This viewpoint criticizes a recent Tax Court decision, Bulas v. Commissioner, denying an accountant deductions associated with a bathroom used almost entirely by clients visiting the accountant's home office. The author argues the court interpreted the requirement in IRC § 280A(c) that the...

In Dagres v. Commissioner, decided in March 2011, the Tax Court considered the distinction between business bad debts and nonbusiness bad debts. This article discusses the particulars of Dagres, which presented some unusual issues, and it describes more generally why the distinction matters to...

This essay reflects on the author's experience as one of the editors of the Journal of Legal Education. In particular, the author discusses the insularity of American legal education, the limited American interest in writing about pedagogy, the poor quality of much legal-academic writing, and...

This piece is part of the author's probably misguided effort to take seriously the Sixteenth Amendment phrase “taxes on incomes.” The piece (in form a letter to the editor, but complete with footnotes!) responds to a reader who had noted that, because of a cap, the basic Social Security...

In Tempel v. Commissioner, decided in April 2011, the Tax Court came to a number of important conclusions about sales of state income tax credits that occurred shortly after the credits had been received. The gain was held to be capital gain (with the court implicitly concluding that the credits...

The idea has gained currency that the Taxing Clause in the Constitution gives Congress the power to do anything, or almost anything, that would be funded by taxation. Most recently, that argument has been advanced in connection with the litigation about the individual mandate in the Obamacare...

This article responds to an argument, made by economist Martin Sullivan, that, if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the Obamacare legislation, all sorts of tax incentives — which, he argues, are economically equivalent to the mandate — would suddenly be at risk...

In a 2011 decision, Tempel v. Commissioner, the Tax Court had held, among other things. that gain on sales of state income tax credits was capital gain. In a Chief Counsel Advice released later in the same year, the IRS accepted the result, and most of the analysis, of Tempel, and it also...

A recent decision by a National Labor Relations Board regional director, concluding that football players at Northwestern University are employees for purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, could have spillover effects in tax law. This article considers whether severing the connection...

This article comments on “Is a Broadly Based Mark-to-Market Tax Unconstitutional,” by Gene Magidenko. Magidenko gets all the big points right in questioning the constitutionality of a mark-to-market system of taxation, but this article suggests he did not emphasize one point enough: the...