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...

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 reviews a book about the venerable Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. Written when the firm was being hit by allegations of ethical impropriety - including suggestions that the firm had been welcoming to Nazi provincial governments in pre-War Germany - the book at times is...

Critics of American Indian law have often complained about federal interference in the internal affairs of American Indian nations. The author ponders how independent the critics really want American Indian nations to be and whether secession theory might help us think about the theory and...

In debates about reorienting the American revenue system, nearly everyone assumes the Constitution is irrelevant. With few exceptions, the tax provisions in the original Constitution - particularly the direct-tax apportionment rule and the uniformity rule - have been interpreted to be paper...

The author argues that, if a legal journal publishes a response to one of its own articles, it has the obligation to let the original author respond to the critic, even if only briefly. If that doesn't happen, it looks as though the journal is accepting the critic's views as the final word on...

The Timing of Income Recognition in Tax Law and the Time Value of Money, by Israeli lawyer and academic Moshe Shekel, is a comprehensive, comparative study of the timing rules for income and deductions (and the debates about those timing rules) in three sophisticated jurisdictions - the United...

The rescission doctrine, governing when parties can unwind a transaction with retroactive tax effect, has more than its share of ambiguities. When the Internal Revenue Service announced in 2012 that it was contemplating providing further guidance on rescission, the reaction of tax practitioners...

This article considers whether realization continues to be a constitutional requirement for an accession to wealth to be included in the base of the federal income tax. Most commentators had thought that the Supreme Court's 1920 decision in Eisner v. Macomber, which treated realization as...