Neo-liberal deregulatory and privatization policies gradually swept away Depression-era restrictions on financial institutions that had provided a staid, conservative, and robust financial system. The erosions of prudent limitations ultimately led to an insatiable demand for short-term profits...

Abusive tax shelters have shone an unappealing light on tax lawyers. Some commentators suggest that these abusive shelters are the work of a small tax shelter bar. This article argues that the same practitioner norms, interpretive approaches, and tax standards that make possible the role of the...

Since the 1998 State Street decision, the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office has been issuing patents on tax planning methods, even including methods that do not require computerized implementation. The tax and intellectual property bars generally have widely divergent views of tax planning...

The U.S. tax administration began a new era of enforcement by focusing on cloned tax shelters that were marketed by ambitious accounting and tax law firms to small groups of customers. That focus led to heightened transparency requirements - new disclosure rules, higher standards for tax...

Several features of the budgetary context and the interaction of the alternative minimum tax (AMT) and the regular tax system suggest that the AMT will increasingly reach into the pool of ordinary taxpayers over the next few years. Taxpayers with incomes of less than $100,000 may in fact...