Nonprofit Publishing and a Defense of the Commerciality Doctrine

When I was a younger person with numerous pretensions and abundant spare reading time, if asked for my favorite to work to revisit regularly, I probably would have cited some bleak French or Russian literature that I may have read one and a half times (generous) but nonetheless decided was core to my personality.

Having traded (some of) those pretensions and (nearly all of) that spare reading time and attention span for the life of a nonprofit tax lawyer, the answer now might be Revenue Ruling 67-4: a 56-year old one-page-long ruling about when publishing counts as an educational activity for 501(c)(3) purposes. Life comes at you fast, etc.

Revenue Ruling 67-4 is not even mentioned in the 501(c)(3) application-denial ruling that caught my eye this week. But it easily could have been. And I think it pairs neatly with something that is cited: the commerciality doctrine, as articulated in Living Faith, Inc. vs. Commissioner, a 32-year old tax case about a religious health food store.

So, join me in a discussion of these two great works of “literature”, and the 501(c)(3) publisher that never was.