Olin Browder: The Scholar-Teacher

A tribute to Olin L. Browde

A Feminist Interpretation of the Law of Legitimacy

I am actually going to continue Professor Ead\u27s discussion on procreation and think about it in a slightly different way. As an inheritance law scholar, the definition of the parent-child relationship has obvious importance to me because it determines who is an heir. As a feminist scholar, the definition is also significant to me because the legal rules regarding the parent-child relationship provide a unique perspective on the dialectical link between property and family

Wills and Trusts: The Kingdom of the Fathers

Speec

A Comprehensive Attack on Tax Deferral

This article explores the operation of T ARET and demonstrates that it produces economic neutrality and fairness among taxpayers, while simplifying the tax system by eliminating the need for provisions designed to reduce deferral advantages or ameliorate the inequities created by the realization-event rule. Finally, even if one decides that TARET should not be implemented, considering its operation provides a useful and quite different perspective on tax policy and taxing issues. In Simons\u27 words, exploring the T ARET model allows us to consider fruitfully the problem of bettering the system of presumptions. Part I establishes the foundation for the time-adjustment component in TARET by explaining tax deferral through examples and analogies. Part II sets forth TARET and shows how it achieves the goals of economic neutrality, fairness, and administrability. Section Il.A.l.a, dealing with nonexhaustible assets used in business or investment ventures, presents the core concepts of the model; further refinements are provided in discussions of assets that the taxpayer exhausts, produces, or devotes to consumption. Section II.D extends the TARET approach to debt, and includes an: extended discussion of the controversy concerning the proper treatment of future costs. The final section of Part II summarizes the model and its operational implications. Part III continues the evaluation of the TARET model by comparing it to the consumption tax approach, which has gained political attention in recent years as a viable and desirable alternative to the present unwieldy tax regime. The purpose of this Part is to begin the debate about whether TARET or the consumption tax best achieves the tax goals of economic neutrality, fairness, and administrability. The conclusion emphasizes certain issues, regarding adjustments to exclude general price-level changes from the tax base and the transition rules necessary to move from the realization-event model to TARET, that must still be explored before TARET can become a serious alternative to the present tax structure

A Matter of Prostitution: Becoming Respectable

Feminists have achieved significant antiviolence legal reforms in the areas of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and rape over the past three decades. These reforms, however, have reinforced old borders between the traditional categories of violence and prostitution and have constructed new borders by maintaining the distinction between worthy and unworthy women. Despite these flaws, the law reform efforts have the capacity to transform the legal and social meaning of prostitution. By adopting an approach that transcends consent or coercion and private or public, Professors Fellows and Balos use the concept of respectability to introduce an analytically powerful framework for rethinking prostitution as a paradigm of degradation and as a practice of inequality. First, the authors explain the role these dichotomies play in maintaining social hierarchies through the discourse of respectability. Next, the authors situate the relationship among prostitution, racial and gendered cultural practices, and rights of citizenship within the degradation/respectability framework. The authors use the concept of respectability to critique previous reform efforts and to propose a possible civil rights remedy that is not dependent on the traditional concepts of consent and coercion and individual liberty. In this way, they avoid polarizing the debate and create a genuine opportunity for significant legal reform in the area of prostitution. Ultimately, the authors elaborate a theory of citizenship that undermines the degeneracy/respectability dichotomy and that does not depend on an idea of worthiness

Costly Mistakes: Undertaxed Business Owners and Overtaxed Workers

This Article advocates fundamental changes in the federal income tax base by systematically challenging conventional understandings of consumption and investment. As signaled by its title, Costly Mistakes, this Article\u27s thesis has to do with the disparate treatment of expenditures incurred by business owners and workers. Where the current tax law treats a business owner\u27s expenditure as investment, the Article sometimes finds consumption and questions why the law should allow the expenditure to be deducted. Where the tax law treats a worker\u27s expenditure as consumption, the Article sometimes finds investment and questions why the law does not allow at least a partial deduction. Through an historical analysis of the development of the modern tax law with special attention to Justice Cardozo\u27s 1933 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Welch v. Helvering and a review of Welch\u27s judicial and legislative progeny, the Article demonstrates that the deference the tax law traditionally has accorded business owners results in their undertaxation. Through an analysis of the tax law\u27s treatment of workers, it further shows how its structural and substantive rules treat workers primarily as consumers, rather than as producers, and why that results in their overtaxation. The Article then investigates the economic inefficiencies produced by the tax law\u27s generous treatment of business owners\u27 outlays and its unduly restrictive treatment of workers\u27 outlays. It goes on to suggest how to scrutinize and reform the tax treatment of workers and how to extend that approach to business owners with far-reaching implications. Finally, the Article relates the undertaxation of business owners and the overtaxation of workers to the broader social policy discussions concerning the high rate of unemployment in the private sector and the escalating deficits in the public sector. It concludes that the success of the U.S. economy in the twenty-first century requires the tax law to treat both business owners and workers as producers. It further concludes that the tax law\u27s continuing failure to acknowledge that business owners and workers are both consumers and producers undermines the goals of efficiency and fairness