Taxpayers or Governments? Default as Determinant in Canadian and US Supreme Court Tax Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. This paper demonstrates that an important and overlooked guide to understanding Canadian and US Supreme Court decision making in tax cases is the “default,” or the party to whom the court will decide in favour of if tax language is ambiguous. While statutory interpretation methods influence the overall manner in which courts approach tax-law decision making, the default is a more concrete guide to evaluating Canadian and US Supreme Court decisions. The paper first explores the statutory interpretation approaches referenced in Canadian and American Supreme Court tax law cases. The paper then examines the histories of defaults, including the cases in which they emerged and the rationales given for their adoption. Third, based on original research, the paper concludes that defaults have a profound effect on income tax decisions by, in Canada, the Supreme Court favouring the taxpayer and, in the United States, the Court deferring to the Internal Revenue Service. Résumé. Cet article démontre que la partie à laquelle les Cours suprêmes du Canada et des États-Unis donnent gain de cause lorsque la loi est ambiguë, appelée “ défaut ”, constitue un point de repère important, souvent négligé, pour comprendre les décisions de ces tribunaux en matière de droit fiscal. Bien que les méthodes d'interprétation de la loi influencent la prise de décision de ces tribunaux dans des causes fiscales, le “ défaut ” représente un point de repère plus concret pour évaluer les décisions des Cours suprêmes du Canada et des États-Unis en ces matières. L'article qu'on va lire examine d'abord les interprétations de la loi rencontrées dans la jurisprudence fiscale des Cours suprêmes du Canada et des États-Unis. Il présente ensuite l'historique des “ défauts ”, les cas où ils ont surgi, ainsi que les arguments et les justifications qui les accompagnent. Enfin, l'article conclut, sur la base d'une recherche inédite, que les “ défauts ” ont des effets profonds sur les décisions des Cours suprêmes en matière de droit fiscal tant au Canada, où la Cour suprême donne le plus souvent gain de cause au contribuable, qu'aux États-Unis où la Cour suprême se range plutôt à l'avis de l'Internal Revenue Service.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".