This article advocates for fundamental changes in the federal income tax base by systematically challenging conventional understandings of consumption and investment. As signaled by our title, “Costly Mistakes,” our thesis has to do exclusively with the deductibility of expenditures by...

As American family structures have become more heterogeneous, status-based intestacy statutes have become less suited to promoting donative intent. Indeed, numerous scholars of wealth transfer law have noted the critical need for intestacy law reform to address the needs of decedents whose...

In this paper we develop two theses. First, we argue that uniform law proposals that ask courts and practitioners to abandon revered legal traditions and ways of thinking about estates and trusts, even when they are intent-furthering proposals, face resistance until in time the glories of the...

This article uses an empirical study to test whether, in the absence of a will, beneficiary designations in will substitutes provide reliable evidence for determining decedents' donative intent in an intestacy statute. No previous scholarship has explored the relationship between will substitute...

This article advocates for fundamental changes in the federal income tax base by systematically challenging conventional understandings of consumption and investment. As signaled by our title, “Costly Mistakes,” our thesis has to do exclusively with the deductibility of expenditures by...