Readers may have heard that the Tax Court is holding a judicial conference from Monday evening March 26 to mid-day on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at Northwestern University Law School. The Tax Court has issued a release about the conference, including information about how to apply to attend.
The Tax Court has extended the deadline to apply, from Wednesday until Friday, November 17.
The Tax Court release discusses the court’s interest in attracting a diverse conference community. The conference will be an opportunity to hear panels on issues of interest to tax litigation as well as give the court a chance to get feedback on ways to improve the tax litigation process. The panels consist of judges, academics, and practitioners from government and the private sector.
Getting together with people who share an interest in the tax litigation process sounds like a great way to spend a few days.
About Leslie Book
The universe of Tax Court practitioners and the universe of tax return preparers rarely intersect, so it is not surprising that this conference would be scheduled for one of the busiest weeks of filing season. However, by excluding tax practitioners like me who see our role as keeping cases out of Tax Court, the stated goal of “diversity” in attendance will be more difficult to achieve.
Preaching to the choir has its virtues, but the Tax Court should consider as well other forums for reaching tax practitioners and taxpayers. Education is the first step toward efficiency.
Meanwhile, a court appears only as smart as its dumbest rule. Therefore, I hope someone who can attend will bring up Rule 23(d), which requires the impossible: Squeezing 1.17 inches of print onto one inch of paper. (“14-point type produced by a proportional print font (e.g., Times New Roman), with double spacing between each line of text . . .Double-spaced lines shall be no more than three lines to the vertical inch”). Every printer and most journalists can tell you that an inch is 72 points. Three lines of double-spaced 14-point type is 84 points.
Isn’t the rule telling you that you can’t have squeeze in MORE than three lines to the inch (“Double spaced lines shall be no more than three lines to the vertical inch.”)? Given that 12 point font is acceptable for non-proportional fonts (e.g. Courier) under the rule, double spaced 12 point font would be 72 points – right at the limit. I do not believe that the rule is requiring that you squeeze three lines of double spaced 14 point proportional font into every inch. The Courts are always fighting for larger font sizes and more readable pages, while practitioners always want to squeeze in as much argument as possible and will fiddle with font sizes and spacing absent rules like 23(d).