This article briefly reviews the arguments, both pro and con, that will inform the debate over wealth transfer tax repeal. We confess, at the outset, our own prejudice in favor of retaining the system, though we do believe that much work needs to be done in the area of reform. We then turn our...

The untimely death of Michael Jackson this past June presents an opportunity to reassess certain thorny estate tax issues that may arise when a celebrity dies owning valuable intellectual property. Elsewhere we have debated hypothetical, tax-motivated changes to state laws relating to postmortem...

The IRS has invoked two gift-tax weapons in its attack on family limited partnerships: the gift-on-formation and indirect-gift arguments. While the former argument has thus far not enjoyed any success in the courts, the latter argument has been embraced by the Tax Court and the Eleventh Circuit...

The IRS has struggled to close down abusive family limited partnerships. At first unreceptive to IRS arguments, the courts eventually embraced section 2036 as an estate-tax tool for attacking such partnerships. Because the section was not designed to apply to partnerships, difficulties have...

California recently passed legislation that creates retroactive, descendible rights of publicity. The New York State Assembly is poised to enact similar legislation. Legal recognition of postmortem rights of publicity permits a decedent's named beneficiaries or heirs to control (and financially...

We previously suggested that post-death publicity rights could be excluded from the decedent's estate for tax purposes if state legislation precluded the decedent from exercising post-death control. In other words, if state legislation designated who would hold these rights after the decedent's...

In this article, the authors revisit their prior article on Circular 230 (see Tax Notes, Apr. 4, 2005, p. 61), focusing in particular on the amendments Treasury adopted on May 18. They consider the meaning of an important, new safe harbor under which transactions that are consistent with the...

The authors think that the new requirements under Circular 230 will likely have a substantial impact on estate-planning practice. Under the circular, written advice concerning a transaction that has tax avoidance as its principal purpose - or perhaps even its significant purpose in some cases -...