The Cabinet and Drawer Model: An Institutional Tension Field in Tax Adjudication

This paper introduces The Cabinet and Drawer Model as a named structural model for analyzing institutional tension in rule-dense adjudicative systems. The model distinguishes between domain-level legal coherence (“drawers”) and system-level institutional structure (“cabinet”), identifying interfaces, stall points, and system-level calibration mechanisms through which accumulated legal tension is redistributed. The model is situated within the framework of the Institutional Tension Field and applied to tax adjudication. Rather than attributing institutional breakdown to interpretive disagreement or actor-level failure, the model treats legal impasse as the visible outcome of accumulated structural load within an adjudicative system. It reframes tension not as an anomaly to be resolved through doctrinal clarification, but as a describable field condition produced by high rule density, interface congestion, and asymmetric calibration capacity. In this sense, the Cabinet and Drawer Model functions as a diagnostic grammar for identifying where and how institutional systems stall, redistribute pressure, or temporarily restore operability under constraint.