The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TRA17) represents the most comprehensive reform of US international tax rules since 1962. An important question in evaluating TRA17 is how US trading partners will respond to its provisions. In general, US trading partners may take steps to negate the...

Twenty years ago I wrote “Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State” (113 Harv. L. Rev. 1573 (2000)), which argued that “[t]he current age of globalization can be distinguished from the previous one (from 1870 to 1914) by the much higher mobility of capital...

Customary international law is law that “results from a general and consistent practice of states followed by them from a sense of legal obligation.” “International agreements create law for states parties thereto and may lead to the creation of customary international law when such...

Since the 1990s, the US tax treaty network has expanded to include most large developing countries. However, there remains a glaring exception: The US only has two tax treaties in Latin America (Mexico and Venezuela), and one pending tax treaty (Chile). The traditional explanation for why the US...

On April 26, 2017, President Trump issued a one-page tax reform outline that included “territoriality,” i.e., exempting from tax dividends from the non-Subpart F income of controlled foreign corporations. Territoriality is also included in the House GOP “Better Way” Blueprint and was...

President Trump has decreed that for every new regulation, two old regulations should be repealed. The next time the IRS wishes to adopt a new tax regulation, I have two candidates for repeal: cost sharing and “check the box”, the 1997 regulation that enables US-based multinationals to shift...

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017), is, in some respects, the anti-Piketty. Scheidel accepts Piketty's view that inequality tends to grow over time, but adds a...

In "Understanding the AMT, and Its Unadopted Sibling, the AMxT." J. Legal Analysis (Advance Access: October 8, 2014), Jim Hines and Kyle Logue propose an interesting new theory about why the US has an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The function of the AMT, they propose, is to enable Congress to...