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Construing Wills And Trusts During The Estate Tax Hiatus In 2010, S. Alan Medlin, F. Ladson Boyle
Construing Wills And Trusts During The Estate Tax Hiatus In 2010, S. Alan Medlin, F. Ladson Boyle
Faculty Publications
Many estate planners have drafted wills and revocable trusts with dispositive provisions based on formulas. These formulas often use language based on transfer tax terminology. For clients who die in 2010, the language used in these formulas will be ambiguous, if not apparently meaningless, because Congress failed to re-institute the estate tax for 2010. The resulting 2010 estate tax hiatus will result in will and revocable trust construction problems for the estates of many decedents who die during the hiatus. Courts will have to use statutory and common law construction methods to attempt to determine the decedent's dispositive intentions. This …
Taxing Structured Settlements, Brant J. Hellwig, Gregg D. Polsky
Taxing Structured Settlements, Brant J. Hellwig, Gregg D. Polsky
Faculty Publications
Congress has granted a tax subsidy to physically injured tort plaintiffs who enter into structured settlements. The subsidy allows these plaintiffs to exempt the investment yield imbedded within the structured settlement from federal income taxation. The apparent purpose of the subsidy is to encourage physically injured plaintiffs to invest, rather than presently consume, their litigation recoveries. Although the statutory subsidy by its terms is available only to physically injured tort plaintiffs, a growing structured settlement industry now contends that the same tax benefit of yield exemption is available to plaintiffs' lawyers and nonphysically injured tort plaintiffs under general, common-law tax …