Twelve years ago, new regulations dramatically changed the manner in which the federal income tax system determines how business entities are taxed. These new explicitly elective quot;check-the-boxquot; regulations for entity classification replaced a multi-factored corporate resemblance test...

This report uses tax opinions rendered to Donald Trump's enterprises in the early 1990s as a case study for examining the relevance of probability theory in multi-issue opinions in which each tax position must be correct for the desired benefits to be achieved. This report also makes...

The ABA Standards now require formative assessment to be integrated into law school courses, and there is extensive literature, both in legal education and education more generally, about the goals and methods for formative assessment. This Article makes the key insights of that literature...

Will a tax lawyer in private practice help taxpayers comply or help taxpayers cheat? Will a government tax lawyer respect or abuse taxpayer rights? Answers to these questions turn, at least in large part, on the lawyer's ethical professional identity—the lawyer's philosophy of lawyering, which...

The fallout from the “Panama Papers” scandal leaves many questions unanswered, including: How did U.S. taxpayers get to the Panamanian law firm of Mossack Fonseca? And what were the ethical responsibilities of the individuals (particularly U.S. lawyers) who connected these U.S. clients with...

Providing a legal referral to a prospective client after declining a proffered matter may seem relatively uncontroversial. Indeed, a lawyer who provides a legal referral, even for an aspiring law-breaker, would be quite unlikely to be subject to any professional sanctions or legal liability as a...

Focal points for private bargaining occur every instance the tax law provides a tax election that directly affects multiple taxpayers. These elections explicitly enable, and actually incentivize, the taxpayers to cooperate in order to reduce their aggregate tax burden. For example, divorced...

In the wake of the financial crisis, policymakers, academics, and many others are trying to figure out how to reform business practices and grow the economy. In the book entitled, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL (Harvard Business Review Press 2011),...

Democrats, Republicans, media commentators and even academics denounce “tax loopholes.” Speakers may think that they are talking about the same things, but this article demonstrates that people have widely divergent views about what tax loopholes are. Thus, people criticizing loopholes often...

The debate rages on about how to tax private equity fund managers and hedge fund managers who, as part of their compensation, receive rights to share in fund profits (“carried interests”). Commentators have paid relatively little attention, however, to the impact that proposals to change the...