McDonald v. Maxwell’s Empirical Analysis
274 U.S. 91 · 1927
Citation profile
33 federal appellate · 3 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions (6 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2007 · most notably Harris v. Commissioner (1950), In re Marriage of Smith (1981)
33 federal appellate · 3 district · 4 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedMcDonald v. Maxwell (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Eisner v. Macomber · Gibbons v. Mahon · Kenaday v. Sinnott · Quon Quon Poy v. Johnson · Williams v. . Western Union Telegraph Co.
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 62 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““A stock dividend really takes nothing from the property of the corporation, and adds nothing to the interests of the shareholders. Its property is not diminished, and their interests are not increased. After such a dividend, as before, the corporation has the title in all the corporate property; the aggregate interests therein of all the shareholders are represented by the whole number of shares; and the proportional interest of each shareholder remains the same. The only change is in the evidence which represents that interest, the new shares and the original shares together representing the same proportional interest that the original shares represented before the issue of new ones.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“After their issuance, which necessarily “ diluted ” the value of the original shares, the dividend shares and the original shares together represented the same proportional interest in the corporate properties that had previously been represented by the original shares alone; no more and no less. Clearly, therefore, the dividend shares themselves represented no increase in the value of the estate; and they could not properly be taken as the basis for the allowance of a commission to the executors on the theory that their receipt, in and of itself, constituted an increase in its capital.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“merely changed the form of the estate's investment * * * by increasing the number of its shares.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.