Professor Solum offers an interesting story:

I have some experience, perhaps atypical, that relates to Greg's question. One forthcoming piece--"The Future of Copyright"--originated as a series of blog posts (Legal Theory Bookclub: Lessig's Free Culture). There can be no doubt that blogging led directly to the placement: the Texas Law Review solicited the piece on the basis of the blog posts.

For more on this topic, start here and follow the links. Incidentally, kudos to the editors at the Texas Law Review for their ingenuity.

Matthew Yglesias makes a case for the estate tax, basically on the grounds that unearned income ought to be taxed the same as earned income. I presume from this that he also thinks that all other gifts, or at least large gifts, ought to be taxable, though he doesn't say so.

Of course, there would likely be some serious evasion problems with taxing gifts as income, but that still doesn't provide a reason to distinguish pre-death gifts from post-death gifts.

UPDATE: It occurs to me-- though Yglesias doesn't say so-- that one reason to treat post-death gifts differently than pre-death gifts would be that estates already benefit from the step-up-in-basis-at-death, and so the estate tax imprecisely counters that. It still seems to me that it would be far more sensible to repeal the basis-step-up, and keep estates taxed the same way as all other unearned gifts.