Interpreting Income Tax Laws in the Common Law World

Civil law scholars often assume there are general differences in the approaches taken to the interpretation of income tax laws in civil law jurisdictions and common law jurisdictions. However, these differences may be dwarfed by the different approaches taken by two camps within the common law world, with the U.S. sitting in one camp and other Anglo jurisdictions in the other. Interpretation of income tax law in the non-U.S. Anglo world is characterized by judicial use of "transplanted doctrines" which involves the application in income tax jurisprudence of concepts, doctrines and meanings copied from other areas of law. Most notable of these is the judicial concept of income for tax law purposes, a concept borrowed from the classification of receipts for trust law purposes. The paper reviews the areas where transplanted doctrines have caused the interpretation of income tax laws to follow very different paths in the United States and in other common law jurisdictions