Edith Libutti, Doing Business as Lion Crest Stable, a Sole Proprietorship v. United States

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• noting that defendant could have asked judge to “allow question-by- question examination” that might have focused on specific actions and generated permissible adverse inferences
• “finding that the overarching concern is fundamentally whether the adverse inference is trustworthy under all of the circumstances and will advance the search for the truth.”
• finding that unincorporated business could be subject to reverse veil-piercing, and noting that courts “must avoid an over-rigid preoccupation with questions of structure” and “apply the preexisting and overarching principle that liability is imposed to reach an equitable result”
• collecting cases and noting that under the theory of “reverse piercing,” assets of a corporate entity may be used to satisfy the debts of the controlling alter ego
• finding that “many of the management problems which a trial court invariably has to wrestle with in order to guard against unfair prejudice when one takes the proverbial Fifth simply do not exist in the context of a bench trial.”
• stating that “the circumstances of this case compel the admissibility and consideration by the trial court of [the taxpayer’s] refusals to answer the questions addressed to him that struck directly at the only issue before the court-whether he or his daughter was the effective owner”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).