Law Commons^™

The Optimum Marital Deduction Survives The Tax Reform Act, J. Rodney Johnson

Law Faculty Publications

Several years ago an article appeared in the pages of this journal which suggested that those attorneys who regularly focused on obtaining the maximum marital deduction in the wills they were drafting for their clients might be suffering from a form of estate planner's myopia. That is, they were losing sight of their ultimate goal of minimizing the total estate tax burden imposed on the husband's assets as they pass from him, through the wife, on to the ultimate beneficiaries. The danger foreseen was that, as an attorney employed one of the various formula clauses designed to obtain every possible …