Um, hello first year of law school?
I just got a call from an attorney who gave me an assignment this morning. I am a little dismayed by the knowledge level he displayed.
My assignment was to look at a very specific provision of a particular IRS Revenue Procedure (RevProc) to see if it was still "good law." fn1.
A little background: Congress writes a law. It's passed by Congress and signed by the President, then codified in the United States Code (U.S.C.). It is typically long, extremely boring, and seems painfully detailed.
However, it's usually not detailed enough, so executive departments (in the case of tax laws, the Department of Treasury), issue regulations about how the law is to be interpreted/applied. This is what we call administrative law, and is recorded in the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). These regulations are even more boring and extreme in their detail.
Even this, however, is not enough for the IRS. They issued RevProcs, which detail exactly how the regulations in the C.F.R. should be applied. fn2.
So my assignment was to look at a very discrete sub-part of the most detailed layer of rules (RevProcs) and see if anything had superseded it in the past 45 years.
The documents I was given to examine (mostly other RevProcs, and a couple cases) turned out not to be relevant. Some of them dealt with other sections of the RevProc in question, others dealt with entirely different sections of the C.F.R.
So I sent an email detailing this information to the attorney. I didn't just say "The section in question is still good law," because I knew he'd want more details. So I noted why the documents I had examined didn't change the sub-section of interest to him.
Five minutes later, I receive a call. "I don't understand this email. What is this C.F.R. and what does it have to do with anything?" Which of course left me in the very uncomfortable position of trying to explain what the C.F.R. is (something which I'm not sure how any litigator who has been practicing for 25 years does not know -- I learned about it in my first semester of law school) without sounding like a condescending jackass.
1. This RevProc was issued in 1960. I needed to see if any later RevProcs or court cases had superseded the rule. If not, it is still "good law" and can be used in our brief.
2. And you wonder why the government employs so many people. Just writing rules about rules about rules is pretty time consuming, not to mention that you have to ensure that everyone is complying with these multiple layers of rules.
Note: Sorry, I realize that this extremely long anecdote was probably of no interest to anyone other than myself. It is, quite likely, more engaging than a RevProc, but probably not extensively so. My apologies.
My assignment was to look at a very specific provision of a particular IRS Revenue Procedure (RevProc) to see if it was still "good law." fn1.
A little background: Congress writes a law. It's passed by Congress and signed by the President, then codified in the United States Code (U.S.C.). It is typically long, extremely boring, and seems painfully detailed.
However, it's usually not detailed enough, so executive departments (in the case of tax laws, the Department of Treasury), issue regulations about how the law is to be interpreted/applied. This is what we call administrative law, and is recorded in the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). These regulations are even more boring and extreme in their detail.
Even this, however, is not enough for the IRS. They issued RevProcs, which detail exactly how the regulations in the C.F.R. should be applied. fn2.
So my assignment was to look at a very discrete sub-part of the most detailed layer of rules (RevProcs) and see if anything had superseded it in the past 45 years.
The documents I was given to examine (mostly other RevProcs, and a couple cases) turned out not to be relevant. Some of them dealt with other sections of the RevProc in question, others dealt with entirely different sections of the C.F.R.
So I sent an email detailing this information to the attorney. I didn't just say "The section in question is still good law," because I knew he'd want more details. So I noted why the documents I had examined didn't change the sub-section of interest to him.
Five minutes later, I receive a call. "I don't understand this email. What is this C.F.R. and what does it have to do with anything?" Which of course left me in the very uncomfortable position of trying to explain what the C.F.R. is (something which I'm not sure how any litigator who has been practicing for 25 years does not know -- I learned about it in my first semester of law school) without sounding like a condescending jackass.
1. This RevProc was issued in 1960. I needed to see if any later RevProcs or court cases had superseded the rule. If not, it is still "good law" and can be used in our brief.
2. And you wonder why the government employs so many people. Just writing rules about rules about rules is pretty time consuming, not to mention that you have to ensure that everyone is complying with these multiple layers of rules.
Note: Sorry, I realize that this extremely long anecdote was probably of no interest to anyone other than myself. It is, quite likely, more engaging than a RevProc, but probably not extensively so. My apologies.
posted by N at 4:24 PM
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