Paul Caron at Tax Prof notes an interesting comment on tax lawyers in a surprising place.  The San Francisco Bay Guardian ran an article on student protests outside the Boalt School of Law targeted at Boalt professor John Yoo, author of the (in)famous memo that appears to condone U.S. torture of terrorist suspects in contravention of U.S. law and international war-crimes conventions.  David Cole, a Georgetown constitutional lawyer, compared Yoo unfavorably to tax practitioners.

"In Yoo's attempt to give CIA interrogators the right to use coercive tactis, Yoo acted more as a lawyer seeking the best way to get a tax cut than a body working for the people." Id.

This isn't the first time that tax lawyers' knack for twisting statutory language to serve their clients' purposes rather than the public interest has been used as an analogy for the questionable rationales of Bush Administration officials in connection with our treatment of enemy combatants.  Paul Caron caught Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe's quip back in 2004 at this posting.

Laurence Tribe (Harvard) in an op-ed in Thursday's Wall Street Journal compares Iraqi torture to tax: "[America's world image is hurt] by Justice Department memoranda cynically dissecting the laws banning torture with a sensibility better suited to the parsing of tax-code loopholes than to the treatment of human beings."

Perhaps we tax lawyers should take to heart the fact that we provide such ready models for cynical approaches to the law.  I argue in a forthcoming article in Virginia Tax Review that we need to rethink the prevalent tax minimization norm.  We should move from the current "zealous advocate" ethics approach towards a more balanced perspective that takes into consideration the public interest in a fair and equitable tax system.