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Abstract:
The federal income tax system treats married couples as if each spouse earned approximately one-half of the couple's combined income through a mechanism called income splitting. For many one-earner and unequal-earner couples, income splitting produces a significant advantage, a marriage bonus, by shifting income from higher to lower rate brackets. Marriage-based income splitting relies on a presumption that marriage is a good indicator of economic unity between two taxpayers. It is not. Marriage does not require spousal sharing and many unmarried couples share everything they earn. As a result, the current system extends the benefit of income splitting to some taxpayers who do not deserve it while withholding it from others who do. Because marriage is a poor proxy for economic unity, this Article proposes a new eligibility criterion for income-splitting: only couples legally committed to sharing their income, regardless of marital status, would be permitted to file jointly.

tax, marriage, gay, same-sex, community property, equality, contract, partnership, income splitting, joint returns, Earl v. Lucas, Poe v. Seaborn

Abstract:
Maps record facts but, whether by design or by accident, they also project worldviews and function as arguments. Maps attached to Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements are a case in point. Every map reflects a set of judgments that influence the viewer's impression of the underlying data. The choice of colors and labels, the cropping, and the process of selecting what gets included and what gets left out all combine to form a visual gestalt. A skilled designer can make peace seem inevitable or impossible, reassuring or terrifying, logical or jumbled.

maps, graphic design, israel, palestine, peace, tufte, negotiations

Abstract:
In most U.S. jurisdictions, property acquired prior to marriage and property received by gift or devise during marriage belongs to each spouse separately. Regardless of how long spouses have been together, divorcing property owners have no obligation to share this separate wealth. Earnings accumulated in the course of the marriage, on the other hand, are divisible at divorce. Thus, where a born rich dilettante divorces a self-made professional, only the worker is forced to share. Although the labor-centered classification principle permeates the overwhelming majority of scholarly, statutory, and judicial discussions of marital property law as a background presumption, it has gone largely unquestioned.

This Article critiques the labor-centered marital property principle and argues that if earnings are to belong to both spouses as a unit, a portion of what is currently classified as separate property should also be attributed to the marriage. The standard for classifying property as marital should look at the parties' overall financial picture and attribute to the couple a comparable level of risk and reward for the duration of the marriage. Specifically, marital property should include a percentage of premarital and unearned wealth based on the length of the marriage as well as on the age of the owner spouse. The guiding principle of the proposal is to attribute to the marriage a fraction of the owner spouse's estimated lifetime financial capability, effectively recognizing that in marriage, labor, luck, and love are intertwined.

divorce, marriage, property, community, separate, labor, luck, gift, inheritence, earnings, spousal support, property distribution, division, partnership, life expectancy