Tax Profs’ Movie Recommendations for Law Students

Few movies involve taxes as a central plot element, but that hasn’t stopped members of the TaxProf Listserv from offering their tax film recommendations for law students.

Robert Nassau, a Rochester, N.Y., tax lawyer and adjunct law professor at Syracuse, is assembling the list, TaxProf Blog reports. Nassau noted the law school’s tax society has screened three tax movies and asked the law professors for additional recommendations. The screened and recommended movies include:

• A Taxing Woman (screened by the law students), a Japanese film in which a female revenue agent audits a gangster businessman, and the sequel, A Taxing Woman’s Return (recommended by Wayne State law professor Mike McIntyre).

• Stranger than Fiction (screened), in which Will Ferrell plays an Internal Revenue Service agent.

• Harry’s War (screened), described by Nassau as “a monstrously bad movie that glorifies the tax protester movement.”

• You Can't Take it With You. Texas Tech law professor Bryan Camp says the family patriarch in the 1938 move is “a goofy old guy who brags he has never paid his income tax and then, in the final act, the IRS man shows up.”

• Say Anything. John Mahoney plays the father of the woman being courted by Jon Cusack. According to Camp, “Mahoney's character has a house full of stuff that he bought for just under $10,000 representing disposition of unreported income; he eventually gets caught for tax evasion and lands in jail.”

• Slap Shot, starring Paul Newman. According to Pennsylvania law professor Michael Knoll, “The tax angle is that the owner holds the team as a tax shelter. The tax shelter story line has a nice teaching point since the owner claims she would be better off folding the team and taking a loss rather than selling it at a profit.”

• The Young Philadelphians, featuring Paul Newman as a tax lawyer.

• Tax Me if You Can, a PBS documentary.

• Star Wars, involving galactic turmoil over “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems.”

Also see:

ABA Journal: "The 25 Greatest Legal Movies"