Major v. Major’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently February 2017
20 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 26 U.S.C. § 179
Relies on Padilla v. Montano · Jurado v. Jurado · In Re the Marriage of Stewart · Henderson v. Lekvold · Roberts v. Wright
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The limitation imposed by the trial court comes from Section 179 of the Internal Revenue Code. This section allows a taxpayer to elect to treat the cost of deprecia-ble property purchased for use in the active conduct of a trade or business as an expense in the year the property is placed in service, rather than as property that is capitalized and thereafter subject to depreciation over a number of years.... It is designed to “ ‘encourage additional investment in small business since it provides for a faster recovery of capital before the taxing of earnings.’” Smyers v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 57 T.C. 189, 203 , 1971 WL 2598 (1971) (quoting H.R. Rep. 85-2198 (1958)). Additionally, since the property is immediately expensed, there is no need to maintain a depreciation schedule on these assets.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Watson v. Watson“Mother argues that this case comes down to an analysis of depreciation. She appears to be arguing that because Father depreciates the cattle over a period of years, he cannot expense them as inventory in one year. That is not what is happening here. Rather, Father is requesting that, when the trial court determines his income for child support purposes, it deduct as a necessary business expense the annual cost of replenishing his breeding herd. Again, how that cost is treated for income tax purposes is not necessarily relevant to determining income for child support.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Watson v. Watson“The lesson we glean from these cases is that we are more concerned with a parent’s actual cash flow than we are with income as represented on tax returns.... We do not rely on technical treatments more appropriate for accounting and tax purposes unless there is evidence that those technical treatments bear some relation to actual cash flow.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Watson v. Watson
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.