A Hypothetical: Quinlan Under Ohio Law

WITH THE DECISION by all of the respondents in In re Quinlan not to appeal their case to the United States Supreme Court, the people in this country will have to wait for a definitive statement of law on a person\u27s right to die and on a guardian\u27s standing to assert that right for his ward. Because of the dearth of precedent in this area, each state court that is faced with the prospect of reviewing a case like Quinlan will have to grapple with its own constitutional and statutory schemes in order to make a determination of these difficult issues. It is the purpose of this comment to explore a hypothetical situation, to take the facts of the Quinlan case as revealed in the New Jersey Superior Court\u27 and the New Jersey Supreme Court opinions and interpret them under applicable Ohio law

Families for Tax Purposes: What About the Steps?

At least 4.4 million families in the United States are blended ones that include stepchildren and stepparents. For tax purposes, these steps receive preferential treatment as a result of their status because, on the one hand, they are treated as family members for many income tax benefit sections, but on the other hand, are excluded from the definition of family member for business entity attribution purposes and for gift and estate tax anti-abuse provisions. In the interests of fairness and uniformity, steps should be treated as family members for all tax purposes where they act like their biological or adoptive counterparts, regardless of whether such treatment would decrease or increase their tax burden

Toward a Reality-Based Estate Tax

Currently, the estate tax does not accurately value the property and transactions that it is meant to cover. Additionally, the marital and charitable deductions do not reflect actual associated transfers, instead skewing their benefits away from their purported beneficiaries. This Article proposes reforming the estate tax by eliminating these sources of unreality and distortion, and to make the current estate tax a reality-based tax. Through six specific proposals, the Article identifies solutions to the problems associated with testamentary transfers, puts forth alternative methods of valuation to prevent gaming of transfer taxes, and offers significant modifications to two deduction provisions

A Simpler Verifiable Gift Tax

The author proposes reforms to simplify the current federal gift tax system, foster uncomplicated outright transfers, eliminate valuation distortions, and increase taxpayer return compliance. In order to obtain those results, the author’s simpler verifiable gift tax would incorporate hard-to-complete rules of transfer taxation, harmonize the gift and estate tax regimes, and grant gift tax preference inducements to encourage the filing of timely gift tax returns

A Hypothetical: Quinlan Under Ohio Law

WITH THE DECISION by all of the respondents in In re Quinlan1 not to appeal their case to the United States Supreme Court,2 the people in this country will have to wait for a definitive statement of law on a person\u27s right to die and on a guardian\u27s standing to assert that right for his ward. Because of the dearth of precedent in this area, each state court that is faced with the prospect of reviewing a case like Quinlan will have to grapple with its own constitutional and statutory schemes in order to make a determination of these difficult issues. It is the purpose of this comment to explore a hypothetical situation, to take the facts of the Quinlan case as revealed in the New Jersey Superior Court\u27 and the New Jersey Supreme Court opinions and interpret them under applicable Ohio law

The Times They are Not A-Changin\u27: Reforming the Charitable Split-Interest Rules (Again)

This article will review the history of the tax treatment of charitable split interest gifts, explain the inequities that Congress both cured and generated in its 1969 reforms, and propose solutions that are consistent with the goals of the 1969 legislation. The article discusses variations in the 1969 definition of a charitable split interest, which, because of the enacted statutory language, applies in instances where there is no abuse potential. The inequity produced by that definition penalizes the donor and flouts the rationale behind the 1969 legislation. By contrast, the creation of some required statutory forms of charitable split interests in trust, enacted to prevent abuse, have themselves created new opportunities for donors to evade taxes in ways unanticipated by the 1969 Act. In the spirit of the 1969 law, the article makes several recommendations, including proposals: (1) to modify the statutory definition of charitable split interest to provide an exception from the statutory requirements where there is no statutory mandate to calculate value by means of the actuarial tables under section 7520 and no abuse potential; and (2) to eliminate (or to restrict the tax avoidance aspects of) some of the charitable split interest in trust devices created in the 1969 legislation