In order to do any “estate planning,” one must first understand the distinction between probate and nonprobate property. Probate property passes under a will. Nonprobate property passes outside a will, transferring automatically to a person (or people) that the owner has designated during...

Completion is the sine qua non of gift taxation. A grantor's retained control over transferred property (intentionally or unintentionally) may cause a gift to be incomplete for gift tax purposes. This is true even if the grantor has no beneficial interest in transferred property. Powers that...

This article provides an overview of the estate tax consequences of jointly-held general powers of appointment. To avoid triggering estate tax inclusion, a general power should be held with either the creator of the power or a person having a 'substantial' and 'adverse' interest in the exercise...

This short column highlights for estate and gift tax practitioners 10 noteworthy law review articles published during 2009. 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...

This short column is part of the annual Tax Notes issue that highlights noteworthy law review articles published during the previous year. In this piece, I identify articles relating to estate and gift taxation that practitioners likely will find of interest. The articles reviewed (in...

In this article, the authors discuss Rev. Proc. 2014-18, in which the IRS provides some estates with a simplified method for making a portability election and having that election treated as timely even though the statutory deadline may have passed. The authors suggest that once the estate tax...

This essay aims to stimulate interest in further empirical study of attitudes toward will making by reporting the results of a 2022 survey conducted in Australia of the general population (n=1202) and legal professionals (n=112). We asked participants for their views about the ideal age at which...

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...

This short column is part of the annual Tax Notes issue that highlights noteworthy law review articles published during the previous year. In this piece, I identify articles relating to estate and gift tax taxation that practitioners likely will find of interest, not withstanding Chief Justice...

This book deals with the federal income tax as it bears on gratuitous transfers and with the federal wealth transfer taxes. The federal wealth transfer taxes presently consist of a partially unified estate and gift tax and a generation-skipping tax. The federal transfer tax system is separate...