In 1949, the Columbia University economist Carl Sumner Shoup helped lead a post-World War II tax mission to Japan. One of the principal goals of the mission was to assist in the reconstruction of the Japanese fiscal system. As part of this mission, Shoup brought with him not only his experience...

Despite the importance of the capital gains tax preference, and the controversy it often evokes, there has been relatively little serious scholarly attention paid to the historical development of this highly significant tax provision. This Article seeks to move beyond the normative and...

The process of establishing a stable and effective system of taxation is a hallmark of nearly all modern states. Among the many modern administrative innovations adopted to facilitate effective tax compliance in the United States, arguably none has been more significant than the use of...

The American historical profession has in recent years witnessed a significant revival of two subfields that were once thought to be nearly dead. Both intellectual history and what is often referred to today as the history of capitalism are flourishing. In some cases, the two fields have...

A century after it was first published, Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution remains a significant and controversial part of constitutional scholarship and history. Just as Beard sought to historicize the Founders as they drafted and adopted the Constitution, this...

For nearly all advanced industrialized nation-states, taxation is the central source of public revenue. Indeed, taxation is the one policy area without which nearly all of the other functions and aspects of the modern state would not be possible. Thus, to continue the Bourdieuian metaphor of a...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of political economists led the conceptual campaign for a fundamental transformation in the American system of public finance. Responding to the social and political conditions of their times, these public finance economists helped...

Corporate reorganizations occupy a special place in American business tax law. As defined by the Internal Revenue Code, specific corporate reorganizations are granted the benefit of non-recognition treatment. That is, neither corporations nor shareholders recognize the gain or loss on the...

This brief essay comments on Mary Lou Fellows recent contribution to the edited volume, Feminist Judgements. It explores Fellows's main contribution to a feminist re-evaluation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo's opinion in the canonical tax law case, Welch v. Helvering. The essay...

The origins of U.S. corporate taxation are often associated with the 1909 corporate excise tax. Scholars who have investigated the beginnings of this levy have mainly focused on the legislative history of the 1909 corporate tax to argue that it was either an expression of the Progressive Era...