Law Commons^™

Serfs At The Mercy Of A Hungry Beast: Aggressive Regressivity, Private Equity, And The Quandary Of The St. Luke Imperative, Bobby L. Dexter

Bobby L. Dexter

Currently, there exists a split in the U.S. Courts of Appeals with respect to whether certain amounts paid to university professors relinquishing tenure and retiring early constitute "wages" with respect to "employment." This Article addresses that split before exploring, more broadly, the troubled concepts of "wages" and "employment." Though some courts have struggled to draw discernable lines of demarcation to separate "wages" from "income" and the income tax conception of "wages" from the payroll tax conception, other courts, apparently yielding to expansive conceptual pressures and the visceral tug of the existence of the employer/employee relationship, have pursued regressive taxes from …