As a third example, take the DOJ Tax Division. Founded in 1919 and greatly expanded in the 1930s, the division in 1931 hired an attorney named Carlton Fox, n229 who became "a pioneer in the field of legislative histories." n230 By the late 1930s, Fox had assembled scrapbooks of primary material on the internal revenue laws - apparently consisting largely of legislative history - that totaled forty-five volumes. n231 When a private tax attorney published a one-volume "legislative history" of the internal revenue laws in 1938, Griswold criticized it in the Harvard Law Review, arguing that it was not "much more than a digest or partial index," declaring that the "only place where the complete sources may now be found is in the compilations which have been made by Carlton Fox, Esq., of the Department of Justice," and concluding that "the final story on the legislative history of the Revenue Acts will not be told until Mr. Fox's compilations can be made more readily available." n232 The Tax Division apparently took advantage of its legislative history to guide the DOJ field service, sending circulars to the U.S. Attorneys' Offices with legislative history on commonly litigated questions. n233Particularly while in the Appellate Section, I worked in legislative history a lot. I had heard of Fox's compilations, but I don't recall that I ever accessed them. I do recall working with Seidman's volumes on legislative history of the tax laws.
n229. 1934 DOJ Register, supra note 199, at 3.
n230. Hudon, supra note 73, at 325.
n231. A copy of the set was donated to the Supreme Court and discussed in Oscar D. Clarke, The Library of the Supreme Court of the United States, 31 Law Libr. J. 89, 91 (1938). Clarke describes the collection as forty-five volumes and covering "tax laws, regulations, and legislative history," id., but it appears the bulk of it was legislative history. See the description by Griswold, infra note 232 and accompanying text. A description of the collection's various parts as of 1950 (by which point it had been further expanded to 160 volumes) indicates that 107 of the volumes consisted entirely of legislative history and another 27 partly of legislative history. Federal Taxation, 32 Chi. B. Rec. 180 (1950); see also id. at 190 (confirming that the donation to the Court occurred in 1937 and that the collection is "adequately indexed").
n232. Griswold, supra note 161, at 718. Griswold added that copies of Fox's volumes were available in the libraries at Harvard and two of the U.S. circuit courts. Id.
n233. E.g., Circular Letter to All United States Attorneys, Circular No. 2730, Re: Memorandum of authorities with respect to the applicability of the Federal Declaratory Judgment Act to suits for the recovery of taxes 10-13 (Aug. 1, 1935), Box 182, Folder 1, Freund Papers, supra note 201. The DOJ Criminal Division and Claims Division would likewise acquire their own legislative history libraries, while DOJ's central library would provide such material to the other divisions. McKavitt, supra note 220, at 276; William Mitchell, Government Law Libraries: Guideposts to Research, 20 Fed. B.J. 281, 283 (1960).
Parillo's point in the article is that such compilations back in Fox's day were not readily available to the private tax bar. For this interested in this niche of history, read Parillo's article.
Does anyone out there remember either Carlton Fox or his legislative histories?
The NYU website, here, has a link to HeinOnLine saying the following:
Taxation & Economic Reform in America Parts I & II, 1781-2010, HeinOnlineOne other interesting matter related to legislative history is that there was some secret legislative history dealing, as I recall it, primarily for legislation in the 1930s (at least that was the period I accessed). We had volumes of that secret legislative history in the Appellate Section library and we had to get permission from the appropriate committee if we wanted to cite the legislative history. I accessed it in a merger case after my reviewer kept sending me back to the history to find some point he insisted was there but which neither I nor he could ever find.
"This historical archive contains . . . legislative history materials and other documents. It includes the complete Carlton Fox Collection which contains nearly 42 years of historical legislation related to the internal revenue laws from 1909-1950. It includes more than 100 other legislative histories related to taxation, economic reform, and stimulus plans. ." (HeinOnline)
