Taxation in Six Concepts ― A Student's Guide, 2019

Tax doctrines rest on a handful of concepts -- just six, in fact. Armed with six concepts, you can decipher the law. In the United States, more so than in any other developed country, the tax law hosts many of the government’s most important social and economic policies. Health care, housing, financial markets, education,and poverty, for example, involve tax. In short, tax turns out to host many interesting and pressing public policy problems. This book introduces the six concepts and uses them to unpack leading cases and real-world transactions. The six are valuation, net income, realization, tax deferral, substance over form and income-shifting. The cases discussed involve one (or two) of the six concepts discussed. This book also looks beyond the classroom. At every step, real-world transactions are included to show how tax planning harks back to the six concepts.

Anne L. Alstott is the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation at the Yale Law School. She has held the Bierman chair from 2004-2008 and again beginning in 2011. From 2008-2011, Professor Alstott was the Manley O. Hudson Professor at the Harvard Law School. Professor Alstott has taught tax law, tax policy, and social welfare policy at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia since 1992. She has won the annual teaching award at Yale Law School three times (in 2012, 2004, and 1998) and at Columbia Law School once (in 1995). The Yale Law School graduating class of 2013 elected her to speak at Commencement. Professor Alstott’s books include No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents (2004, Oxford University Press) and The Stakeholder Society (1999, Yale University Press) (with Bruce Ackerman). Her scholarly articles have been published in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the Tax Law Review, as well as in many other journals and in books. Professor Alstott was born in Indianapolis. Her parents are Dr. David F. Alstott and the late Dr. Rosemary Lester Alstott.