Joseph Chappell Hutcheson, Jr., then the circuit's chief judge, wrote for the panel in affirming the Tax Court's holding, although he also left intact some of the refunds it had granted.

While it has not been cited in many later tax cases,[2] its unintentionally humorous title,[3] suggesting a lawsuit between Batman and Commissioner Gordon from the DC Comics franchise, has earned it some notoriety in legal circles.

[4][5] After spending his teen years working in wheat fields around the country, Ray Batman settled down on his own farm near Perryton, Texas, in 1923.

Three years later he farmed and ranched 200 head of cattle on over 6,500 acres (2,600 ha) of land near Perryton and in nearby Harper County, Kansas.

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.

"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.

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.

"But for the partnership label affixed to it by the father, the inventor, creator, and deus ex machina of the plan for increasing his family's net earnings by decreasing the taxes accruing on them, no one would have any difficulty in seeing the arrangement for what it is, another attempt of the earner of the income to have his cake and eat it too, vicariously, indeed, for the present through his son.

"[11] He likened it to the scheme before the Supreme Court two decades earlier in Lucas v. Earl, where the justices had disallowed a man's attempt to avoid taxes on half his income through a contract with his wife.