The Tax Law of Charitable Giving, 5th Edition

Preface

Although this sounds like a horrendous conceit, I marvel at this book. More accurately, I marvel at the size of this book. The very title suggests a subject that ought to be summarized in a pamphlet: The Tax Law of Charitable Giving. The principal reason for my amazement: How can something as seemingly simple and innocent as charitable giving generate so much law? It is, I suppose, a hallmark of our society; matters of law are quite complicated in the United States, and this includes the matter of the tax law consequences of transferring money and property to charitable organizations.

There is another reason for my wonder, one that is personal. By the early 1990s, this book had been on my mind for a long time. It had been written, in fits and starts, on many occasions over the years, with the manuscript pages ending up accumulating in this storage box and that file. It took some gentle prodding by the wonderful people at John Wiley & Sons—specifically, for the initiation of this project, Jeffrey Brown (long since promoted to Wiley's higher echelons) and Marla Bobowick (now a consultant in the charitable sector)—to get me going on completion of the book. The first edition appeared in 1993. Martha Cooley skillfully continued in the fashion of her predecessors; the second edition arrived in 1997. Susan McDermott provided the impetus for the third and fourth editions (2005, 2010) of the book. Lia Ottaviano oversaw production of this fifth edition.

It is not that I did not ...