This article examines an influential set of articles, written by Professor John Tiley in the late 1980s, about anti-avoidance doctrines developed by US courts. The trilogy of articles was written for a British audience, as part of Tiley's efforts to resist importation of US doctrines...

The rescission doctrine, governing when parties can unwind a transaction with retroactive tax effect, has more than its share of ambiguities. When the Internal Revenue Service announced in 2012 that it was contemplating providing further guidance on rescission, the reaction of tax practitioners...

This article considers whether realization continues to be a constitutional requirement for an accession to wealth to be included in the base of the federal income tax. Most commentators had thought that the Supreme Court's 1920 decision in Eisner v. Macomber, which treated realization as...

This essay reviews a book about the venerable Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Written when the firm was being hit by allegations of ethical impropriety - including suggestions that the firm had been welcoming to Nazi provincial governments in pre-War Germany - the book at times is...

Critics of American Indian law have often complained about federal interference in the internal affairs of American Indian nations. The author ponders how independent the critics really want American Indian nations to be and whether secession theory might help us think about the theory and...

In debates about reorienting the American revenue system, nearly everyone assumes the Constitution is irrelevant. With few exceptions, the tax provisions in the original Constitution - particularly the direct-tax apportionment rule and the uniformity rule - have been interpreted to be paper...

The author argues that, if a legal journal publishes a response to one of its own articles, it has the obligation to let the original author respond to the critic, even if only briefly. If that doesn't happen, it looks as though the journal is accepting the critic's views as the final word on...

This article, prepared for a symposium at the Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University, considers whether the Taxing Clause provides an alternative constitutional basis, as some have recently argued, for the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...

In Polar Tankers, Inc. v. City of Valdez, the Supreme Court in 2009 struck down a City of Valdez levy that was in form a personal-property tax, but that primarily reached oil tankers using Valdez’s ports, on the ground that the levy violated the Tonnage Clause of the Constitution (“No State,...

This review considers a novel about life (and death) on the University of Chicago Law Review, where editors and associates seem to do little but have sex, connive to get ahead, have sex, kill (with Gunther's con law casebook, no less), and have sex. The reviewer, who didn't attend the U of C law...