This article considers the tax consequences of a booster's contribution to a college athletics program, using the case study of financier Robert Burton's multi-million dollar contribution to the University of Connecticut football program. This article discusses the income and gift tax issues...

A tax system should be fair. According to conventional wisdom, this fairness mandate means that similarly situated taxpayers should pay similar taxes. Notably absent from most discussions about tax fairness or equity is any consideration of race. This makes sense, if one focuses on the tax...

The untimely death of Michael Jackson this past June presents an opportunity to reassess certain thorny estate tax issues that may arise when a celebrity dies owning valuable intellectual property. Elsewhere we have debated hypothetical, tax-motivated changes to state laws relating to postmortem...

This article examines the changes that philanthropist Brooke Russell Astor made to her will – or, more accurately, the changes that Mrs. Astor purportedly made to her will – before her death in 2007. Anthony Marshall, the 85-year old son of Brooke Astor, and lawyer Francis X. Morrissey, who...

The focus of this article is the federal estate and gift tax treatment of copyright termination rights. The right of a creative individual to terminate prior copyright transfers serves to protect against economic exploitation. Once a copyright’s value has been established in the marketplace,...

Anyone who has spent time in cyberspace understands the concept of an alter-ego. In on-line games, chat rooms and on the internet generally, users select one or more avatars to represent themselves. Avatars function as the end-user's alter-ego. The avatar may be a three-dimensional character in...

What are the constitutional limits on a state's power to tax a trust with no connection to the state, other than the accident that a beneficiary lives there? The Supreme Court of the United States will take up this question this term in the context of North Carolina v. Kimberley Rice Kaestner...

In their contributions to the Symposium on The Centennial of the Estate and Gift Tax, Professor Joseph Dodge, Professor Wendy Gerzog, and Professor Kerry Ryan offer concrete proposals for improving the existing estate and gift tax system. Professor Dodge and Professor Gerzog are especially...

Alaska has made two sweeping reforms to its trust laws in an effort to position itself as the most sophisticated quot;offshorequot; trust jurisdiction for wealthy U.S. citizens and non-U.S. persons holding substantial U.S. property or stock. This article describes Alaska's departure from the...