How to find old court cases, IRS rulings, and tax laws

September 5, 2013 2:49 PM

I am wondering if there is a single place I can find either one or all of these things.
posted by locussst to Education (6 answers total)

Not to be glib, but yes. A law library or a commercial legal research database like Lexis or Westlaw has all of these things.

No law library and no legal database has every single published case and every law every enacted ever. For instance, some county reporters are only available on paper in the county courthouse. Nonpublished cases are only available in case files. Most federal case files can be accessed electronically or requested from the court archives by any person who wants to see them (for a small copying fee), but state cases are less easily accessed, although you can often try by going to the clerk of the court in the relevant county.

Is there a nuance to your question that I am missing?
posted by crush-onastick at 3:10 PM on September 5, 2013

If you live in the US (presumably, since you mention the IRS) you very likely have a public law library that will have access to a lot of this body of law, probably through free-to-the-public Lexis or Westlaw. These libraries are usually organized by county. Try googling the name of your county and "law library." If you strike out try the closest big city to you and/or the name of your state. There is a tax law research database called Checkpoint, but unless you actually practice law it's probably way more expensive then you want to pay. Wolters Kluwer also has a tax research database called Intelliconnect, also probably more money than you're looking to spend. I'm not even sure they'll sell to a person and not an organization.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 3:31 PM on September 5, 2013

Not sure if "old" modifies all 3 of cases, IRS rulings, and tax laws, but if you are interested in the current Federal tax law it is contained in Title 26 of the US Code, which is publicly available, for instance, here. Your local law library (as recommended by previous answers) will probably have bound copies of the US Code, and perhaps even the annotated version, which will not include all the old code sections, but may at least explain changes from prior versions.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 3:59 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Google Scholar has a pretty good free collection of cases. Not sure how far back it goes, and not sure how comprehensive its collection is, but it may not be not a bad place to start.
posted by burden at 5:23 PM on September 5, 2013

The best database for tax material is Checkpoint, the second best is CCH. Generally only law firms and other practitioners pay for access to these. The current code, regulations, and Internal Revenue Bulletins are available via the IRS website but the searching functions leave much to be desired.
posted by melissasaurus at 6:23 PM on September 5, 2013

IRS Revenue Bulletins - http://www.irs.gov/irb/

IRS Revenue Rulings - http://www.legalbitstream.com/irs_materials.asp?pl=i2
posted by yclipse at 6:23 PM on September 5, 2013