Reid Kress Weisbord (Rutgers) & Naomi Cahn (Virginia), Repealing the Estate Tax Could Create Headaches For the Rich – As Well As Worsen Inequality:
Nothing is more certain than death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin famously declared. And, since 1916, the federal government has imposed an estate tax on the transfer of property owned at death.
But the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers may be on the verge of changing all that. GOP legislators are now considering a massive bill that includes major tax law changes and could pass by June or July 2025. Among the measures under consideration in both the House and Senate is the Death Tax Repeal Act, which would end the federal estate tax and reduce the tax rate on lifetime gifts. …
As law professors who specialize in trusts and estates, we’re interested in what might happen next. Interestingly, while the long-term impact to the federal budget would be significant, repealing the estate tax would complicate estate planning for the wealthy taxpayers who might not save all that much money. …
The bottom line is that repealing the estate tax may hurt both taxpayers and the government. People with sufficient wealth to exhaust the high exemption are likely to have established estate plans that can’t be changed to benefit from estate tax repeal. Meanwhile, for new estate plans that seek to retain property ownership until death, the government will lose an important source of tax revenue – $22.5 billion in 2022 – collected from a tiny number of very wealthy estates that can afford to pay the tax.
And, of course, repeal would also abandon the original purpose of the estate tax, which sought to reduce extreme concentrations of wealth.
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Taylor Swift’s songs inspire generations of fans to sing and dance about love and to “shake . . . off” heartbreak. Swift’s hard-earned “reputation” for being a savvy music mogul inspires other creative spirits to be “fearless” in their artistic endeavors. But unless these artists are songwriters and musicians, they should keep their “eyes open” when selling their works, as they may see “red” when they discover their tax rates.
Since World War II, tax treaties have served as vital instruments for fostering cross-border investment and economic cooperation. However, the rise of economic nationalism and protectionism now threatens the stability of these agreements. This article examines what I argue is the first sign of the unraveling of the international tax treaty network, driven by a shift towards Economic Sovereignty Neutrality (ESN), a new approach that prioritizes domestic interests and economic resilience over traditional principles of capital neutrality.
She is the first graduate of our relatively new 
This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal framework governing taxpayer privacy in the United States, with a focus on Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code. Tracing the historical evolution of privacy protections from early 20th-century political misuse to the present, the article explains how legislative reforms have aimed to limit unauthorized access to tax return information. Morse critically examines the statutory and regulatory mechanisms that seek to protect sensitive taxpayer data—including criminal sanctions, civil remedies, and administrative safeguards—and assesses their efficacy. Particular attention is given to recent controversies involving breaches by IRS contractors and data skimming by third-party tax software providers, highlighting gaps in enforcement and legal redress. The article ultimately argues that while formal rules have improved, taxpayer privacy protections have not kept pace with technological and political developments, leaving individuals vulnerable to misuse of their financial data and underscoring the need for reform.
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There has been a noticeable trend at the Supreme Court in the last half-century toward using history to determine constitutional meaning. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced a new methodology for Second Amendment jurisprudence, which rejected the old “means-end scrutiny” test in favor of comparison to “historical tradition.” The upshot of this new test is that “judges . . . are supposed to analogize modern laws directly to historical sources, unmediated by a legal rule or standard like the tiers of scrutiny.” Using this method, judges would no longer be asked to judge in the traditional sense, but rather to engage in historical analysis. To the Court, this method is preferable because “reliance on history to inform the meaning of constitutional text . . . is . . . more legitimate, and more administrable, than asking judges to ‘make difficult empirical judgments’ about ‘. . . costs and benefits . . .’ especially given their ‘lack [of] expertise’ in the field [of firearms regulation].” 
Saturday:
Mary Lu Bilek (Former Dean, UMass & CUNY), Claudia Angelos (NYU), Joan W. Howarth (UNLV; 
