Law Commons^™

Shape Up Or Ship Out: Accountability To Third Parties For Patent Ambiguities In Testamentary Documents, Angela M. Vallario

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The attorney's preparation of a testamentary document (hereinafter sometimes referred to as a will or revocable trust) should clearly and accurately reflect the client's last wishes. Although these testamentary documents should reflect the client's intent, they often fall short of accomplishing that goal. There are numerous examples of will and trust construction cases that exhaust tremendous resources in an effort to ascertain the client's wishes or intent. Many of these cases involve the construction of patent and/or latent ambiguities which should have been resolved by appropriate drafting. This article's scope is limited to patent ambiguities caused by the attorney's negligence …

Proposed Regulations On Noncompensatory Options: A Light At The End Of The Tunnel, Walter D. Schwidetzky

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It has become increasingly common for partnerships to issue options. There is a dearth of authority on the federal tax treatment of options to acquire interests in partnerships. In this context, there are two main categories of options, services options and noncompensatory options. Services options, unsurprisingly, are options to acquire partnership interests where the option is received in exchange for services. Noncompensatory options cover the rest of the waterfront. The simplest version of the latter would be partnership analog to normal options found outside the partnership context: the option holder pays the partnership an option premium to acquire an option …

Wither Firpta, Fred B. Brown

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Under FIRPTA, foreign persons are subject to U.S. tax on dispositions of directly held interests in U.S. real property as well as on dispositions of stock in certain U.S. real property holding corporations. Congress enacted FIRPTA to combat several techniques used by foreign persons to avoid U.S. tax on dispositions of U.S. real estate. However, since FIRPTA's enactment, changes in the tax law would defeat these tax avoidance techniques. Consequently, this raises the issue of whether FIRPTA continues to make sense as a policy matter.

This article suggests that the repeal of portions of FIRPTA may be in order and …