Individuals often fund charitable gifts with their savings or retirement benefits. However, such benefits, other than those from a Roth individual retirement arrangement, are generally included in the individual's gross income when received, and may not be deductible from the donor's income....

Estates and trusts are recognizing growing amounts of taxable income from “income in respect of a decedent” (or “IRD”). These are payments attributable to income earned by a decedent before death but received by an estate, trust, or other beneficiary after death, and taxed to that...

Tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. If all taxation is indeed slavery, as Nozick suggested, why bother analyzing libertarianism for insights into our tax system? This dismissal, however, ignores the diversity...

The tax treatment of cross-border charitable contributions increasingly concerns both individuals and corporations. Individuals make donations of money, financial, and nonfinancial assets, including intellectual property, time, and skills on their own or someone else's behalf to support...

Charitable trust law authorizes surnamed trusts, and provides no convenient mechanism to force a name change even hundreds of years after the founder's death. Tax law treats the use of a surname as harmless. A founder's ability to surname can provide a significant benefit to the founding family...

The Buffett-Gates Giving Pledge, under which wealthy individuals promise to leave a majority of their assets to charity, is an admirable effort to encourage philanthropy. However, the Pledge requires us to confront the paradox that the federal estate tax charitable deduction is unlimited while...

The direct charitable contribution deduction was an experimental deduction for the 1982-1986 tax years. It represents the only example in the tax laws in which non-itemizers were allowed a charitable contribution deduction in tandem with the standard deduction. This article offers a review of...

In Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 U.S. 680 (1989), the Supreme Court held that payments by Scientologists to their local churches for auditing and training, which are required religious practices, were not deductible as charitable contributions because they were made in exchange for specific...

This Estate and Gift Tax Rap column for Tax Notes is an extended discussion of the United States District Court (W.D. Pa.) decision in Estate of Palumbo v. U.S.. In that case, the court upheld a claimed estate tax charitable deduction for amounts passing to charity pursuant to a settlement of a...