Loper-Bright
Federal Tax — IRS, Tax Court, and Refund Litigation
The federal tax track is structurally unlike any state track because it splits at the moment of assessment into two parallel paths with different Article I / Article III profiles. The fork is determined by a single decision: pay the disputed tax before litigating, or not? That decision determines whether a jury trial is available, the institutional character of the first judicial decision-maker, the tradition-lens profile of the proceeding, and the appellate route.
Routing Failure: Why Sovereign Citizen Arguments Lose in Court
The standard explanations for why sovereign-citizen arguments fail in court — the establishment's 'frivolous and delusional' and the movement's 'systemic suppression' — are both inadequate. A more precise account: a significant portion of these failures are routing failures, not merits failures. The argument is being sent to a tribunal that cannot receive it. This essay introduces the impedance framework that operationalizes that diagnosis.