Commissioner v. Coward’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

9 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““We must determine whether a given payment is a forced contribution to the expense of-government, or whether it is something else' — a voluntary capital expenditure, for example. Its solution must lie in a close analysis of the transaction of pay ment. It cannot,' in our judgment, be solved by any rule of thumb that a property owner’s payment is not one of a tax on his property because a prior owner (on the accrual basis) might have been permitted to accrue it. For that permission to accrue may depend on technical exigencies of accounting utterly foreign to the later owner’s economic position in actually making the payment. * * * “Where, on the other hand, the tax payment falls into neither of these two categories — where it neither discharges (by contract, express or implied) the personal liability of another, nor what was originally a tax lien on another’s property — the deduction has been permitted, Commissioner v. Plestcheeff, 9 Cir., 100 F.2d 62 .””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Commissioner v. Rust's Estate