Valuation, Values, Norms: Proposals for Estate and Gift Tax Reform

In their contributions to this Symposium, Professor Joseph Dodge, Professor Wendy Gerzog, and Professor Kerry Ryan offer concrete proposals for improving the existing estate and gift tax system. Professor Dodge and Professor Gerzog are especially interested in accuracy in valuation, and advance specific proposals with respect to split-interest transfers and family limited partnerships. Professor Dodge makes an additional proposal to improve the generation-skipping transfer tax system, an understudied area of the law. Professor Gerzog’s Symposium contribution draws particular attention to the legal fiction on which the estate and gift tax marital deductions rely. She would restrict the availability of the deduction to only meaningful economic transfers to a spouse, consistent with a desire that tax results reflect the underlying substantive results. Professor Ryan also focuses on the estate and gift tax marital deduction, along with other wealth transfer tax benefits available to spouses. She imagines an expansion of those rules, showing how easily the law can be separated from economic substance.