What. A. Year.

When tax geeks arose from their slumber on January 1, 2018, we were greeted by a strange and unfamiliar world. Gone were personal exemptions, Section 199, and 50% bonus depreciation. In their place were a doubled standard deduction, Section 199A, and 100% bonus depreciation. These changes, in addition to countless others, were the end result of a whirlwind legislative process that overhauled our beloved Internal Revenue Code in a mere seven weeks, an act of Congressional hubris that tax professionals will rue for years to come.

As a result of this sweeping new legislation, ever since the calendar turned to 2018, all of our attention has been focused on getting up to speed on the new law. But while we’ve been up to the strained waistline of our pleated Dockers in Opportunity Zones and interest limitations, the century worth of tax law that existed prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has been completely ignored. Thousands of provisions survived the recent round of reform, and throughout 2018, many of those provisions have found their way into the Tax Court, where disputes between taxpayers and the IRS have ended in all-important judicial precedent.

But anyone who claims to have kept up with the Tax Court in 2018 is flat-out lying. Save for the occasional Wesley Snipes appearance, most of the cases decided by the court in 2018 have gone largely unnoticed, lost to the piles of proposed regulations that have been published on the new law.

And that, quite frankly, is unacceptable. We can’t be like Homer, who once lamented that every time he learned something new, it pushed some old stuff out of his brain. We’ve got to do it all: get a grasp on the new law, while continuing to master the old. After all, Judge Holmes ain’t offering up that word play for no one to read it.

So let’s do this. Over the next twelve weeks, lets dissect one Tax Court case from each month of 2018. Keep in mind, these cases are not necessarily the most important decisions of each month, but rather the ones that I believe to be most useful to your humble workaday tax pro. If you disagree, write your own damn list.