Social Welfare Law Commons^™

Decoupling Tax Exemption For Charitable Organizations, Charles A. Borek

William Mitchell Law Review

[T]his article proposes a new approach to defining the term “charitable” for tax purposes that both respects the essence of tax-exempt eleemosynary activity and injects an element of clarity that has eluded the use of the term in modern tax parlance. Part I traces the evolution of the legal concept of charity, with emphasis on the shift in focus from poverty relief to social action facilitated through the device of trust law. I argue that it is in this shift of emphasis that the concept of charity became entangled in property concepts and thereby transformed into something wholly unrelated to …