- 15 - does not apply since they never maintained the position that the merged amount was a contribution, their position was not accepted by the Court since respondent conceded it, and references in Fazi I to the 1986 tax year are just dicta. For the reasons explained below, we believe that petitioners have the better argument. The Tax Court unequivocally accepted the doctrine of judicial estoppel in Huddleston v. Commissioner, 100 T.C. 17, 28- 29 (1993): We hold that the doctrine of judicial estoppel is available in the Tax Court to be used in appropriate cases, such as the one before us, to prevent parties from taking positions that are inconsistent with those previously asserted by the parties and accepted by courts and that would result in inappropriate and prejudicial consequences to the courts. We used judicial estoppel in Huddleston to prevent the petitioner in that case from denying that he had fiduciary authority to act on behalf of a decedent's estate. Judicial estoppel may apply to issues of law as well as factual issues: "In certain circumstances a party may properly be precluded as a matter of law from adopting a legal position in conflict with one earlier taken in the same or related litigation." Allen v. Zurich Ins. Co., supra at 1166; see In re Cassidy, supra at 641; Reynolds v. Commissioner, 861 F.2d 469 (6th Cir. 1988). Judicial estoppel must be used with caution: "Judicial estoppel is applied with caution to avoid impinging on the truth-seeking function of the court because the doctrine precludes a contradictory positionPage: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Next
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