In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of political economists led the conceptual campaign for a fundamental transformation in the American system of public finance. Responding to the social and political conditions of their times, these public finance economists helped...

Corporate reorganizations occupy a special place in American business tax law. As defined by the Internal Revenue Code, specific corporate reorganizations are granted the benefit of non-recognition treatment. That is, neither corporations nor shareholders recognize the gain or loss on the...

This brief essay comments on Mary Lou Fellows recent contribution to the edited volume, Feminist Judgements. It explores Fellows's main contribution to a feminist re-evaluation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo's opinion in the canonical tax law case, Welch v. Helvering. The essay...

The origins of U.S. corporate taxation are often associated with the 1909 corporate excise tax. Scholars who have investigated the beginnings of this levy have mainly focused on the legislative history of the 1909 corporate tax to argue that it was either an expression of the Progressive Era...

Since 2003 American political leaders and lawmakers have been committed to the simultaneous pursuit of tax cuts and military excursions abroad. Just a few decades ago, when military hawks were also deficit hawks, such a position would have seemed incongruous. This essay reviews, War and Taxes, a...

In the last few years, corporate mergers and acquisitions witnessed explosive growth. Although more recent market conditions have halted the latest merger movement, scholars and commentators have used the earlier rise in merger activity to reevaluate the preferential tax treatment granted to...

The late nineteenth-century notion of moving American public finance toward more direct and graduated forms of taxation was an idea that was embedded in and born out of a larger transatlantic web of intellectual exchange. At the center of this international transfer was a group of American...

In recent years, numerous lawmakers, policy analysts, and scholars have been decrying the many defects of the present U.S. income tax system. Few have attempted to defend our return-based mass income tax. This essay reviews Learning to Love Form 1040, Lawrence Zelenak’s stirring and persuasive...

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income...