Law Commons^™

Some Meandering Thoughts On Plaintiffs And Their Attorneys' Fees And Costs, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article examines statutory interpretation in general and the common-law doctrines at issue in particular (the assignment-of-income doctrine as well as the doctrine first identified in the seminal case of Old Colony Trust). While the author believes that these plaintiffs ought--as a matter of policy and income tax theory--to escape taxation on the amounts paid to their attorneys, she belives that the issue is truly a " deduction" issue, not a "gross income" issue. The article concludes, however, that the ill-fitting application of "gross income" doctrine in this context leads to indefensible distinctions that sound superficially plausible under the rubric …