The Tax Sections Ethics Debate - Historical Reflections

Abstract

The recent American Bar Association Section of Taxation debate on standards of advice and disclosure is not new among tax lawyers. The legal ethics literature reports tax lawyers discussing these issues in the 1950s and 1960s. Having neither the benefit of formal ethics opinions or committee work, for good or not, the debate was more open-ended, oriented more around the ethics of lawyering than the law of lawyering.

Keywords: income tax, legal ethics, circular 230, disclosure, Randolph Paul, Norris Darrel, Hugh Bickford, Mortimer Caplin, Boris Bittker, Gerald Wallace, law of lawyering