Over the years, I have accumulated some interesting insights from Supreme Court Justices on how they view tax cases. Generally, in the snippets I have accumulated, it appears that Supreme Court Justices (or some representative number of them) dislike tax cases. I wanted to say in my article that part of which may have motivated Justice Jackson, Wikipedia here, the author of a key deference case, Dobson v. Commissioner, 320 U.S. 489 (1943), here, (Caveat, Dobson is a key case but subtle on the issue of deference to agency interpretations; I discuss Dobson in my article; suffice it to say here Dobson adopted a strong form of deference to Tax Court interpretations, but treated the Tax Court as an agency (as the statute said it was); so the strong form of deference Dobson adopted can be applied to agency interpretations.)
I wanted to say in my article what may have motivated Justice Jackson to adopt a strong form of deference to Tax Court tax interpretations. There are some good reasons to do so--agency expertise, etc. But another reason might be that deference could prevent the courts from being overwhelmed where agency interpretations of the esoterica of tax law when deference would promote more uniformity in the tax law. (Maybe there's some notion that tax interpretations are good enough for government work; for the surprising history of the idiom, see Good enough for government work and close enough for government work (Grammarist undated, here viewed 8/2/23)) .
In order to support that claim of Justice aversion to tax cases, I had a footnote addressing some anecdotal instances where Justices since then have asserted (sometimes tongue in cheek) aversions to tax cases. The source for some of these is an article titled "Tax Cases" at Greenbag here.
- Justice Souter when asked why he sang with Chief Justice Rehnquist at the Court’s annual Christmas party, responded “I have to. Otherwise I get all the tax cases.”
- As reported in Bernard Schwartz, The Unpublished Opinions of the Rehnquist Court 7-8 (1996), “Some justices have said that they would rather volunteer to wash windows than be assigned the chore of writing tax opinions.”
- Justice Brennan’s normal reactions to tax case cert petitions: “This is a tax case. Deny.”
- Justice Blackmun, the only Justice with extensive tax background: “If one’s in the doghouse with the Chief, he gets the crud, He gets the tax cases, and some of the Indian cases.”
- Quoting Justice Powell: “A dog is a case that you wish the Chief Justice had assigned to some other Justice.” A deadly dull case, “a tax case, for example.”
- Scholars have also noted “the widespread view among the Supreme Court justices that tax cases are boring.” Lawrence Zelenak, The Court and the Code: A Response to the Warp and Woof of Statutory Interpretation, 58 Duke L.J. 1783, 1789 (2009) (citing James J. Brudney & Corey Ditslear, The Warp and Woof of Statutory Interpretation: Comparing Supreme Court Approaches in Tax Law and Workplace Law, 58 Duke L.J. 1231, 1272-1273 (2009) (“"Some of the Justices likely deferred to Justice Blackmun simply because they were not interested in tax law - something Blackmun recognized inside the Court as well as in public statements.”).
