When someone brings up the empirical study of legal citation, most people think of the work Landes & Posner and Epstein & Martin. If you’re really cool, you might even think of Dan and me, who have spent quite awhile analyzing and visualizing Supreme Court citations like those in the 3D 1080p animation below:
These studies, including our own Supreme Court papers, focus on just one particular type of citation, however – judicial citation. It’s important to remember that for some subjects, judicial citation means squat compared to the law on the books – statutory law. The U.S. Tax Court is exactly one of these contexts, and we set out to analyze the statutory citation behavior of the U.S. Tax Court from 1990 to 2008.
Parsing and analyzing the Tax Court written decisions was probably one of the most interesting and challenging projects I’ve worked on. However, I don’t want to spoil too much. If you’re interested, go grab a copy of the journal from the Virginia Tax Review or download a copy from SSRN. The abstract is below:
What can empirical data tell us about the jurisprudence of United States Tax Court? Which sections of the Internal Revenue Code are most frequently cited and has recent tax legislation sparked change in the Tax Court’s decisions? This article presents an analysis of the citation practices of the United States Tax Court between 1990 and 2008. While much of the existing empirical legal research focuses on judicial citation, Tax Court decisions overwhelmingly cite statutes rather than case law. Therefore, analysis of the Tax Court must accommodate the primacy of statutory authority in this domain. After providing a brief overview of relevant prior research, we describe the Tax Court’s written decisions in aggregate along a number of dimensions and examine the Tax Court’s citation of the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) in detail. Though in principle Congress writes the tax code on a blank slate and could design an entirely new legal scheme each year, the Tax Court, as expected, overwhelmingly cites provisions that are likely to remain stable from year to year. We provide evidence of changes resulting from major tax legislation and discuss the implications of these findings for subsequent research.
Bommarito, Michael James, Katz, Daniel Martin and Isaacs-See, Jillian, An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions (March 20, 2011). Virginia Tax Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2011. Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=1441007