Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) notes this interesting line in yesterday’s New York Times article, Physics Awaits New Options as Standard Model Idles, by Dennis Overbye:
"Unlike, say, in the tax code, however, in physics new laws are more elegant and economical than the ones they replace."
Are new tax laws "more elegant and economical than the ones they replace"? Comments are open.
My favorite quote on physics and tax is from Albert Einstein: "Nuclear physics is much easier than tax law. It’s rational and always works the same way." Check out this cartoon on the subject (thanks to Sarah B. Lawsky for the tip).
The seminal work on tax and physics is Stephen B. Cohen, The Tax of Physics, The Physics of Tax, 3 Green Bag 2d 375 (2000):
Sometimes ideas from science illuminate muddled legal thinking. Physics teaches that, for every particle of matter, there exists a corresponding particle of anti-matter. A particle of matter and its corresponding particle of anti-matter are identical except that they have opposite electrical charges. A proton’s charge is positive, an anti-proton’s negative. When matter and anti-matter meet, they produce the most powerful explosion in nature, totally annihilating each other. These ideas help me explain the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Bradford v. Commissioner [, 233 F.2d 935 (6th Cir. 1956).] Bradford involved a baffling departure from established rules for taxing the discharge of a debt.
For more on tax and physics, see below the fold.
Eric A. Lustig, Who We Are: An Empirical Study of the Tax Law Professoriate, 1 Pitt. Tax Rev. 85, 99 (2003) (noting that very few tax professors were physics majors in college).
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Tax Stories and Tax Histories: Is There a Role for History in Shaping Tax Law?, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2227, 2234 (2003):
But history has a broader and more important role to play in understanding taxation. If you listen to many academic expositions of tax law, you might think that taxation is grounded in the exact sciences (or at least in economics), and therefore that it progresses over time–as scientific knowledge improves, tax law gets better. From this "Whiggish" perspective, it is indeed unimportant to study anything but current doctrine, just like a course in physics will spend little time on Aristotle or Ptolemy. The actual evolution of the tax law, however, has been nothing like the linear progression suggested by this view.
Louis Eisenstein, The Ideologies of Taxation 227-28 (1961):
Concededly, a good deal of tax law is exceedingly technical and abstruse. But no one claims that voters can be magically transformed into tax experts in several easy lessons. The question rather is whether they would grasp the basic essentials of tax policy if the issues were adequately presented to them. The real difficulty, I suspect, is that they might understand too well. If this second reason is tenable, then most Americans should not be concerned with the social problems of atomic energy, because nuclear physics is beyond their comprehension. In any event, where taxes are involved, our Congressmen and others of authority are noticeably reluctant to speak informatively for general consumption. The discourse, as a rule, is on a high level of platitude. If the public is unenlightened, the fault is not theirs.
Steve Johnson, The 1998 Act and the Resources Link Between Tax Compliance and Tax Simplification, 51 U. Kan. L. Rev. 1013, 1047-48 (2003):
Yet, absent adequate funding, budget reallocations are a game of "robbing Peter to pay Paul." If more goes to taxpayer service, less will go to enforcement. If the new enforcement initiatives receive substantial funding, some other important aspect(s) of tax administration will suffer. One thinks, in this connection, of the principle of physics known as Boyle’s Law (or, in France, Mariotte’s Law). That principle states that (at constant temperature) the volume of gas varies inversely with its pressure. The principle explains why, when one squeezes a balloon in one place, it tends to expand in another. Similarly, in a constrained budget environment, squeezing one service or compliance area (by reallocating funds to it) requires removing the administrative hand from another part of the balloon, causing that area to bulge out.
Eric Dodson Greenberg, Falsification as Functionalism: Creating a New Model of Separation of Powers, 4 Seton Hall Const. L.J. 467, 486 (1994):
Whether one’s theory concerns quantum physics or tax policy, the scientist and the policy-maker both must offer a theory or solution which is then subject to testing and criticism.
