No abstract
89 Washington Law Review 1185 (2014)Following the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Windsor, many seem to believe that the fight for marriage equality at the federal level is over and that any remaining work in this area is at the state level. Belying this conventional wisdom, this Article plumbs the gap between the promise of Windsor and the reality that heteronormativity has been one of the core building blocks of the federal tax system. Eradicating embedded heteronormativity will take far more than a single court decision (or even revenue ruling); it will take years of work uncovering the subtle ways in which heteronormativity pervades the federal tax laws and of identifying means of eliminating that heteronormativity. To further this work and in keeping with the theme of this symposium issue, Compensated Surrogacy in the Age of Windsor, this Article explores the unremitting heteronormativity of the federal tax incentives for procreation as they apply to compensated surrogacy, which is the only practical option for gay couples wishing to procreate.
Could a feminist perspective change the shape of the tax law? Most people understand that feminist reasoning has tremendous potential to affect, for example, the law of employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. Few people may be aware, however, that feminist analysis can likewise transform tax law (as well as other statutory or code-based areas of the law). By highlighting the importance of perspective, background, and preconceptions on the reading and interpretation of statutes, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions shows what a difference feminist analysis can make to statutory interpretation. This volume, part of the Feminist Judgments Series, brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite tax decisions in which a feminist emphasis would have changed the outcome or the court's reasoning. The volume includes cases that implicate gender on their face (like medical expense deductions for fertility treatment or gender confirmation surgery as well as special tax benefits for married individuals), as well as cases that require a more nuanced understanding of history, politics and economics (such as the tax treatment of tribal lands and the business expense deduction). This book opens the way for a discussion of how viewpoint is a key factor in statutory interpretation.
2010 Utah Law Review 605 (2010)The debate in the United States over individual versus joint federal income tax filing is at something of a crossroads. For decades, progressive - and, particularly, feminist - scholars have urged us to abolish the joint return in favor of individual filing. On the rare occasion when scholars have described what such an individual filing system might look like, the focus has been on the ways in which the traditional family must be accommodated in an individual filing system. These descriptions generally do not take into account - let alone remedy - the tax system's ongoing failure to address the tax treatment of nontraditional families. More recently, scholars concerned with the sexual-orientation-based discrimination that pervades our tax laws have proposed extending joint filing to same-sex and, in some cases, unmarried different-sex couples. But these proposals are equally problematic because they merely widen the privileged circle by extending the tax advantages provided to traditional families to other relationships patterned after the traditional family (and only to such relationships). Especially in view of the growing complexity of family arrangements in the United States, I find neither of these proposed paths to be desirable. As an alternative, I lay out a third path in this article that has a different, more inclusive destination. Relying on the Canadian experience with individual filing and proposals there to move "beyond conjugality," I sketch the outlines of an individual filing system that, where appropriate, recognizes all economically interdependent relationships for tax purposes -- and not only those that are patterned after the traditional family headed by a married different-sex couple.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.