Tax Law Commons^™

Fetal Personhood And Inheritance By Unborn Children, Alyssa A. Dirusso, Emily Price

ACTEC Law Journal

This article will first discuss the status of the law with respect to inheritance rights of the unborn, including both posthumous children and posthumously-conceived children. This paper next describes the fetal personhood movement and its recognition of not only life but also death before birth. The article explains the current law on survivorship and inheritance rights. Then this article discusses the implications of death before birth on intestate distributions. These implications lead the authors to recommend a default rule barring unintentional nevernatal inheritance. The authors support, however, practical provisions for the unborn for those who choose to do so.

"Health" In Hems Means Complete Well-Being, Claudia E. Tordini, Richard S. Franklin

ACTEC Law Journal

This article focuses on the definition of “health” as used in the ascertainable standard exception of Internal Revenue Code § 2041(b)(1)(A), most frequently articulated in trusts as “health, education, maintenance and support” (HEMS). It is clear that a discretionary power to distribute for one’s own health is permitted without causing a taxable general power of appointment, but there is a dearth of authority indicating the meaning of health for this purpose. This article provides the research and foundation for understanding that health as used in HEMS is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the …

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

2025, Richard Delgado

Seattle University Law Review

"In a cutting and provocative social critique in one of the more extended Rodrigo Chronicles, Richard Delgado in 2025 employs skillful narrative—one of CRT’s many contributions to legal scholarship —to tell a gripping story of just how far the nation has descended into darkness with President Trump’s re-election. In Delgado’s vision, law professors—along with other political opponents of the President: immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, the underserved—have targets on their backs."

-excerpt from Kevin Johnson's review of 2025

Veiled Justice: Secularism And The Hijab Across Democracies, Mohamed ‘Arafa

Seattle University Law Review

For much of 2022, Iran was gripped by widespread protests led by women who openly challenged the regime’s authority, particularly its compulsory veiling laws, following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Women around the globe came around and showed solidarity with the women in Iran. However, in non-Islamic countries and societies, one can still make out many prejudices and stereotyping connected to the question of whether and to what extent veiling is mandatory for women according to Shārīe’ā law. Is wearing the hijab a choice, or rather, an essential religious practice that religious Muslim women need to obey? …

Illness/Wellness, Ableism & Perfectibility In The Tax Code, Diane Klein Kemper

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rewriting The Playbook: The X’S And O’S Of The House Settlement And The Future Of Student-Athletes’ Voice In Their Compensation, Matthew K.V. Glazer

Seattle University Law Review

Since the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the 1900s, collegiate athletes (student-athletes) have been prohibited from using their own name, image and likeness (NIL) for profit. But on July 1, 2021, the NCAA changed course and began allowing student-athletes to profit from their own NIL. In the past few years, U.S. college athletics have undergone significant changes, most notably introducing monetary compensation for student-athletes’ NIL. While these changes were long overdue and ultimately beneficial, they have significantly disrupted the landscape of college sports, giving rise to numerous challenges that some experts have compared to the “Wild …

Mr. Trump Goes To Washington Part Ii: A Review Of Richard Delgado's 2025, Kevin Johnson

Seattle University Law Review

Richard Delgado’s The Rodrigo Chronicles have captivated a generation of law students and legal scholars.  Mapping the terrain of race, racism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT), the skillful, and long-running narrative series stands as a testament to Delgado’s dedication to justice for all.

The Rodrigo Chronicles are simply one of Delgado’s many intellectual contributions and part of an unparalleled scholarly legacy.  As one of the founders of CRT, he produced a landmark body of scholarship –authoring the field's primary text,  making the argument for the regulation of hate speech,  forcefully challenging the Black/white binary of civil rights that long dominated …

International Law’S Forgotten Refugees—Palestinian Refugees In Egypt

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines the legal and humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian refugees who have fled to Egypt amidst the ongoing violence in Gaza. While escaping active conflict, these refugees face systemic barriers to employment and education, rendering their living conditions precarious and unsustainable. The unique legal status of Palestinian refugees stems from the fact that they have been excluded from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, leaving them without any meaningful international protection. This exclusion is rooted in the political complexities of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and reflects a fragmented legal framework that prioritizes limited humanitarian aid over …

The Preventative Care Gap: Completing The Aca’S Vision For Health, Abby Nagaich

Seattle University Law Review

This Note examines the preventive care mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the legal, political, and practical challenges that threaten its effectiveness. While the ACA significantly expanded access to no-cost preventive services, gaps remain—particularly in behavioral health, obesity management, and equitable service delivery. Ongoing litigation, potential administrative rollbacks, and shifting political leadership further destabilize this critical component of public health policy.

This Note argues that for the ACA to fulfill its original promise—and for any health framework to succeed—preventive care must be redefined as a comprehensive, early intervention approach grounded in both systemic access and patient education. It …

Land Without Legacy: The Case For Market-Based Appraisals On Hawaiian Home Lands, Alexis C. Owens

Seattle University Law Review

The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 (HHCA) was enacted to restore Native Hawaiians to ancestral lands and promote long term economic self-sufficiency. More than a century later, that promise remains unfulfilled. This Note argues that a central but overlooked barrier lies in the HHCA’s mandated use of the replacement cost appraisal method, which systematically undervalues homestead properties by excluding market forces. In one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, this approach suppresses home equity, the primary means of intergenerational wealth building, and restricts beneficiaries’ access to credit and financial stability. By severing the connection between …

Reimagining Legal Education: The Transformative Power Of Small-Group Instruction, Michael I. Meyerson

Seattle University Law Review

Legal education is failing its students. Those entering their first year of law school have greater anxiety and less developed reading and writing skills than ever before. The traditional large Socratic class, which was never the most effective teaching method, has become increasingly counterproductive.

This Article contends that small-group instruction provides the opportunity for superior teaching, especially for first-year law students. Recent scholarship in active learning, educational psychology, and students’ mental health demonstrates the limitations of the traditional large Socratic class experience. Building on that theoretical foundation and informed by sustained classroom experience, this Article argues that small-group pedagogy more …

The Martha Wright-Reed Act: How The Fcc Took One Step Forward For Communication Equality For Deaf Individuals In Correctional Facilities And How It Could Be Expanded, Ashley Seebold

Seattle University Law Review

For decades, phone companies preyed on incarcerated individuals and their loved ones due to the lack of regulation of jail phone calls.2 In 2021, the average cost of a fifteen-minute jail phone call was about $3.3 In 2022, the average cost rose to $5.74, while some individuals faced an extreme charge of $24.82 for the same amount of time.4 In the early 2000s, consumer advocate and concerned grandmother Martha Wright-Reed called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fix the imbalance so she could speak to her incarcerated grandson.5 Eventually, in 2023, the FCC answered her call to action and …

Algorithmic Tax Ownership, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Dmitry Erokhin

Articles

Tax ownership is a crucial concept for determining tax liabilities, compliance, and enforcement. However, neither the courts nor the IRS has provided clear guidance on how to analyze it. Since the Supreme Court first outlined a twenty-six-factor test for determining tax ownership in Frank Lyon Co. v. United States in 1978, this multifactor test has remained largely unchanged, and there has been no further guidance from the courts or the IRS to this day. Even tests with shorter lists of factors only add to the confusion regarding compliance and enforcement, as there is no clarity on which factors are most …

National Report Of United States (2025), Christine Speidel

Research Reports & White Papers

The Observatory on the Protection of Taxpayers’ Rights (OPTR) identifies principles, minimum standards and best practices for the effective protection of taxpayers’ rights. It allows for the permanent monitoring of global compliance with such minimum standards and their amendment and development in different regions of the world.

Nevada Health And Bioscience Asset Corporation V. State Of Nevada Ex Rel. Department Of Taxation And Nevada Tax Commission, 142 Nev. Adv. Op. (May 28, 2026), Collin Faught

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The court held that contracting with a government entity does not prevent an otherwise qualifying charitable organization from receiving a sales and use tax exemption.

Confronting Inequality: Three Eras Of Gender And Tax Scholarship, Bridget J. Crawford

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Tax law is not neutral—it encodes social values and reinforces certain longstanding hierarchies. For over fifty years, legal scholarship at the intersection of gender and tax has exposed how seemingly neutral tax laws perpetuate gender inequality. This Article uses the metaphor of quilting to trace the evolution of this scholarly field across three distinct eras.

Part I names and defines the designing era (1971–1986), which began with Grace Blumberg’s writing on the gendered impact of tax laws on marriage, labor, and caregiving; she framed taxation as a tool of social control over women. Blumberg’s work laid the foundation for other …

How Should West Virginia Approach Scholarship Granting Organizations, Elaine Waterhouse Wilson

West Virginia Law Review Online

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“OB3”) introduced Scholarship Granting Organizations (“SGOs”) into federal tax law through new Internal Revenue Code § 25F, which creates a federal income tax credit for qualifying contributions to state-certified scholarship organizations beginning in 2027. Because SGOs have long existed at the state level as part of broader school choice initiatives, Code Section 25F delegates to participating states, including the responsibility to certify eligible organizations and establish oversight procedures. West Virginia’s decision to participate in the federal SGO framework, coupled with its recent adoption of the Hope Scholarship Program, places the state at the center …

Poor Esg: Regressive Effects Of Climate Stewardship, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani, Alex Raskolnikov

BYU Law Review

The rise of inequality and global warming are the two ultimate challenges of our time. After decades of congressional failure to address climate change, the private sector has stepped in and adopted a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies as a market-based solution to a public policy failure. ESG advocates hope that corporate executives would save our planet. Where Congress failed, ESG will succeed.

This Article argues that if ESG-driven climate stewardship ever achieves the scale necessary to have a real impact on global warming, it will hurt the poor. Legislative interventions to combat climate change are nearly …

The Constitution And Financial Freedom: Analyzing First Amendment Claims About Cryptocurrencies, Mithun Imbulamure

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In recent years, the United States has intensified regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency technologies. In August 2022, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer, leading to the prosecution and conviction of its developers for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. Congress also amended § 6050I of the Tax Code through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, extending cash transaction reporting requirements to digital assets. These developments prompted cryptocurrency advocates to assert First Amendment protections for their activities, arguing that compelled disclosure requirements violate associational privacy and that computer code constitutes protected speech. The government …

A Gdpr-Compliant Fatca Structure?, Michael Hatfield

Articles

A 2025 Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) decision and ensuing preliminary questions referred by the Belgian Market Court to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) highlights the tension between the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) structure in Europe. The FATCA structure relies on intergovernmental agreements (FATCA IGAs) between the US and EU Member States. Under these agreements, Member State tax authorities transfer personal data of their citizens and residents to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It may be determined that these transfers violate some or all of …

Factors Behind Choosing Carbon Tax Vs Carbon Trading To Curb Environmental Impact: The Asean Case, Mohamed Redza Mohamed Zakaria, Albertus Prabu Siagian

Indonesian Journal of Environmental Law

Carbon accumulation in the atmosphere is a major environmental impact of today's economy. To make carbon emissions costlier, ASEAN country members have different preferences. Some choose not to price the carbon yet, some choose carbon taxation first (regardless carbon trading follows later or not), and some choose carbon trading first (regardless carbon taxation follows later or not).

This paper aims to assess whether these differences are shaped by the difference in the population size and the economic level of their respective countries. This paper hypothesizes that ASEAN country members with lower income per capita tend to not price the carbon …

Ultras: Rethinking Tax Policy For Digital Assets, Lauren Liedel

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This comment examines the challenges current federal tax policy faces in addressing the rapidly expanding and volatile digital asset market. The author argues that the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) current "piecemeal" approach to defining taxable events—such as mining and staking—creates significant uncertainty for taxpayers and leads to strategic litigation. To resolve these issues, the article proposes the adoption of Unliquidated Tax Reserve Accounts (ULTRAs) as an alternative reporting framework. By utilizing blockchain's inherent capability to track notional interests, ULTRAs allow the IRS to account for economic activity while offering taxpayers the flexibility to defer actual payment until the assets are …

Relevance Matters After Patel: Where The Economic Substance Doctrine Goes From Here, Daniel Chung

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This article examines the modern Economic Substance Doctrine (ESD) through the framework of the Tax Court's decision in Patel v. Commissioner. The author argues that Patel serves as a "doctrinal reset," restoring the ESD to its intended role as a narrow, purpose-driven judicial backstop rather than a generalized anti-abuse tool. Central to this analysis is the reemergence of a "relevance" inquiry, which requires courts to determine if the ESD applies to a transaction at all—based on pre-codification common law—before engaging the statutory two-prong test under Section 7701(o) . While the court in Patel ultimately found the doctrine relevant and sustained …

It's The Night Of The Living Deepfakes: The Threat Of Deepfakes On The Film Industry, Neki Shero

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

La Levée Du Secret Bancaire Au Liban, Karim Daher

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

The Banking Secrecy Law, adopted in Lebanon in 1956, formally prohibited banks and their personnel from disclosing any information relating to their clientele to any public or private party. The purpose of enacting this law was to attract financial inflows to Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s, a period that coincided with the oil boom in Gulf countries, and nationalization processes in neighboring Arab countries, especially Egypt and Syria, as well as later from wealthy Gulf oil monarchies. While this legislation ensured the protection and confidentiality of these deposits, it weakened tax citizenship, promoted a culture of corruption and impunity, …

Public Budget Laws And Economic Performance In The Uae, Carole Ibrahim

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

This paper aims to examine the impact of the public budget laws implemented in the UAE on the country’s economic performance, by studying the relationship between government spending and the country’s economic activity during the last four decades. The results show that since 2001, government spending has strongly impacted the non-oil economic growth. These results can be explained by the implementation of the “Program and Performance-based Budgeting” method, the medium-term budget cycle, and the functional classification of the government expenditures.

Le Secret Bancaire Libanais À L’Épreuve Des Contraintes De La Coopération Internationale, Youmna Zein Hayek

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

The Banking secrecy law which was promulgated in 1956 is undoubtedly one of the pillars of the Lebanese banking system. The stringent provisions of the law require banks to maintain the absolute secrecy of their clients’ information, except in some limited cases. However, Lebanon has lately joined the global community’s effort to fight money laundering and terrorism financing including tax evasion. As a result, new laws were enacted whereby new circumstances trigger the release of the banking secrecy. This article examines the impact of the new laws and regulations on the scope of the Lebanese banking secrecy system.

Endowmentball, Doron Narotzki

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article presents a policy and a structural response to a national capacity failure in American higher education: the concentration of endowment wealth in a handful of elite institutions, while most colleges, those that educate the majority of Americans, including most low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students, operate under permanent financial constraint, and remain drastically underfunded. This imbalance carries a profound social cost. It weakens equity, limits inclusion, and undermines the promise of upward mobility that higher education is supposed to deliver.

The proposed framework introduces a progressive excise tax on endowment investment returns, scaled by per-student wealth. Universities with excessive …