The Duke and The Lady: Helvering v. Gregory and the History of Tax Avoidance Adjudication

Likhovski, Assaf

doi:10.2139/ssrn.430080

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The opposite approach to tax avoidance is a formalist (some would say liberal) approach, which has characterized English law during most of the twentieth century. The American approach to tax avoidance for most of the twentieth century was placed somewhere between these two extremes (Likhovski 2004b, 2007). Obviously, each of these approaches represents a different conception of the proper scope of state intervention in the behavior of its citizens and a different idea about the propriety of state attempts to regulate not only the outward conduct of its citizens but also their inner “soul.”…”

Section: Conclusion: the Darker Side Of Compliancementioning

confidence: 99%

“Training in Citizenship”: Tax Compliance and Modernity

Likhovski¹

2007

Law &Amp; Social Inquiry

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Do the attempts of modern states to foster tax compliance reflect wider attributes of modernity? This article analyzes the history of the creation of a tax compliance culture in Israel of the 1950s and the various practices, techniques, and discourses that were deployed by the state to create model taxpaying citizens. It shows how the specific history of tax compliance can be understood as part of a wider phenomenon: the desire of modern states to create self‐policing, normalized subjects. By interpreting the history of tax compliance critically, as part of the attempt of the state to control its citizens, the article suggests a new way of understanding the history of twentieth‐century tax compliance generally and more specifically the history of judicial attempts to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance.

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Section: Conclusion: the Darker Side Of Compliancementioning

confidence: 99%

“Training in Citizenship”: Tax Compliance and Modernity

Likhovski¹

2007

Law &Amp; Social Inquiry

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“…4 Likhovski (2004) examines the history of tax-shelter adjudication beginning with Learned Hand's Gregory v. Helving. Solan and Dean (2007) identify the importance of the rule of lenity, a statutoryconstruction heuristic normally associated with criminal cases which advises strict construal of penal provisions against the government.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Case Vectors: Spatial Representations of the Law Using Document Embeddings

Ash¹,

Chen²

2019

Law as Data

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This paper contributes to recent work in political economy and public finance that focuses on how details of the tax code, rather than tax rates, are used to implement redistributive fiscal policies. I use tools from natural language processing to construct a high-dimensional representation of tax code changes from the text of 1.6 million statutes enacted by state legislatures since 1963. A data-driven approach is taken to recover the effective tax code -the set of legal phrases in tax law that have the largest impact on revenues, holding major tax rates constant.Exogenous variation in tax legislation from judicial districts is used to capture revenue impacts that are solely due to changes in the tax code language, with the resulting phrases providing a robust out-of-sample predictor of tax collections. I then test whether political parties differ in patterns of effective tax code changes when they control state government. Relative to Republicans, Democrats use revenue-increasing language for income taxes but use revenue-decreasing language for sales taxes -consistent with a more redistributive fiscal policy -despite making no changes on average to statutory tax rates. These results are consistent with the view that due to their relative salience, changing tax rates is politically more difficult than changing the tax code.

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“…As Assaf Likhovski has shown, Gregory needs to be understood against its historical background (Likhovski 2004). The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 was followed by sharp increases in the tax rates on the rich, especially in 1935-36, and by hearings that exposed massive tax avoidance by rich individuals like former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon.…”

Section: […]mentioning

confidence: 99%