TaxProf Blog

Ann M. Murphy (Gonzaga), has published Nothing to Gain: The Disparate Impact of the Capital Gains Tax Preference on Women and Persons of Color, 26 Nev. L.J. 1 (2025). Here is the abstract:

Tax preference provisions are scattered across the Internal Revenue Code, and the capital gains tax rate offers an enormous advantage for wealthy taxpayers. When first enacted, it was touted as eliminating the “lock-in effect” which caused investors to hold on to their investment property. Today, it is justified as encouraging investment and eliminating gains produced merely by the passage of time. The provision’s unequal benefits are hidden from the picture. Although not overtly discriminatory, the preference operates as a tax cut for the wealthy. Women and persons of color see little benefit from the lower tax rate. The difficulty of comparing tax data by gender, race, and ethnicity exacerbates this inequity. The exclusion of women and persons of color from the reduced tax rate contributes to the overall inequality of wealth, a situation that must be remedied. Historically, Congress has been reluctant to make meaningful adjustments to eliminate this built-in inequality, such as taxing unrealized gains or providing comparable benefits to women and persons of color. This Article provides a brief history of the capital gains preference, examines statistical income and wealth disparities based on gender and race, and proposes solutions to reduce the negative impact of the capital gains preference that leaves behind women and persons of color.

Pippa Browde (Montana) has published “#Taxback? Prohibiting State Real Property Taxes on Land in Indian Country,” 108 Marq. L. Rev. 877 (2025). Here is the abstract:

Land is a critical asset of Indian tribes. As tribes wrestle with how to create sustainable economies to support their sovereignty, the use and management of tribal land is integral. Taxation is a key component of economic development. This Article is about taxation of land within Indian country. It considers existing law that allows for state taxation of some land within Indian country. It makes a normative claim as to who the proper taxing sovereign should be based on tax policy principles and principles that support tribal self-governance and tribal sovereignty.

In Part II, this Article provides the background for the analysis. It starts with explaining ad valorem property taxes, describing the key features and highlighting the importance such taxes serve in funding sub-federal level governments. Next, the Article provides the history of the relationships between Tribal Nations and the federal and state governments, specifically on Allotment and the legacy of Allotment policies that shaped the law limiting a tribal government’s ability to tax and expanding a state government’s ability to tax real property in Indian country. Part III of this Article analyzes the legal and policy arguments that could be made to dismantle the expansion of state power to tax real property owned by tribes and/or their members in Indian country. The analysis critiques the jurisprudence expanding state taxation of real property in Indian country and analyzes the negative impact on tribal sovereignty. It sets forth the alternative to expanding state power based on both territorial jurisdiction and tax policy principles. Part IV concludes.

Reuven Avi-Yonah, Lucas Brasil Salama, Herbert Snitz, and W. Robert Thomas have published “Taxation of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence” (the Boden Lecture) in the Marquette Law Review. Here is the abstract:

This Article proposes that tax can be a useful supplement to other measures to regulate Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and limit its potential harmful effects. This proposal differs from command-and-control regulation of AAI along the lines of European Union legislation that may unduly limit the development of AAI. It also differs from existing proposals to tax AAI to generate revenue to help workers displaced by AAI programs, or to tax the data used by AAI. The proposal is based on granting AAI programs like ChatGPT separate legal personhood, like corporate personhood, while incentivizing or requiring their corporate owner to place them in a separate corporate shell. The tax rate on AAI’s income is adjusted based on harmfulness indices based on an objective assessment, thereby creating an incentive for its corporate owner to reduce the harm. Developing a new tax on AAI excludes it from the limits imposed by the existing international tax regime on taxing multinationals, which are inappropriate for a tax on a person that does not have a physical location except on servers that can be located anywhere.