Legal argument mining supports passage classification, retrieval, and argument completion.
This work introduces an expert-annotated dataset of 42 U.S. federal tax opinions on corporate reorganizations under I.R.C. §368. To our knowledge, it is the first expert-annotated, tree-structured argument corpus for this domain.
Explicit spans receive one of five functional labels: Rule, Analysis, Conclusion, Background Facts, and Procedural History.
Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion spans can be linked into directed support trees, while Background Facts and Procedural History serve a contextual function.
The corpus provides span-based, sentence-based, flat, and tree-structured representations.
Agreement analysis shows that functional node labels are more reliable than directed support edges and implicit intermediate conclusions.
Directed-path agreement is stronger than direct-edge agreement, which indicates that broad reachability is more stable than exact local decomposition.
Classification experiments show that functional labels are learnable under case-disjoint evaluation.
Retrieval experiments show that supervised fine-tuning improves within-case retrieval. However, cross-case generalization remains weak.
The dataset supports legal passage classification and provides a conservative benchmark for structured argument mining in U.S. federal tax case law.