1,720,972 research outputs found
Why I Left Israel, and Why I\u27m Going Home
Get PDFShari Motro describes her dual identity as both Israeli and American, including why she left Israel and why she decided to return
A New I Do: Towards a Marriage-Neutral Income Tax
Get PDFThe federal income tax system treats married couples as if each spouse earned approximately one-half of the couple\u27s 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
My Audacious Hope
Get PDFUS elections 2008: Why I voted for Barack Obama, and what a victory for him could mean for America and the world
Single and Paying for It
Get PDFProfessor Motro argues that present-day income tax benefits to married couples, such as the privilege to file jointly, are unfair to unmarried taxpayers with or without children, and challenges these policies\u27 societal values of encouraging marriage and subsidizing the support of children born to married couples
Session A: Courage and Creativity in Legal Scholarship
No full textLed by Shari Motro, University of Richmond School of La
The Price of Pleasure
Get PDFThis Article argues that unless sexual partners explicitly agree otherwise, pregnancy should create a unique type of legal relationship. This relational default would come with certain obligations: in limited circumstances, a woman would be expected to communicate the fact of a pregnancy to the man with whom she conceived, and a man would be required to help support her during pregnancy and recovery. Child support obligations should kick in only once a child is born; until and unless this happens, a man\u27s economic responsibility should be conceptualized as a responsibility towards the woman herself.
The goal of this Article is to start a conversation about an issue that is critically relevant to our lives yet virtually absent from our laws. Commentary on current laws addressing the pregnancy-related obligations of unwed fathers is sparse and the scope of these provisions is uncertain. And while theorists have written extensively on rape, reproductive freedom, family leave policies, public funding for abortion, child support, and pregnancy discrimination in the employment context, virtually no one has focused on the legal relationship between unmarried sexual partners wh
Preglimony
Get PDFUnmarried lovers who conceive are strangers in the eyes of the law. If the woman terminates the pregnancy, the man owes her nothing. If she takes the pregnancy to term, the man\u27s obligation to support her is limited. The law reflects this lovers-as-strangers presumption by making a man\u27s obligation towards a woman with whom he conceives derivative of his paternity-related obligations; his duty is towards his child, not towards the woman in her own right. Thus, a pregnant woman\u27s lost wages and other personal costs are her private problem, and if there is no child at the end of the pregnancy, there is no one----from a legal perspective----that the man must support.
The law also endorses this lovers-as-strangers default in the way in which it treats men who do support their pregnant lovers. It does this through the tax code. Current tax law likely regards payments between unmarried lovers as gifts or as child support. This characterization not only misses the mark descriptively, it also misses an opportunity to reward and encourage a behavior that is critically important in an age when sex and procreation outside of marriage are common.
This Article argues that the law should develop a new framework for addressing the unique relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive and that tax reform offers a practical and relatively modest first step for doing so. To this end, it proposes that Congress create a pregnancy-support deduction to benefit taxpayers who already support pregnant women, thereby extending to them the same deduction we now give taxpayers who pay alimony
Scholarship Against Desire
No full text"Where is your heart in this work?" I often pose this question to faculty candidates I'm interviewing after they share their scholarly agenda. A depressing proportion seems baffled by the question. One refreshingly honest candidate answered: "It's not." He had started his career writing about a topic he was passionate about, but had concluded that it hurt his marketability. So he switched, and his stock went up. "Now I'm just solving an intellectual puzzle," he said. And in the same breath: "It's business.
In Praise of Open Windows
Get PDFMotro calls for an open-window revolution, in which Americans reduce their constant use of carbon polluting air conditioning, open the windows, and let the sun shine in
Labor, Luck, and Love: Reconsidering the Sanctity of Separate Property
Get PDFThis Article proposes a new alternative to the labor-centered marital property rule. Instead of focusing on how property was acquired, marital property law should look to spouses\u27 overall financial resources and require them to share these resources to the extent they shape their identities during the marriage. Financial capability affects some of the most fundamental aspects of our lives-our health, our education, our work, the neighborhood in which we live. Marriages in which these aspects of spouses\u27 identities are kept separate strike us as jarring. Imagine a husband and wife who sleep in the same bed, under the same roof, but who receive dramatically different levels of medical care.
I do not propose that all preexisting, gifted, and inherited property belong to the marriage. Rather, the approach introduced in this Article attributes a percentage of separate property to the marriage based on the length of the marriage and on the property owner\u27s life expectancy. The core concept is to spread separate property over the life of the owner spouse and to allocate to the marriage a pro rata portion of this property
- …
