Law Commons^™

Teaching Tax Law After Tax Reform, Martin D. Ginsburg

Washington Law Review

Professor Ginsburg compares the teaching of individual income taxation before and after the extensive statutory revisions of the 1980s. The pervasive question, what is income, remains the central inquiry in the basic tax course, he observes, and the great classifications, personal versus commercial and current versus capital, unavoidably persist. The development in tax law that has most significantly changed the way the subject is taught, he believes, is embodied in the recent enactment of a variety of Internal Revenue Code provisions which, while facially inconsistent in their approach to particular cases, have in common an appreciation of differences in present …