Some Meandering Thoughts on Plaintiffs and Their Attorneys' Fees and Costs

This article examines statutory interpretation in general and the common-law doctrines at issue in particular (the assignment-of-income doctrine as well as the doctrine first identified in the seminal case of Old Colony Trust). While the author believes that these plaintiffs ought--as a matter of policy and income tax theory--to escape taxation on the amounts paid to their attorneys, she belives that the issue is truly a " deduction" issue, not a "gross income" issue. The article concludes, however, that the ill-fitting application of "gross income" doctrine in this context leads to indefensible distinctions that sound superficially plausible under the rubric of the common-law doctrines themselves but which are ultimately meaningless in the context of the larger problem at hand.