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The United States Patent and Trademark Office is tasked with the job of reading patent applications and determining which ones qualify for patent protection. It is a herculean task, and the Patent Office pursues it subject to enormous informational and budgetary constraints. Nonetheless, under current law, courts are bound to defer to the Patent Office's decisions regarding patent validity. That is a mistake. Deference to previous decisions is appropriate in instances where those previous decisions have a high likelihood of being accurate. But to grant significant deference to the initial process of patent review is to defer to an unavoidably and significantly inaccurate signal. Put bluntly, early patent review is not reliable and is unlikely to become so. In this Article, we explain why and propose the creation of a two-tier system of patent validity, with a strong presumption being given to patents after they have been subject to any of a number of intensive review procedures, but only a weak presumption being awarded as a matter of course upon patent issuance.

The DRC v Uganda case failed on all of these fronts with regard to evidentiary standards for self-defense. It not only constituted another missed opportunity for the articulation of an explicit standard, but by implicitly employing differing standards throughout, it undermined the possibility of a desirable 'clear and convincing' standard emerging from the jurisprudence of the Court.

The essential character and purpose of tax controversy is precisely the same as that which underlies broader civil processes: bringing conflict to closure. The rules are best understood by working backward from the mechanisms in extremis. The Code provides for compromises and closing agreements; it explicitly refers to the function of the Office of Appeals as \"dispute resolution.\" It distinguishes between \"administrative proceeding\" and \"court proceedings.\" The shortcomings of that process, and how they apply and sometimes are magnified in the work that tax lawyers do every day, is the real focus of this article. Part II lays the foundation for critically looking at specific statutory presumptions by briefing their common law ancestry and sampling their modern codification. Part III analyzes the critical role of the burden of proof in factfinding, and what the different standards of proof mean in terms of corresponding rates of error in outcomes.