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4 - How Lower Courts Respond to a Change in a Legal Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2019

By
Anthony Niblett
Edited by
Yun-chien Chang
Yun-chien Chang
Affiliation:
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
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Summary

We investigate how lower courts respond to a change in the legal rule by an appellate court. We create a dataset comprising 525 cases from the Tax Court of Canada over the period 1997 to 2017 that determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor for tax purposes. We look at how this lower court responds to a 2006 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals introducing a new factor in a multi-factor test to be applied by the lower court. We find only limited evidence that this change in the legal rule has any impact upon the outcomes of lower court cases.

Keywords

CourtsPredictabilityLower CourtsCommon LawTax LawEmploymentContractsRulesStandardsMulti-Factor Test
Type
Chapter
Information
Selection and Decision in Judicial Process around the World
Empirical Inquires
 , pp. 110 - 131
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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