Using the Social Background Model to Explain Who Wins Federal Appellate Tax Decisions: Do Less Traditional Judges Favor the Taxpayer‪?‬

I. INTRODUCTION Legal research examining how judges decide cases has begun to complement political science literature about the effects of judges' social backgrounds on their decisions in various areas of the law. (1) However, very little systematic research has been conducted with respect to tax litigation, and almost none has analyzed whether or how a judge's social background influences the outcome of tax litigation. (2) This paper applies social science techniques to a data set of recent federal appellate tax cases compiled for this paper to study the connection between outcomes of tax litigation and the social backgrounds of the deciding judges.