Taxation & Estate Planning

Gaylord & Haile: 1st Amendment and Commerce Clause Limits on Amazon Laws

Posted on March 22, 2011
Scott Gaylord (Elon) & Andrew J. Haile (Elon) have posted Constitutional Threats in the E-Commerce Jungle: First Amendment and Dormant Commerce Clause Limits on Amazon Laws and Use Tax Reporting Statutes, 89 N.C. L. Rev. ___ (2011), on SSRN. Here is part of the abstract: This article ...

More on the ABA's Proposed Modification of the Tenure Requirement

Posted on March 22, 2011
Following up on this morning's post, ABA Minority Proposal Softens Removal of Tenure as Accreditation Standard: my Pepperdine colleague Mark Scarberry shares his thoughts on the proposals: Neither the draft supported by the majority of the ABA subcommittee nor the Wolff/Barry minority draft requires that tenure be retained...

Tax Profs Moran, Pietruszkiewicz Are Dean Finalists at Arkansas

Posted on March 21, 2011
Tax Profs Beverly Moran (Vanderbilt) (left) and Chris Pietruszkiewicz (LSU) (right) are two of the four finalists for the Deanship at Arkansas. (The other two finalists are Stacy Leeds (Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Kansas) and Kathryn Rand (Interim Dean, North Dakota)...

Holcomb & Byrn: Taxing Gestational Surrogacy

Posted on March 21, 2011
Morgan Holcomb (Hamline) & Mary Patricia Byrn (William Mitchell) have published When Your Body is Your Business, 85 Wash. L. Rev. 647 (2010). Here is the abstract: Surrogacy in the United States is a multi-million dollar industry in which well paid professionals seek out highly specialized women to fulfill the...

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Cornell Law School Faculty Pie-Eating Contest

Posted on March 21, 2011
Cornell Law School faculty (from left to right, Dean Stewart Schwab, John Mollenkamp, Jeffrey Rachlinski, Brad Wendel, Charles Whitehead, and Greg Alexander) dive in at a pie-eating contest -- perhaps a new method of law school rankings?

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Posted on March 21, 2011
Saturday: Rethinking Taxes: Proud to Pay Tulane Tax Policy Roundtable Trade Secret Law as an Alternative to Tax Patents Sunday: Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads Judge's Jokes Fall Flat in Hearing on Law Profs' $5.2m Verdict v. West GAAP and the UCC The Tax-Exempt Status of Charities that Support Israeli...

Craig Boise Named Dean at Cleveland-Marshall

Posted on March 21, 2011
Tax Prof Craig M. Boise (DePaul) has been named Dean at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. This is a spectacular hire for Cleveland-Marshall and a homecoming of sorts for Craig, who was on the faculty at Case Western before moving to DePaul in 2009 to direct its tax program.

McGinnis Reviews The Legal Academy and an Overlawyered America

Posted on March 21, 2011
John O. McGinnis (Northwestern) reviews the new book by Walter Olson (Cato Institute), Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (2011) in today's Wall Street Journal: Law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university...

Knauer: Gay and Lesbian Estate Planning

Posted on March 21, 2011
Nancy J. Knauer (Temple) has published Gay and Lesbian Elders: Estate Planning and End-of-Life Decision Making, 12 Fla. Coastal L. Rev. 163 (2010). Here is the abstract: At a time when gay men and lesbians enjoy an unprecedented degree of acceptance, many gay and lesbian elders are facing the challenges...

Forget Harvard, You Can Make More as a Plumber

Posted on March 21, 2011
Yahoo! Finance, Forget Harvard and a 4-Year Degree, You Can Make More as a Plumber in the Long Run, Says Prof. Kotlikoff: A new study from Princeton University [Estimating the Return to College Selectivity over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data] shows that expensive college degrees are not necessarily worth...

Ron Allen on David Van Zandt's Deanship at Northwestern

Posted on March 21, 2011
Brian Leiter has a riveting interview with Ron Allen about David Van Zandt's deanship at Northwestern. Here are some excerpts: Leiter: David van Zandt was Dean at Northwestern for 15 years, an unusually long tenure for any law school Dean. Van Zandt also seemed to have a very concrete vision...

Kahn & Kahn: A Justification for the Individual Mandate Under ObamaCare

Posted on March 21, 2011
Jeffrey H. Kahn (Washington & Lee) & Douglas A. Kahn (Michigan) have posted Free Rider ? A Justification for Mandatory Medical Insurance Under Health Care Reform?, 109 Mich. L. Rev. First Impressions ___ (2011), on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...

GAAP and the UCC

Posted on March 20, 2011
Omar Ochoa (J.D. 2011, Texas) has published Note, Filling the ?GAAP?: Why Generally Accepted Accounting Principles Should Inform U.C.C. Article 9 Decisions, 89 Texas L. Rev. 207 (2010). Here is the Conclusion: I have now laid out arguments as to why GAAP should be incorporated into commercial law...

The Tax-Exempt Status of Charities that Support Israeli Settlements

Posted on March 20, 2011
Margaret A. Weirich (J.D. 2010, Iowa) has published Hijacking the Charitable System: An Examination of Tax-Exempt Status for Charities that Support Israeli Settlements, 14 J. Gender Race & Just. 327 (2010). Here is part of the Introduction: This Note will argue that domestic policy, coupled with strong international law principles,...

Judge's Jokes Fall Flat in Hearing on Law Profs' $5.2m Verdict v. West

Posted on March 20, 2011
I previously blogged the $5.2 million awarded by a federal district court jury to Law Profs David Rudovsky (Penn) and Leonard N. Sosnov (Widener) in their lawsuit against West, in which they claimed that they were falsely identified as the authors of a poorly researched ?sham? supplement to their treatise,...

Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads

Posted on March 20, 2011
This week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads is the same as last week's list, with some minor reshuffling of the ordering within the Top 5. The #1 paper is now #107 in all-time downloads among 7,331 tax papers : 1. [783 Downloads] The Fundamentals of Wealth...

Tulane Tax Policy Roundtable

Posted on March 19, 2011
The two-day Tulane Tax Policy Roundtable concludes off today: Dorothy Brown (Emory), Implicit Bias and the Earned Income Tax Credit Discussant: Robert Peroni (Texas) David Gamage (UC-Berkeley), Three Essays on Tax Salience: Market Salience and Political Salience Discussant: Neil Buchanan (George Washington) Diane Ring (Boston College), Backdoor Harmonization?: Implications of...

Trade Secret Law as Alternative to Tax Patents

Posted on March 19, 2011
Phillip A. Childs (J.D. 2010, Tulane; LL.M. (Tax) 2011, Florida) has published Comment, Be Happy With What You've Got: Tax Strategy Patents as Too Dangerous to be Allowed to Continue to Exist, and Trade Secret as a Sufficient, If Not Perfect, Alternative Protection...

Rethinking Taxes: Proud to Pay

Posted on March 19, 2011
Rethinking Taxes: Proud to Pay: With Tax Day 2011 approaching, we thought it would be a good idea to expand on those thoughts. In this mini-symposium, we offer two essays. The first is an elaboration on the idea of a taxpayer receipt. The piece is by Ethan Porter and David...

Tulane Tax Policy Roundtable

Posted on March 18, 2011
The two-day Tulane Tax Policy Roundtable kicks off today with these presentations: Leandra Lederman (Indiana-Bloomington), Hold the Mayo: What Respect Should Courts Accord Tax Regulations and Rulings Issued During Litigation? Discussant: David Gamage (UC-Berkeley) Steven Sheffrin (Tulane), Folk Justice and Taxation Discussant: Benjamin Leff (American) Shu-Yi Oei (Tulane), Burying the...

NY Times: The Best SAT Prep -- Watching 'Jersey Shore'?

Posted on March 18, 2011
New York Times, SAT?s Reality TV Essay Stumps Some: Every year, the SAT reduces more than a few teenage test-takers to tears. But few questions on the so-called Big Test appear to have provoked more anxious chatter ? at least in this era of texting and online comment streams and...

Crawford: Charlie Sheen's Oprah Tax Problem

Posted on March 18, 2011
Bridget Crawford (Pace), Charlie Sheen's Oprah Problem: Of all of the odd news concerning Charlie Sheen in recent weeks, one particular tidbit caught my tax-professor eye. The actor is holding a raffle for two tickets to his roadshow in Detroit on March 22, 2011...

NYU 3L's Take on Charlie Sheen

Posted on March 18, 2011
(Hat Tip: ABA Journal, Above the Law.)

Joint Tax Committee Releases Revenue Estimates of President's Tax Proposals

Posted on March 18, 2011
The Joint Committee on Taxation yesterday released Estimated Budget Effects of the Revenue Provisions Contained in the President?s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Proposal (JCX-19-11). (For the Obama Administration's 2012 Green Book, see here.)

ABA to Change Employment Data Reporting; U.S. News to Adopt in 2013 Rankings

Posted on March 18, 2011
The Subcommittee on Consumer Information of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Accreditation Committee has released its draft report on revising the ABA accreditation standard regarding employment data: Attached is a proposed new Standard 509(b) regarding employment data, and a chart we propose that each...

Tax News Roundup

Posted on March 18, 2011
Atlantic, GOP Bill Would Force IRS to Conduct Abortion Audits, by Garance Franke-Ruta Bloomberg, Tax-Writer Camp?s Push for Lower Rates Forces Deduction Choice, by Steven Sloan & Richard Rubin Bloomberg, Technology Companies Lobby U.S. Lawmakers for Lower Corporate Taxe Rates, by Alison Fitzgerald Broadway World, Love, Sex and the IRS...

NPR: How Offshore Tax Havens Save Companies Billions

Posted on March 18, 2011
NPR, How Offshore Tax Havens Save Companies Billions: On today's Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions ? and in some...

Pastor: 'No Tax Refund, No Communion'

Posted on March 18, 2011
Fox News, Pastor Accused of Denying Communion to Churchgoers Who Didn't Give Tax Refunds Jonathan Turley, Pay and Pray: Pastor Accused of Withholding Communion After Parishioners Refuse To Hand Over Their Tax Refunds

McCormack: Negative Externalities and the Charitable Deduction

Posted on March 18, 2011
Shannon Weeks McCormack (UC-Davis) has published Taking the Good with the Bad: Recognizing the Negative Externalities Created by Charities and Their Implications for the Charitable Deduction, 52 Ariz. L. Rev. 977 (2010). Here is the abstract: The tax code allows donors to deduct amounts donated to an extremely broad variety...

Weisbach & Galle: The Regulation of Tax Advice and Advisers

Posted on March 17, 2011
David Weisbach (Chicago) & Brian Gale (Boston College) have published The Regulation of Tax Advice and Tax Advisors, 130 Tax Notes 1279 (Mar. 14, 2011). Here is the abstract: The rules governing tax advice have been dramatically revised and extended in the last decade...

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