Law Commons^™

Deference To Tax Agencies' Interpretation Of Their Regulations, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

This installment closes a loop begun in the last installment of this column. We have been exploring the degrees of deference accorded by the courts to interpretations and positions taken by state and local revenue agencies. The last installment examined conditional deference doctrines, that is, deference specific to particular situations or conditioned on the existence of particular conditions. That installment noted one line of conditional deference, applying to cases in which agencies are interpreting their own regulations. This is often called Auer deference, after one of the most prominent cases of the line. Because of the richness of the Auer …