Bringing sexual orientation and gender identity into the tax classroom

A recent piece in the Journal of Legal Education analyzing student surveys by the Law School Admission Council reports that, despite improvement in the past decade, LGBT students still experience a law school climate in which they encounter substantial discrimination both inside and outside the classroom. Included among the list of best practices to improve the law school climate for LGBT students was a recommendation to incorporate discussions of LGBT issues in non-LGBT courses, such as tax. In a timely coincidence, the Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues held a day-long program at the 2009 AALS annual meeting to consider LGBT issues across the law school curriculum. I prepared this essay as a hand-out for a break-out session on tax during that day-long program to help other tax teachers think about how they might incorporate LGBT issues into their tax classes. \ud \ud In this essay, I identify several areas likely to be covered in tax courses in which a discussion of LGBT issues is relevant. The general areas of the tax curriculum that I have identified for inclusion are: fringe benefits, health insurance, attribution rules, medical expenses, property transfers, and income splitting. In each of these areas, I first discuss the general tax rules that serve as the backdrop for the discussion. Next, I recount a narrative that - in a concrete, personalized setting - raises the question of how these general tax rules apply to LGBT individuals. I then explain how the rules apply to the situation face

The house of Windsor: Accentuating the heteronormativity in the tax incentives for procreation

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, many seem to believe that the fight for marriage equality at the federal level is over and that any remaining work in this area is at the state level. Belying this conventional wisdom, this Article plumbs the gap between the promise of Windsor and the reality that heteronormativity has been one of the core building blocks of the federal tax system. Eradicating embedded heteronormativity will take far more than a single court decision (or even revenue ruling); it will take years of work uncovering the subtle ways in which heteronormativity pervades the federal tax laws and of identifying means of eliminating that heteronormativity. To further this work and in keeping with the theme of this symposium issue, Compensated Surrogacy in the Age of Windsor, this Article explores the unremitting heteronormativity of the federal tax incentives for procreation as they apply to compensated surrogacy, which is the only practical option for gay couples wishing to procreate

Multiple high-reward items can be prioritized in working memory but with greater vulnerability to interference

An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance

Of families and corporations: Erasing the public–private divide in tax reform debates

In this chapter, I compare and contrast the tax treatment of two sociolegal constructs: the family and the corporation. I first analyze the ways in which the tax treatment of these two constructs operates in parallel fashion. I then discuss and dissect the ways in which debates about reforming the taxation of the family and the taxation of corporations nonetheless completely diverge. The purpose of the chapter is to question the divergence of these two tax reform discourses and to push those engaged in the corporate tax reform debate to determine whether they can learn anything from debates over reforming the taxation of the family