Jasper L. Cummings, Jr. (Alston & Bird, Raleigh, NC), Alvin Warren’s Writings, 190 Tax Notes 1469 (Mar. 3, 2026):

Practitioners routinely ignore, or are not exposed to, so-called academic articles on tax. Usually it doesn’t matter because academic articles are seldom useful in practice. Occasionally, an appellate brief making a constitutional argument will cite one.

But every now and again, an academic writer consistently produces work that we either need to know about, or that can be useful in practice, or both. My list is relatively short in the history of the federal income tax, including Erwin Griswold, Boris Bittker, Stanley Surrey, Walter Blum, James Eustice, and Larry Lokken. I am sure I have missed a few, but you get the point. It used to be easier for academics to write useful tax articles because, at one time, law reviews and tenure committees were less fussy about writing subjects.

Alvin Warren, a recently retired tax professor at Harvard Law School, is another to add to the list. He is not above writing for practitioner journals. He can also hold his own with the tax policy crowd. He helped establish the foundations for the modern tax policy analysis of income and consumption taxation.

This article summarizes his principal articles because the subjects are worth knowing about, even for practitioners: (1) the taxation (or not) of capital income; (2) the corporate tax and integration of the corporate and shareholder taxes; (3) the incoherence of international taxation; (4) systemic tax reform; (5) financial instruments; and (6) discontinuities in the income tax (aka dumb rules).

These are the hallmarks of the Warren treatment: (1) motivation by observing some dumb stuff in the tax law (my words, not his); (2) arrival at the issue either before his contemporaries or in conjunction with the initial ferment of an issue; (3) rigorous table-setting and then analysis of the effects of current law and alternatives for change, based on a 1-2-3 approach and not philosophizing; (4) a (sometimes irritating) bent toward mathematical illustration of the logical points, which is actually indispensable for a tax academic; and (5) at least tentative conclusions and suggestions.

Things mostly have not turned out as Warren recommended, but that wasn’t his fault. He recommended corporate tax integration, and we got a reduced rate on dividends received. He recommended corporate tax integration in the cross-border space, and we got the U.S. version of territoriality; plus, we are getting some new version of international tax cooperation, but motivated by national self-protection. Warren showed how expensing can eliminate the taxation of capital income, suggesting that it was not a good idea for an income tax, but we got a lot of expensing anyway (because it is not good for an income tax). The incoherence he described in the U.S. tax system generally, and in the taxation of financial products in particular, has continued unabated because the political actors are not yet interested in fundamental change.

No one talks about corporate tax integration anymore. But by and by the movement toward a consumption tax will again rear its head.

Even if you’re not a tax policy wonk, you should know about the broad strokes of policy issues around basic parts of the income tax, as precisely explained in Warren’s articles.

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