favorable view of such partnerships among family members, seeing them as a potential tax dodge. Over the next two years he distributed some of the farm's assets and profits to Gerald, per an oral agreement he claimed the two had made. He and his wife filed their tax returns reflecting this. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), however, did not consider the partnership between Ray and Gerald to have been legitimately formed and assessed both the Batmans almost $10,000 each in extra income tax for the years 1944 and 1945. Litigation The Batmans filed an appeal of the IRS's determination in United States Tax Court. It was not heard there until 1950. Judge Eugene Black issued a memorandum opinion in March upholding the IRS. While he agreed that some of the facts on the record supported Batman's assertions, he could not find that the partnership between father and son had been formed at the initiative of both parties. "The question of whether the partnership here in question is to be recognized for income tax purposes depends upon whether the parties, in good faith and acting with a business purpose, intended to join together as partners in the present conduct of the enterprise," he wrote, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Commissioner v. Culbertson, which had involved a similar division of a family-owned ranch among sons. "It seems to us," he continued, Ray Batman claimed that his son was a silent partner, but Black could not find anything in the record which supported that. Since everything else suggested that the older man had continued to run the farm by himself as before, he agreed with the IRS that no partnership existed. He did, however, allow some of the deductions that the agency had denied Batman for those years. The Batmans appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They claimed the Tax Court had given too much weight to their son's infancy, Ray Batman's status as head of the farm and Gerald's being the silent partner. A three-judge panel composed of Joseph Chappell Hutcheson, Jr., Wayne G. Borah and Robert Lee Russell took the case and rendered a decision over a year later, in 1951. Unanimously, they agreed with Black. After briefly reviewing the parties' arguments, Hutcheson stated unequivocally that the court agreed with the IRS. "But for the partnership label affixed to it by the father, the inventor, creator,