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Full-Text Articles in Estates and Trusts

Fraying The Knot: Marital Property, Probate, And Practical Problems With Tribal Bans, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne Apr 2020

Fraying The Knot: Marital Property, Probate, And Practical Problems With Tribal Bans, Suzianne D. Painter-Thorne

Articles

In the summer of 2015, marriage equality advocates celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down state prohibitions on same-sex marriage.The Court found that “[t]he right of same-sex couples to marry . . . is part of the liberty promised by the Fourteenth Amendment.” Two years earlier, the Court had struck down parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), finding that the federal government could not discriminate against same-sex married partners. With these two decisions, the Court ensured that the marriages of same-sex couples would be recognized by the federal government and in …


Comments On Proposed Treasury Regulations Defining Terms Relating To Marital Status, Anthony C. Infanti, The American Bar Association Dec 2015

Comments On Proposed Treasury Regulations Defining Terms Relating To Marital Status, Anthony C. Infanti, The American Bar Association

Articles

These comments respond to proposed Treasury Regulations defining terms relating to marital status in the Internal Revenue Code following the Supreme Court's decision in the Windsor and Obergefell cases. The comments applaud the Internal Revenue Service for reading gendered terms relating to marital status in a gender-neutral fashion. For a number of reasons, however, the comments recommend that the final regulations omit the proposed rule for determining an individual’s marital status and, in its place, codify the current deference to local law in determining marital status for federal tax purposes. Most importantly, the comments further recommend that the final regulations …


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.


Redesigning The Spouse's Forced Share, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner Jan 1987

Redesigning The Spouse's Forced Share, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

American forced-share law underwent a major round of reform in the 1960s. The main objective was to prevent the decedent from engaging in "fraud on the widow's share," that is, using nominal inter vivos transfers to evade the surviving spouse's forced-share entitlement. In jurisdictions that follow the Uniform Probate Code of 1969 (UPC), that mischief has been eradicated. The UPC, which is discussed in some detail below, extends the forced-share entitlement to property that has been the subject of inter vivos transfer. In the present article we develop the view that the time has come for a further round of …


The Estate Tax Marital Deduction, Harold Dubroff, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1980

The Estate Tax Marital Deduction, Harold Dubroff, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The estate tax marital deduction, section 2056 of the Internal Revenue Code, was enacted in 1948, along with the split-income provisions of the income tax law and the marital deduction and split-gift provisions of the gift tax law. The purpose was to give married residents of common law states approximately the same federal tax advantages that were available to married residents of community property states. Ordinarily, upon the death of a married resident of a community property state, only one-half of the community property is taxed in the decedent's estate. Section 2056 achieves approximately the same result for married residents …


Transactions Subject To Gift Tax, Douglas A. Kahn, Earl M. Colson Jan 1975

Transactions Subject To Gift Tax, Douglas A. Kahn, Earl M. Colson

Articles

The gift tax is imposed on the "transfer of property by gift." The term gift is not expressly defined either in the Code or in the Treasury Regulations. However, section 2512(b), dealing with the valuation of gifts, states that "where property is transferred for less than an adequate and full consideration in money or money's worth," the difference between the value of the property transferred and the consideration received constitutes a gift. Thus, for gift tax purposes, the determination of whether a gift was made does not turn so much on the intent of the transferor as it does on …