Tax Law

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) hosts and facilitates the creation of CALI Lessons, a library of over 950 interactive legal tutorials written by law professors and geared towards law students. CALI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit consortium of law schools, law libraries and related organizations. Almost every United States law school is a member of CALI and they make up the bulk of our membership.

This study aid features an innovative method of content organization. It uses a checklist format to lead students through questions they need to ask to fully evaluate the legal problem they are trying to solve. It also synthesizes the material in a way that most students are unable to do on their own and assembles the different issues, presenting a clear guide to procedural analysis that students can draw upon when writing their exams. Other study aids provide sample problems, but this book offers a systematic approach to problem solving.

This comprehensive and clearly written text is designed to help students recognize and understand the basic principles and issues covered in law school courses in corporate taxation at both the J.D. and LL.M. levels. It explains all the fundamental concepts and transactions affecting C and S corporations and their shareholders, and includes numerous illustrative examples, self-test questions with answers, and sample exam questions. The Ninth Edition incorporates all relevant provisions of the 2017 legislation known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Black Letter Outlines are designed to help a law student recognize and understand the basic principles and issues of law covered in a law school course. Black Letter Outlines can be used both as a study aid when preparing for classes and as a review of the subject matter when studying for an examination. Each Black Letter Outline is written by experienced law school professors who are recognized national authorities in their subject area.

Black Letter Outlines are designed to help a law student recognize and understand the basic principles and issues of law covered in a law school course. Black Letter Outlines can be used both as a study aid when preparing for classes and as a review of the subject matter when studying for an examination. Each Black Letter Outline is written by experienced law school professors who are recognized national authorities in their subject area.

This book does not deal solely with judicial opinions. In the field of business taxation, many of the most significant developments are not cases, and certainly not Supreme Court cases, but rather legislative and administrative changes and transactional innovations. Business Tax Stories includes chapters on several landmark cases; however, it also surveys many of the critical developments in the history of U.S. corporate and partnership taxation. Taken as a whole, this title is organized to serve as a history of business taxation over the last century.

The Sum & Substance Audio Series allows you to assimilate the essentials of the course at your convenience - listen while working, commuting, exercising or just relaxing. The information and ideas you struggled with previously are now brought to life simply and succinctly. The series provides Quick Reference Indexing, allowing you to quickly locate every topic in the entire recording. Also provided are exam tips to maximize your performance and Lifetime guarantee. These audios are time saving, convenient and effective. Professor Frank J. Doti's Federal Income Tax 7th edition contains a detailed audio presentation of Federal Income Tax law. The series includes coverage of changes effective in 2018 by the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. Also included as part of the traditional audio series are the following unique additional useful aids: 1. A written outline of the audio series discussion topics, 2. Briefs of the cases typically assigned in a federal income tax course, and 3. Tables and charts to help explain the more complex areas.

Completely revised and up to date with all the new tax laws, this third edition of Exam Pro on Federal Income Tax contains 200 multiple-choice questions derived from actual final examination questions. The questions are “challenging” and provide you with a comprehensive landscape of the concepts and topics covered in a typical Federal Income Tax course. The “Answer Keys” contain thorough analyses that explain relevant Federal Income Tax rules in a logical, step-by-step approach to help you skillfully apply the rules to various fact patterns. The questions, and accompanying answers, also serve as a valuable resource for approaching and answering exam essay questions. Exam Pro on Federal Income Tax helps deconstruct even the most complex tax concepts into digestible components.

The Second Edition of the Exam Pro on Partnership Taxation extends the approach of the original as a partnership tax study guide with questions and answers. Completely revised and updated, it includes lectures and study questions on the deduction for qualified business income under section 199A, the new regulations on allocating partnership recourse debt, and the choice of entity for conducting business and investment activities. New sample exams at the basic, intermediate and advanced levels give you an even better shot to ace your partnership tax exam. The book is designed to help JD and LLM students from the first day of class. It begins with over 50 short lectures on topics in partnership tax ranging from basic to advanced, illustrated by over 280 study questions, each with a complete explanation of the right (and wrong) answers. Several of the lectures focus on the basic accounting concepts that are essential to understanding partnership tax, to give students with no prior accounting background the tools they need to succeed in this subject. The book includes twelve sample exams (a total of 120 more questions) that, like the lectures, increase in difficulty from basic to advanced, labeled so that students can pick the exams that are right for them and the course they are taking. Full answers to each of the exam questions are provided, with cross-references to the lectures and the study questions. Robert R. Wootton, Professor Emeritus of Practice of Law, and Sarah B. Lawsky, Professor of Law, teach partnership tax at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

The eighth edition of this popular student supplement retains the cradle-to-grave ordering of prior editions and is updated to reflect changes made by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as well as other recent changes in the law. In addition to using a “cradle-to-grave” approach to corporate taxation, the book features a discussion of taxable and tax-free corporate acquisitions and penalty provisions. It also surveys the tax treatment of S corporations and (briefly) consolidated groups. Full of examples with explanations of both how and why the system works as it does, this book can be used alongside any standard casebook. It may also be used as a primary text for those who emphasize the problem method and have developed their own problem set.

This comprehensive guide can serve either as a course supplement or as a refresher for members of the bar. Expert commentary summarizes the law and offers critical perspectives on the estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes, including lifetime and testamentary transfers, joint-and-survivor tenancies, life insurance, annuities, and powers of appointment; inclusion and valuation; exemptions and exclusions; deductions; and tax liabilities. Additional chapters cover basic tax and estate planning concepts, reform proposals, and fundamental alternatives to the current transfer tax system.

This highly-acclaimed text explains the conceptual basis of federal income taxation. It is designed to help students quickly pull together the entire subject for end-of-semester review and provide perspective about where a topic fits within the federal income tax scheme. While focusing on the present income tax, the text provides an explanation of the often-discussed consumption tax and contrasts the two taxes in a note at the end of the volume. The new edition reflects developments since the fourteenth edition, including the promulgation of regulations interpreting major provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. It also features new or expanded discussions of several topics, including: possible legislative reconsideration of the realization requirement (in the context of “billionaires’ tax” proposals); the long-term shift from deductions to credits in the design of nonbusiness tax expenditures, and the new and used electric car credits introduced by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

This edition has been completely revised to reflect the 2017 Act and developments through August 2018. The text focuses on the corporation as a taxable entity and tracks the corporate life cycle from incorporation through complete liquidation. It includes discussion on nonliquidating distributions, redemptions, and stock dividends. It also addresses advanced problems in corporate taxation, such as taxable acquisitions, tax-free reorganizations and corporate divisions, and carryover of corporate tax attributes.

This comprehensive guide can serve either as a course supplement or as a refresher for members of the bar. Expert commentary summarizes the law and offers critical perspectives on the federal income taxation of estates, trusts, and beneficiaries, including the decedent’s final income tax return; classification of estates and trusts; income in respect of a decedent; distributable net income; simple and complex trusts; distributions; grantor trusts; charitable trusts; and foreign trusts. Additional chapters cover basic income, gift and estate tax concepts, accumulation distributions, and specially treated trusts.

How and when is income taxable? To whom is it taxable? This Nutshell summarizes U.S. federal income tax law, defines income, and identifies the different types of deductions. Explains statutory inclusion and exclusion from gross income, profit-related deductions, mixed deductions, personal deductions, and other allowances. Also inquires into the policy and purposes of, and alternatives to, existing legal rules.

This book provides a concise overview of federal partnership taxation. It covers partnership formation, including contributions of property and admission of service partners, allocation of income and loss, tax accounting, and sharing of recourse and nonrecourse liabilities. Building on this foundation, the book also addresses advanced topics, including transactions between partners and partnerships, sales of partnership interests, distributions of property, optional and mandatory basis adjustments, and planning for retirement or death of a partner. Numerous concrete examples illustrate the tax treatment of specific transactions, allowing students to grasp the principles of partnership taxation in a problem-oriented course. The revised sixth edition reflects major tax legislation enacted in 2017 (the “2017 Act”), including choice of entity issues in light of the new 21% corporate tax rate and the § 199A passthrough deduction.

This Gilbert Summary on Estate and Gift Taxation includes a detailed substantive discussion of estate and gift taxation, including the generation-skipping transfer tax, marital deduction, powers of appointment, portability of the deceased spousal exclusion amount, valuation, disclaimers, and computation and payment of the taxes. It includes 100 multiple choice review questions and answers and numerous practice exam essay questions and answers.

This outline discusses taxation of partnerships, including current partnership income, contributions of property to partnership, sale of partnership interest, distributions, and liquidations, as well as the taxation of corporations, including formation, corporate distributions, sales of stock and assets, and reorganizations, S corporations. The book has been updated to include discussion of the special taxation of Qualified Business Income and other changes adopted as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Comprehensive outline on Income Tax law with detailed explantations of relevant law, capsule summary, and exam tips.

This book provides professors teaching an introductory federal income taxation course with supplementary materials on comparative and international tax topics. An introductory chapter covers the structure of global tax systems and income taxes, as well as the various concepts of income employed by different tax systems. Other chapters cover the comparative tax treatment of in-kind benefits, gifts and inheritances, deductions, the taxable unit and income-splitting rules, capital gains, and income earned in international transactions. It also includes an introduction to taxation based on source or residence/citizenship, avoidance of double taxation, tax deferral, transfer pricing, and tax treaties.

This Nutshell, which provides an introduction to U.S. international taxation useful to both U.S. and non-U.S. students and practitioners interested in the topic, has been revised and updated with the most up-to-date discussion of recent regulatory guidance interpreting the significant changes to the U.S. international tax rules introduced by the 2017 tax act. It also includes a discussion of how the newly enacted U.S. book minimum tax interacts with the international tax rules. Referenced throughout are the global tax developments of recent years and how those rules and proposals interact with the U.S. international tax regime. In addition to providing a survey of the technical rules, the book also offers insight into tax planning considerations and how these have been impacted by U.S. and global developments. Both the U.S. activities of foreign taxpayers, as well as the foreign activities of U.S. taxpayers are explored. In today’s world, it is crucial for those involved in business and investment activities to understand the tax consequences of cross-border flows. The author’s career spans the academic and private sectors, and she has used her experiences to distill the complexities of real-world tax considerations into a clearly written, straight-forward presentation of the key international tax concepts.

Accounting for income taxes has become a critically important issue for both financial accounting and income taxation purposes in recent years. However, there is nothing new about the need to account for income taxes for purposes of presenting, or to opine upon, the financial accounts of corporations or other business entities. The process of accounting for tax matters has been a traditional aspect of the responsibilities of finance and taxation officers of business entities, particularly publicly traded corporations, for many years.

Gain the advantages of office hours with professors on your own schedule! The West Academic Office Hours series is a collection of short audio and video tracks that tackle some of the thorniest questions plaguing law students. The professors answer students’ most frequently asked office hour questions. With clear and easy-to-understand explanations, these professors will help you reach that “lightbulb” moment of comprehension, just as they have with their own students in their own offices. You now have virtual faculty explanations available at the click of a button! The Office Hours series features a variety of notable law faculty explaining these tough topics in new and thoughtful ways.

Gain the advantages of office hours with professors on your own schedule! The West Academic Office Hours series is a collection of short audio and video tracks that tackle some of the thorniest questions plaguing law students. The professors answer students’ most frequently asked office hour questions. With clear and easy-to-understand explanations, these professors will help you reach that “lightbulb” moment of comprehension, just as they have with their own students in their own offices. You now have virtual faculty explanations available at the click of a button! The Office Hours series features a variety of notable law faculty explaining these tough topics in new and thoughtful ways.

Gain the advantages of office hours with professors on your own schedule! The West Academic Office Hours series is a collection of short audio and video tracks that tackle some of the thorniest questions plaguing law students. The professors answer students’ most frequently asked office hour questions. With clear and easy-to-understand explanations, these professors will help you reach that “lightbulb” moment of comprehension, just as they have with their own students in their own offices. You now have virtual faculty explanations available at the click of a button! The Office Hours series features a variety of notable law faculty explaining these tough topics in new and thoughtful ways.

This book attempts the simplest possible introduction to an intricate body of law. Any “simplified” description of the rules of partnership taxation would be so misleading as to be useless. We have therefore tried to make the subject accessible not by paraphrasing the rules, but by including numerous illustrations that are as straightforward as possible. The text focuses on simple partnerships holding few assets and engaging in routine transactions. It places the rules in context by pointing out the purposes of the statute and regulations and presenting background information about practical matters such as how partnerships maintain capital accounts and how nonrecourse financing works. Using many examples, it then shows the operation of the rules in everyday cases encountered by practitioners. This is not a reference book: many interesting and difficult issues have been ignored. Some matters, such as the application of § 736 to noncash distributions and the taxation of tiered partnerships, are not discussed at all. Most of the points that are addressed, however, are discussed at considerable length. Changes may be on the horizon; as this edition is going to press, tax professionals are grappling with understanding and implementing 2017 tax legislation, which included a reduction to the tax rate for some types of pass-through income. Numerous proposed regulations have been issued in recent years, and new regulatory projects interpreting the recent legislation are likely. Our goal has been to give students background material and illustrations so that they can begin to understand and work with a statute that was drafted for (and by) experienced practitioners and so that they can be prepared to make sense of any future changes. Most chapters end with a section comparing the tax treatment of partners with that of the shareholders of S corporations. Many students encountering partnership taxation for the first time have already studied subchapter S. We expect that an examination of some of the basic differences between subchapters S and K should help those students understand both subjects.

The book is not organized according to the chronological life of a corporation. Instead, the book begins by examining the tax treatment of a withdrawal of property from an existing corporation. The reason for choosing that organization is that the concepts embodied in such topics as dividends, earnings and profits, and stock redemptions are the fundamental building blocks on which the more complex provisions of corporate taxation rest. The authors explain the technical operation of the various Code provisions and provide numerous examples illustrating how they are applied and how several provisions must be read in concert with each other.

The book is not organized according to the chronological life of a corporation. Instead, the book begins by examining the tax treatment of a withdrawal of property from an existing corporation. The reason for choosing that organization is that the concepts embodied in such topics as dividends, earnings and profits, and stock redemptions are the fundamental building blocks on which the more complex provisions of corporate taxation rest. The authors explain the technical operation of the various Code provisions and provide numerous examples illustrating how they are applied and how several provisions must be read in concert with each other.

The perfect companion for students in law school tax courses and practitioners seeking a helpful introduction, this popular reference has been completely updated to reflect recent developments. Like prior editions, it includes analysis of cases and concepts from the leading casebooks on federal income tax, complete with explanations, diagrams and flow charts. The book includes extensive treatment of the time value of money issues.

The new edition of Principles of Tax Policy explains the essential building blocks of the American tax system clearly and concisely, including the changes adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation in 2022. Chapters focus on the political process, individual and corporate income taxes, Social Security and other payroll taxes, state and local budgeting, international tax planning, and more. Each chapter opens with a brief description of the policy topic, providing a synopsis of the current state of the law, and is followed by a discussion of the arguments made on all sides of the major debates over the topic.

Designed to make the study of federal estate and gift taxation simple, clear, and convenient, this text provides a basic explanation of the federal gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfer taxes. Written to facilitate an understanding of the overall structure of these taxes, the text discusses critical statutory provisions as well as relevant regulations and important cases. Topics include: valuation, the definition of a gift, the gift tax requirement of completion, the annual exclusion, the gross estate, estate tax deductions, and the generation-skipping transfer tax.

We spend a fair amount of time in law school talking about the taxation of income. What about taxing other things, like spending, wealth, luxury and sin? What about funding government in other ways, like borrowing money, printing money, building toll bridges, and selling lottery tickets? This Short and Happy Guide considers all of these possibilities. Would taxing spending (sales taxes, value added taxes, or annual consumption taxes) be better than taxing income or wealth? Perhaps we should tax all of them. In fact, we do. This book considers each of these ways of funding government—how they work, and what makes them good or bad.

This guide is a fully updated summary of state and federal laws that pertain to public finance and taxation. It is a valuable supplement to law school courses on local government law and state and municipal finance, as well as course offerings on these topics in schools of business and public policy. The book places the technical legal rules it considers in the context of the broader public policy issues that those rules raise. It focuses on several past fiscal crises as a catalyst for, as well as a source of, doctrinal changes in these areas of the law.

Taylor’s Tax-Exempt Organizations in a Nutshell provides a valuable introduction and foundation for those students taking classes that deal with the law of nonprofit organizations and the tax treatment of them. Special treatment is provided on charitable giving, fundraising, unrelated business income, and private foundations. Because of its focus on the law, this is a valuable introduction for nonprofit professionals who need a concise overview of the legal problems that nonprofit organizations routinely face.

Taxes impact every individual and business in the United States and around the world. Countries are constantly changing, modifying, and occasionally reforming their tax systems. Understanding tax policy and implementing changes in the tax law that are consistent with sound tax policy is critically important. This compact guide explains essential concepts in tax policy, including theories of taxation and their implementation, criteria in evaluating a tax system, tax bases, the Haig-Simons definition of income, Samuelson depreciation, the Cary Brown Theorem, capital gains and losses, tax expenditures, the distribution of the tax burden, and issues in corporate and international taxation. The book discusses the tax policy considerations of contemporary law, including the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the most comprehensive U.S. tax system reform in over thirty years.

The Sixth Edition of Tax Procedure and Tax Fraud in a Nutshell is designed to acquaint students with the theoretical and practical aspects of tax practice, from administrative or civil actions involving the Internal Revenue Service to criminal prosecutions brought by the Department of Justice. Specific coverage includes IRS and treasury rulemaking; IRS confidentiality and disclosure; ethical issues of tax practice; civil audits and administrative appeals; assessment issues; the collection process; civil and criminal penalties; statutes of limitations; civil litigation considerations in the various tax forums; civil and criminal IRS investigations; and tax crimes and prosecution.

This book explores the historical contexts of seminal U.S. Supreme court federal income tax cases and the role they continue to play in our current tax law. Each of the chapters sets forth the social, factual, and legal background of the case and discusses various court proceedings and judicial opinions.The Foundation Press Law Stories Series brings landmark cases to life by telling the true, never-before-heard stories behind the cases. Editor Paul Caron and the general editors of each edition discuss the immediate impact of cases and document the continuing importance of the cases in shaping the law.

The Subchapter S rules are complex. This book describes the basic rules that apply to S corporations and their shareholders with sufficient detail to alert the reader to potential pitfalls. The topics covered include: (1) the qualification requirements for a Subchapter S election, (2) the allocation of tax items among the shareholders, (3) the effect of those allocations on a shareholder’s basis in stock and debt, (4) the limitations on the deduction of pass through items, (5) the treatment of corporate distributions, (6) the voluntary and involuntary termination of Subchapter S status, (7) the treatment of the year in which a Subchapter S election is terminated, (8) the limited availability of certain Subchapter S provisions after a Subchapter S election is terminated, (9) the taxation of an S corporation’s passive investment income and built-in gains, and (10) the business income deduction. The discussion of these issues is supplemented by numerous examples.

This book is a useful companion to law students taking a course in this area. It can also serve as a course book that will provide an introduction to the subject as a prelude to applying the principles to a set of problems. This complex topic has been made comprehensible to readers who are not yet conversant with the area and is a valuable supplement to a casebook or set of problems. The book discusses the crucial issues of corporate taxation and provides numerous examples illustrating how the various provisions operate.