Federal Income Tax and Corporate Practice
At BC Law, I took Tax I under Prof. Kornhauser. She’s a new, visiting professor, but I saw that she had a degree in education and mentioned a “problem-solving” approach to tax in her class description. After taking the class, I highly recommend it because of this problem-based approach, as opposed to a case-based approach to tax. And here’s why.
Our class pretty much wholly relied upon working through a packet of problems alongside the tax code book. It was just you and the code. So not only was the approach very practical in terms of addressing real-world problems, but it taught me—and Prof. Kornhauser stressed this a lot in class—how to “read the code.”
So I’m writing a provision about compliance with “Section 1060 of the Code.” I have no idea what this is… I look it up in the Definitions section and figure out it’s Section 1060 of the Internal Revenue Code—the tax code. I browse through Cornell’s LII and find Section 1060. Anyone who has struggled with the code knows that at first blush it just looks like a mess. But, really, it makes a lot of sense. You read the whole section first, then re-read the first chunk, and then step through and mentally apply the conditions and exceptions that generally follow.
Now, the reason why I started this post: although Federal Income Tax might not have that much application to people interested in corporate practice, it’s use is that it teaches you to read the Code. And, personally, I’d stay away from theory and policy classes and take a class like Prof. Kornhauser’s that gets your hands dirty in it.
Oh, and regarding Section 1060: From what I can gather, it allows the parties in our specific agreement to agree in writing to the allocation of assets, and then guides the parties into how to report the assets to the government (Form 8594).
Law School, Regulatory | paul | 
May 24, 2007 4:26 pm
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