Tax Stories: An In-Depth Look at Ten Leading Federal Income Tax Cases

PAUL L. CARON, ed., Tax Stories: An In-Depth Look at Ten Leading Federal Income Tax Cases (New York, NY: Foundation Press, 2003, pp. v, 375, $18.95).

The reason to use landmark cases to teach tax is made succinctly by the book's introductory quote that likens the examination of law cases to archaeology:

[A] reported case does in some ways resemble those traces of past human activity-crop marks, post holes, the footings of walls, pipe stems, pottery shards, kitchen middens, and so forth, from which the archaeologist attempts, by excavation, scientific testing, comparison, and analysis to reconstruct and make sense of the past. cases need to be treated as what they are, fragments of antiquity, and we need, like archaeologists, gently to free these fragments from the overburden of legal dogmatics, and try, by relating them to the evidence, which has to be sought outside the law library, to make sense of them as events in history and incidents in the evolution of the law.1

Tax Stories is the first volume in a series of books by Foundation Press to cover the leading cases across law school curriculum. Torts Stories, Civil Procedure Stories, Criminal Law Stories, Constitutional Law Stories, Property Law Stories, etc. will examine the leading cases in other areas of law. In Tax Stories, ten seminal ("landmark") tax cases make up the ten chapters; each chapter examines the historical, social, economic, and legal background of the case, the facts of the case, and the judicial history as the case moved through the court system to reach the Supreme Court. The opinion and reasoning of the courts are analyzed, along with the related cases that were cited in the arguments and the decision. Each...