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Ct. App. 2004) (emphasis added). This makes us especially
disinclined to second-guess, in the guise of economic-substance
review, their specialized expertise in the appropriate allocation
under Ohio family law of the lump-sum settlement of a state tort
claim.
In upholding the allocation of the settlement made by the
State court in this case as having economic substance, we are not
invoking a bright-line rule that our Court must always defer to
settlement allocations reviewed by State courts--we plainly don’t
in circumstances like those we faced in Robinson, where a state-
court judge late one night accepted a settlement that grossly
rewrote a jury’s allocation in a way plainly aimed at reducing
the taxability of the award. In a case like that, there is no
incentive by the state-court judge to closely review the
settlement--as we pointed out there, since Texas has no income
tax of its own, there was no state interest that would be
affected by a different allocation.
The Hickses’ case--though superficially similar in that the
settling tortfeasor had no interest in the allocation of the
settlement--is different in important ways. The first, of
course, is that states themselves have an interest (represented
by state-court judges) in considering the impact of allocations
in personal injury cases on the state’s own Medicaid system. The
field of long-term health-care planning, both for the disabled
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