Saturday, March 26, 2022
Decide Ketanji Brown Jackson And Tax Circumstances
Lee A. Sheppard, The Judicial Expertise of Circuit Decide Ketanji Brown Jackson, 174 Tax Notes Fed. 1467 (Mar. 14, 2022):
[E]mployers know that elite legislation colleges prepare their graduates to be appellate judges. They don’t prepare them to be trial attorneys, trial judges, enterprise planners, wealth advisers, or any of the myriad different sensible jobs that attorneys do. Jackson, who has been an appellate decide solely since June 2021, has finished a number of of those common lawyer jobs. She was an appellate public defender within the federal courtroom for 3 years and sat on the D.C. federal district courtroom for seven years. She was additionally an assistant particular counsel to the USA Sentencing Fee.
Is Jackson’s intensive sensible expertise related? Though the Supreme Courtroom just isn’t a fact-finder, trial expertise may very well be beneficial. Unhealthy factual information do make unhealthy legislation. Some necessary circumstances have come to the Courtroom with poorly developed factual information, just like the Vietnam-era black armbands in highschool case (Tinker v. Des Moines Unbiased Neighborhood College District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969)). Readers will recall that the Courtroom was factually clueless in multiple necessary tax case (Arkansas Finest v. Commissioner, 485 U.S. 212, 222 (1988), and Frank Lyon Co. v. United States, 435 U.S. 561 (1978)). If a Justice Jackson sat up and stated, “Actually, counsel, is that believable?” throughout oral argument, that may not be a nasty factor. …
This text analyzes Jackson’s judicial document. As soon as once more, as with the final 4 Supreme Courtroom nominees, the true problem is administrative legislation. Can the federal government develop by means of administrative rulemaking? Or is enhancement of substantive guidelines the unique province of the legislature? That’s extremely pertinent to our readers, for whom administrative rulemaking is as or extra necessary than statutory legislation. Lots of the topics Jackson thought of as a federal district decide are controversial, like unlawful immigration, however the authorized points are the identical administrative process points that our readers face when difficult tax rules. …
“The necessary query for tax is whether or not, on the Supreme Courtroom, the brand new justice can be equally inclined to look by means of Treasury/IRS’s formal actions and explanations with a view to think about maybe underlying motivations,” [Steve R. Johnson of Florida State University College of Law] speculated.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2022/03/judge-ketanji-brown-jackson-and-tax-cases.html
