Pornography cannot be classified as good or bad on the basis of the sex of the featured participants. This article criticizes Professor Jeffrey Sherman's claim that gay male pornography, unlike heterosexual pornography, provides the consumer with a necessary component to a 'flourishing life,'...

The law of wills, trusts, and estates could benefit from consideration of its development and impact on people of color; women of all colors; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered individuals; low-income and poor individuals; the disabled; and nontraditional families. One can measure the...

This short column highlights for estate and gift tax practitioners 10 noteworthy law review articles published during 2010. Estate and gift taxation is one area in which law professors’ writing should be of interest to tax practitioners and vice versa, because significant change in the law of...

Gifts of tangible personal property and closely-held business interests typically are made without a paper trail (e.g., cancelled check or deed recording). Because gift tax returns are not due until April 15 of the calendar year following the transfer, a non-compliant taxpayer can game the...

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...

In this short essay I make 10 modest suggestions for bringing Trusts & Estates to the front and center of American legal education. Many students take the basic school T&E course with some sense that it is part of a well-rounded legal education, but the field has a reputation for being staid,...

Intrafamilial arrangements labeled as loans have long invited special scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the IRS has successfully established that the arrangement was not a loan but another type of transfer, such as a gift. In the wake of several IRS victories in cases...

This article explores the gift tax consequences of an exchange of promissory notes between family members when interest rates have dropped from when the original or old note was issue to the present time when the new note is issued. More specifically, the scenario contemplated involves two...

This short essay introduces a special issue of the ACTEC Law Journal devoted to the estate planning jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States. The issue includes two invited essays on the role of the court in developing the law in this area, as well as commentaries on seventeen of...

George Steinbrenner was a lucky man. The longtime owner of the New York Yankees died on July 13, 2010, during the current one-year hiatus in the federal estate tax. The man whose management style earned him the nickname ‘‘The Boss'' may have pulled off the greatest play in baseball history....