Tax Law Commons^™

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 …

Fiscal And Foreign Relations Dimensions Of Financial Stability Regulation, Ilya Beylin

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Perverse Tax Incentives And The Destruction Of Creative Works, Luke Maher

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Is Tax “Law”?, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Fordham Law Review

Although taxation remains a hotly contested issue in debates by both politicians and political theorists—over the optimal size of government, distributive (and sometimes corrective) justice, or even the legitimacy of current private property arrangements—taxation has been largely ignored by legal theorists, to the detriment of both tax law and legal theory. This Article argues that tax law, driven by its battle against tax evasion, is in deep conflict with widely accepted conceptions of “legality”—that is, the qualities that make a rule distinctively and normatively “law.” This matters because legality is a key buttress in jurisprudential and political theory accounts that …

Aggressive R&D Consulting Companies Fail To Align With The Purpose Of R&D And R&E Tax Incentives., Emily Belanger

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Research and development (R&D) credits and research and experimentation (R&E) tax incentives have recently experienced legislative changes and litigation related to the questionable methods deployed by R&D consulting firms. Proponents of research tax incentives tout their potential to produce positive externalities and innovation. Critics have pushed back, questioning whether research tax incentives are successfully achieving their purpose. The shifting landscape, litigation over aggressive tax claims, and debatable success of tax incentives signal a need to reassess whether research tax incentives are properly claimed in the United States. This paper proposes stronger regulation of R&D consulting firms to ensure research tax …

Revisiting The Missed Pigouvian Opportunity Of The First Industrial Revolution: A Carbon-Based Pigouvian Tax On Ai, Haozheng Jiang

SLU Law Journal Online

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the economy with comparative speed and scope as during the First Industrial Revolution, policymakers face a familiar dilemma: how to preserve technological progress while addressing its negative externalities. This article proposes a uniform, carbon-based Pigouvian tax on AI as a practicable and forward-looking solution to correct one of AI’s most readily measurable negative externalities without stifling innovation. Drawing on lessons from existing carbon-pricing systems, this article contends that such a tax should be designed with flexibility and transparency to promote both effectiveness and political feasibility. Properly structured, the tax would not deter AI development but …

The Hidden Tax Game, Doron Narotzki

William & Mary Business Law Review

Taxation is not just a legal duty; it is a game, and the best players always win. While governments rely on laws and penalties to enforce compliance, corporations, high-net-worth individuals, and elite tax strategists exploit loopholes, turning complexity into opportunity. This Article argues that tax avoidance is not a flaw in the system, but an expected outcome. Modern tax law does not just permit avoidance; it actively encourages it. The more intricate the rules, the more valuable it becomes to manipulate them.

Using game theory as an analytical lens, this Article reframes taxation as a high-stakes competition, where strategic players …

Aligning Reparations And Taxation, Katherine Pratt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Rehabilitative reparation remedies advance the important normative goals of intergenerational restorative justice and racial reconciliation. This Article fills a gap in the reparations literature by exploring a critical missing piece of reparations—nontaxation of reparation remedies. Historical examples of reparation remedies show how, in the past, a patchwork of tax rules prevented taxation of reparations and advanced the rehabilitative goals of reparation remedies and procedural fairness in tax administration. Conversely, contemporary examples show how current tax law taxes the receipt of reparation remedies, thereby undermining the rehabilitative goals of reparations and procedural fairness.

This Article proposes a new statutory tax exclusion …

Is Tax “Law”?, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

Articles

Although taxation remains a hotly contested issue in debates by both politicians and political theorists—over the optimal size of government, distributive (and sometimes corrective) justice, or even the legitimacy of current private property arrangements—taxation has been largely ignored by legal theorists, to the detriment of both tax law and legal theory.  This Article argues that tax law, driven by its battle against tax evasion, is in deep conflict with widely accepted conceptions of “legality”—that is, the qualities that make a rule distinctively and normatively “law.”  This matters because legality is a key buttress in jurisprudential and political theory accounts that …

The Myth Of Credit Card Competition, Benjamin Dinovelli

Vanderbilt Law Review

You pay an invisible tax every time you swipe your credit card to pay—whether to buy groceries, grab a coffee, or access transportation. Credit card companies charge merchants to process your transaction, who in turn increase their own prices. These swipe fees are both extractive—higher than the cost of service and the fees in most other countries—and regressive—placing more of the cost burden on lower-income consumers and smaller merchants. Such outcomes are typically associated with firms having material market power. Yet, this market has competition: Consumers choose various cards offered by multiple card issuers, including banks and networks like American …

Couples Neutrality, Marriage Neutrality, And Two-Earner Deductions, Daniel Shaviro

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Tax policy discussions of how to tax married couples, as compared to singles, often focus on the by now much-criticized norms of “marriage neutrality” and “couples neutrality.” While these norms are largely unpersuasive, they do offer a useful analytic starting point, because of both (a) how they relate to more validly expressed concerns, and (b) the significance of the empirical reasons why they generally do not hold.

In evaluating the proper relative tax treatment of different married couples, one of the most important factors that the federal income tax law fails to recognize is the difference between one-earner and two-earner …

Is A Gender-Neutral Income Tax Feasible—Or Desirable?, James Alm, Yvette Lind

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

It is increasingly recognized that the individual income tax leads to disparate treatment by race, ethnicity, and gender, even when the statutory tax code is written in a race-, ethnicity-, and gender-blind way. Partly in response to these disparate treatments, there have been many suggestions for moving the income tax to more neutral treatments of taxpayers. In this paper, we focus on a specific aspect of these reform efforts: making the individual income tax gender-neutral. We first examine the many sources of gender non-neutrality in the income tax. We argue that gender non-neutrality arises largely because of deviations of “income” …

Ladies First? The Tax Code Says Otherwise Tax Policy And The Cost Of Economic Dependence, Doron Narotzki, Tamir Shanan

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

First, inclusion and equity policies—such as anti-discrimination laws, affordable childcare, or education access—increase people’s participation in the labor market and thus increase federal and state revenues. Second, ultimately, tax law is not just a mechanism for raising revenue. It actively shapes economic and social realities. By acknowledging the ways in which it has reinforced outdated structures, we can also recognize its untapped potential. If designed differently, tax policy could—and should—serve as more than just a fiscal tool. It could foster economic autonomy, address inequalities, better reflect the needs of a changing society which includes, among other factors, a transition …