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Full-Text Articles in Law

Reforming The Law Of Gratuitous Transfers: The New Uniform Probate Code, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

Reforming The Law Of Gratuitous Transfers: The New Uniform Probate Code, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In the mid-1980s the Uniform Law Commission undertook a landmark revision of the American law of gratuitous transfers. These reforms culminated in a drastically revised Uniform Probate Code ("UPC"). The revisions inspired the Albany Law Review to organize this symposium issue for the purpose of examining the 1990 UPC. In this introductory paper, we point to the main themes of the reform movement, discuss some of the traits and constraints of the uniform law process, and comment on some of the suggestions and insights that appear in the symposium articles.


The Upc's New Survivorship And Antilapse Provisions, Edward C. Halbach Jr., Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

The Upc's New Survivorship And Antilapse Provisions, Edward C. Halbach Jr., Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Law governing transfers of family property has long struggled with questions of survivorship in their many and varied forms. Important results can and regularly do turn on how such issues are resolved.


The Model Employment Termination Act: Fairness For Employees And Employers Alike, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1992

The Model Employment Termination Act: Fairness For Employees And Employers Alike, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The Model Employment Termination Act (META), which state legislatures are expected to consider in the near future aims to prevent the unfair firing of Amer~ ican workers. At the same time, the Act aims to prevent devastating financial blows to American business. For both employees and employers, META offers streamlined dispute resolution procedures that would be simpler, less costly, and less time-consuming than the civil courts. The essence of the proposal is compromise-not as a matter of political expediency but as a practical, balanced accommodation of the competing worthwhile interests of employers and employees. Workers are entitled to be free …


Tax Expenditure Budgets: A Critical View, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman Jan 1992

Tax Expenditure Budgets: A Critical View, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Articles

During the past few months, Tax Notes has featured an extended discussion about the "normalcy" (or lack thereof) of accelerated depreciation. Two contributions to that discussion came from Professor Calvin Johnson of the University of Texas Law School, who disagreed with certain aspects of an article that Professor Kahn wrote in 1979. And the debate shows no sign of slowing down. The interchange over the details of accelerated depreciation offers a useful backdrop against which to consider a more general issue: the intellectual coherence of the tax expenditure budgets. The larger concept of tax expenditures was what motivated Kahn to …


Tax Policy And Panda Bears, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman Jan 1992

Tax Policy And Panda Bears, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Articles

In this article. Professors Kahn and Lehman argue that the concept of tax expenditure is flawed as a tool for measuring the propriety of tax provisions. It assumes the existence of on true and correct standard of federal income taxation that applies to all circumstances. To make that a assumption, the proponents of the concept implicitly make a particular moral claim about the relative importance of a wide range of values, including efficiency, consumption/savings neutrality, privacy, distributional equity, administrabiliy, charity, and pragmatism. They then measure a tax provision's "normalcy" exclusively by how it conforms to their Platonic concept of income. …


Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

Marital Property Rights In Transition, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The subject of "marital property rights" is very timely because those rights are in a state of transition. The term "marital property rights" covers a vast multitude of rights or interests conferred by law on persons who occupy the status of spouse. This lecture is divided into four discrete, yet related segments. The first segment addresses how the law allocates original ownership between spouses in a marriage. The second segment turns to the intestate share of the surviving spouse. This is not a topic that high-powered estate planners get involved in very much because intestate estates are usually fairly small. …


Spousal Rights In Our Multiple-Marriage Society: The Revised Uniform Probate Code, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1992

Spousal Rights In Our Multiple-Marriage Society: The Revised Uniform Probate Code, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

The transformation of the American family constitutes one of the great phenomenons of the past two decades. The traditional Leave It to Beaver family no longer prevails in American society. To be sure, families consisting of the wage-earning husband, the homemaking and child-rearing wife, and their two joint children still exist. But divorce rates are astonishingly high and remarriage abounds. In fact, there is an increasing prevalence in the population of marriages that are more likely to end in divorce than others-marriages in which one or both partners were divorced before and marriages of couples who cohabited prior to marriage.


Compensatory And Punitive Damages For A Personal Injury: To Tax Or Not To Tax, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1992

Compensatory And Punitive Damages For A Personal Injury: To Tax Or Not To Tax, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Since the adoption in 1919 of the Revenue Act of 1918, damages received on account of personal injuries or sickness have been excluded by statute from gross income.1 This exclusion, which does not apply to reimbursements for medical expenses for which the taxpayer was previously allowed a tax deduction,2 is presently set forth in section 104(a)(2). One might expect that a provision having recently attained the ripe age of 75 years without change in its basic language would have a settled meaning. However, recent litigation under section 104(a)(2) bristles with unsettled issues. Does the exclusion apply to punitive damages? To …