The Columbia Journal of Tax Law has published its second issue (Vol. 1, No. 2):

• David M. Hasen (Penn State, moving to Santa Clara), Legal Transitions and the Problem of Reliance, 1 Colum. J. Tax L. 120 (2010): "This Article analyzes the literature on legal transitions. The principal focus is taxation, but the analysis generalizes to other areas. I argue that the theoretical apparatus developed by scholars active in the legal transitions area suffers from significant conceptual shortcomings. These shortcomings include the unwarranted assimilation of legal to factual change, the naturalization of conventional arrangements, and the disregard of the distinction between making law and finding it. As a consequence, the recent literature offers an analysis that is unable either to explain actual transitions or to provide an adequate theory of how legal change should take place. In the end, the older view of legal transitions is more capable than the newer one of providing an adequate normative and positive framework for understanding legal transitions."
• Richard M. Bird (Toronto) & Eric M. Zolt (UCLA). Dual Income Taxation and Developing Countries, 1 Colum. J. Tax L. 174 (2010): "The dual income tax combines a progressive tax on labor income and a lower flat rate tax on income from capital. Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden adopted dual income taxes to address a set of tax challenges that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although developing countries face much different economic, political, and tax environments from the Nordic countries, the dual income tax may be the right solution to the different set of challenges facing many developing countries.

  Providing separate tax rates for labor and capital income allows countries greater flexibility in addressing tax competition while retaining progressive tax rates for labor income. A dual income tax regime may also allow developing countries to rationalize the taxation of income from active business operations under the personal and corporate tax systems and the taxation of passive investment income under the personal tax system. Developing countries could also use the move to a dual income tax system as an opportunity to make broader reforms in their personal, corporate, and payroll tax systems.

  Finally, recent tax reforms in Russia, Ukraine, and several countries in Central and Eastern Europe have led to flat tax regimes that generally apply a single tax rate to all types of income above some zero-bracket amount. We contend that a dual income tax may provide policymakers in developing countries with an attractive alternative that addresses tax competition concerns while maintaining a progressive tax on labor income."

• Jacob Nussim (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), To Confuse and Protect: Taxes and Consumer Protection, 1 Colum. J. Tax L. 218 (2010): "Imperfect information may cause rationally bounded individuals to make consistent mistakes. This paper focuses on potential misperception of prices. Consumers may underestimate the full price of tax-exclusive prices and hence overconsume goods and services. Countries with a significant consumption tax base (for example, a value-added tax) regulate tax-inclusive price presentation to overcome consumers’ biases and thus to protect consumers. The United States is considering the adoption of a federal consumption tax base and therefore may be similarly expected to regulate tax-inclusive price presentation. Based on a theory of optimal taxation, this paper explains why tax-exclusive rather than tax-inclusive prices can be socially desirable. To the extent that tax-exclusive pricing confuses consumers who then ignore non-indicated taxes and overconsume, consumers may be better off. The argument is counterintuitive, in particular for consumer protection advocates: confusion is actually good for consumers. The paper investigates several potential justifications for tax-inclusive pricing, and shows that a reasonably accepted rationale is rather limited in scope and unrelated to consumer-protection motivations. Finally, the paper extends the analysis to income-based taxes and to misleading non-tax (marketing) practices."
• Erik M. Jensen (Case Western), Book Review, 1 Colum. J. Tax L. 262 (2010) (reviewing Moshe Shekel, The Timing of Income Recognition in Tax Law and the Time Value of Money (2009)): "Moshe Shekel has produced a prodigious piece of work on timing, the result of a major research project. Shekel is a partner in an Israeli law firm that he founded and is also a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Few American practitioners, even in down economic times, can afford the time to write a comprehensive, comparative study, systematically pulling together the doctrine and the controversies about doctrine in three sophisticated jurisdictions—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. (It's hard enough for us American lawyers to get a grasp on and critique American doctrine.) But that comprehensive, comparative work is exactly what Shekel has given us."