on February 23, 2011
Jeffrey A. Cooper (Quinnipiac) has published Shades of Gray: Applying the Benefit-the-Beneficiaries Rule to Trust Investment Directives, 90 B.U. L. Rev. 2383 (2010). Here is the abstract: This Essay considers the trust investment management implications of Section 105(b)(3) of the Uniform Trust Code (UTC), which codifies an unwaivable requirement that...

Bogdanski: Retained Interests and Estate of Stewart

Posted on February 23, 2011
John A. Bogdanski (Lewis & Clark) has published Upstairs, Downstairs: Retained Interests and Estate of Stewart,130 Tax Notes 911 (Feb. 21, 2011): Section 2036(a) hauls back into a decedent?s gross estate, for federal estate tax purposes, property that she gave away while alive, if the decedent retained at death the...

Photographic Evidence of the Horrible Physical Toll of the Law Prof Lifestyle

Posted on February 23, 2011
Here (not for the squeamish).

The Tax Implications of Obama's Abandonment of the Defense of Marriage Act

Posted on February 23, 2011
The Department of Justice announced today that the Obama Administration believes that the Defense of Marriage Act in unconstitutional and will stop defending it in court, including in the Windsor v. United States case challenging the constitutionality of limiting the estate tax marital deduction to hererosexual couples...

IRS: Federal Payments to Financially Distressed Homeowners Are Not Taxable

Posted on February 23, 2011
The IRS ruled today that cash payments to financially distressed homeowners under federal housing relief programs do not constitute gross income under the general welfare exception (which excludes from income payments under governmental social benefit programs for the promotion of the general welfare)...

Burman Presents Tax Expenditures and Budgeting Today at Penn

Posted on February 23, 2011
Leonard Burman (Syracuse University, Maxwell School) presents Tax Expenditures and Government Size and Efficiency (with Marvin Phaup (George Washington University, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration)) at Pennsylvania today as part of its Center for Tax Law and Policy Seminar Series hosted by Chris William Sanchirico and Reed...

Law Dean Salaries

Posted on February 22, 2011
The median 2010 law school dean salary was $278,454, according to a report issued yesterday by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (via Chroncile of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.) Sample law school dean salaries: Arizona State (2008): $282,000 Florida (2009): $256,051 George Mason (2010): $325,583...

I Hate Law School

Posted on February 22, 2011

Goldberg: E-VAT -- An Electronically Collected Progressive Consumption Tax

Posted on February 22, 2011
Daniel S. Goldberg (Maryland) has posted E-VAT: An Electronically Collected Progressive Consumption Tax, 128 Tax Notes 1351 (Sept. 27, 2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This report proposes replacing the income tax with an electronic, progressive consumption tax that couples a credit-method VAT (modified for wages) with a progressive...

Law Reviews Are Not Dead: Judicial Citation Patterns

Posted on February 22, 2011
Whit D. Pierce & Anne E. Reuben (both J.D. 2011, Wake Forest) have published Empirical Study: The Law Review Is Dead; Long Live The Law Review: A Closer Look at the Declining Judicial Citation of Legal Scholarship, 45 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1185 (2010). Here is part of the Introduction:...

Exam Bluebooks as Love Letters

Posted on February 22, 2011
Ruthann Robson (CUNY), The Zen of Grading, 36 Akron L. Rev. 303, 317 (2003): "Love" may seem like a strange emotion to consider in the context of bluebooks, but each exam can present itself as a love letter of sorts. It's a personal communication from the student to me (only...

Kahn Presents Penalty Taxes Today at Santa Clara

Posted on February 22, 2011
Jeffrey H. Kahn (Washington & Lee) presents Penalty Taxes at Santa Clara today as part of its Faculty Workshop Series. Here is the abstract: President Obama signed into law an historic overhaul of the United States health care system. One of the most discussed provisions of the health care reform...

Kornhauser: Shaping Public Opinion and the Tax Law in the 1930s

Posted on February 22, 2011
Marjorie E. Kornhauser (Arizona State) has published Shaping Public Opinion and the Law: How a 'Common Man' Campaign Ended a Rich Man's Law, 73 Law & Contemp. Probs. 123 (2010). Here is the abstract: The danger of an oppressive majority faction is an obvious concern in a democracy, one that...

Christopher Hanna Named Senior Policy Advisor to Senate Finance Committee

Posted on February 22, 2011
Christopher H. Hanna (SMU) has been named Senior Policy Advisor for Tax Reform on the minority staff of the Senate Finance Committee: He joins the Committee after serving as the Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor and Professor of Law at SMU, where he has received the Dr...

NYU Offers Entirely Online Tax LL.M.

Posted on February 22, 2011
The NYU Graduate Tax Program announced today that it has eliminated the two-credit residency requirement for the Executive LL.M. in Taxation, meaning that the degree can now be completed entirely online: During the past year, the Executive LL.M. in Taxation program has expanded globally; in order to make the program...

Fleischer: Regulatory Arbitrage

Posted on February 22, 2011
Victor Fleischer (Colorado) has published Regulatory Arbitrage, 88 Texas L. Rev. 1235 (2010). Here is the abstract: Regulatory gamesmanship typically relies on a planning technique known as regulatory arbitrage, which occurs when parties take advantage of a gap between the economics of a deal and its regulatory treatment, restructuring the...

Janitors in Helmsley Building Pay Higher Tax Rates Than Millionaire Residents

Posted on February 21, 2011
Martin A. Sullivan (Tax Analysts) has published At the Helmsley Building, the Little People Pay the Taxes, 130 Tax Notes 855 (Feb. 21, 2011): Martin A. Sullivan looks at IRS Statistics of Income Division data showing that the effective tax rate for filers listing the Helmsley building as their address...

Russell Osgood, Vincent Rougeau Named Dean Finalists at Boston College

Posted on February 21, 2011
According to this letter from the BC provost: Russell K. Osgood (Visiting Professor, Washington University; former President, Grinnell College; former Dean (and Tax Prof), Cornell) and Vincent Rougeau (Notre Dame) are the two finalists for the BC deanship, after Tax Prof Jim Repetti (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and William...

Interview With Tenured Law Prof Fighting For His Job After Using Dean in Hypos

Posted on February 21, 2011
Following up on last week's post, Law Prof May Lose Tenure For Classroom Hypos on Shooting His Dean: the National Association of Scholars has posted an interview with Lawrence Connell, the tenured law professor at Widener who is fighting to keep his job after students complained about his frequent class...

Big Increases in Tax Prosecutions (27%), Convictions (15%)

Posted on February 21, 2011
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University has released data on tax prosecutions: Overall, the data show that [tax] prosecutions ... are up 26.7% from levels reported in 2005. Figure 1: Monthly trends in prosecutions [T]he data show that [tax] convictions ...

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Posted on February 21, 2011
Saturday: FactCheck.org: ObamaCare Requires the IRS to Hire 1,000 More Workers California Bar Asks U.S. News to Add Diversity Component to Rankings San Francisco to Impose 1.5% Tax on Stock Options Albany Law School to Shrink Class Size, Budget Sunday: WSJ: Same-Sex Couples in CA, NV & WA Reap Big...

WSJ: Buy Your Way Into an Elite College by Not Applying for Financial Aid

Posted on February 21, 2011
Wall Street Journal, Buying Your Way Into College, by Jane J. Kim: Forget the standard advice that everyone should apply for financial aid. This year, forgoing aid applications may actually boost the chances of getting accepted. Thanks to the recent recession, more colleges are giving seats to wealthier students?especially international...

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