Category: Of Interest

Today I filed an amicus brief supporting the cert petition in CIC Services, LLC v. Internal Revenue Service, No. 19-930. I was not the only one. A variety of voices also filed brief supporting cert in this case, including Harvard Law School’s Low Income Taxpayer Clinic, the Chamber of Commerce,...

Having offered several blog posts highlighting the implications for tax administration of recent non-tax Supreme Court decisions, the question that remains is what these and other cases like them tell us. We have a Court that includes several Justices who possess extensive administrative law expertise and a deep interest in...

Continuing with the fifth of my series of posts on the tax implications of recent non-tax Supreme Court decisions: Although United States v. Gamble less directly implicates tax administration than the other cases discussed in this series of posts, I nevertheless think it warrants a mention. Gamble was not an...

Continuing with the fourth of my series of posts on the tax implications of recent non-tax Supreme Court decisions: Let me mention a case from the 2017 term: Lucia v. Securities & Exchange Commission. In Lucia, the Court held that SEC administrative law judges are officers of the United States....

Continuing with the third of my series of posts on the tax implications of recent non-tax Supreme Court decisions: Another high-profile case from the last Supreme Court term is Gundy v. United States.  In Gundy, the Court seemingly came within a hair’s breadth of overturning decades of nondelegation jurisprudence and replacing...

Continuing with the second of my series of posts on the tax implications of recent SCOTUS decisions: One high-profile Supreme Court decision this year was Kisor v. Wilkie.  As I noted in a post a few days ago, the Court in Kisor retained the Auer deference standard for agency regulatory...

In 2011, the Supreme Court in Mayo Foundation for Medical Education & Research v. United States indicated that it was “not inclined to carve out an approach to administrative review good for tax law only.”  Since then, both tax jurisprudence and, consequently, tax administration have been on a gradual march...

For several weeks, Supreme Court watchers and administrative law types have been waiting for the Court to resolve a petition for rehearing in Gundy v. United States, in which the Court narrowly upheld the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act against a nondelegation challenge, with Justice Gorsuch writing a lengthy...

A recurring question at two conferences I attended last week was whether and how much the Supreme Court’s decision in Kisor v. Wilkie really changed the Auer doctrine.  As so often in the case in law, the answer is “it depends.” By way of review, the Supreme Court in Auer...

The Ninth Circuit’s denial of rehearing en banc in Altera Corp. v. Commissioner, with a forceful dissenting opinion by Judge M. Smith (joined by Judges Callahan and Bade). Several judges recused. To recap: The Tax Court in Altera unanimously invalidated a high-dollar-value tax regulation on general administrative law grounds (e.g.,...