West v. Oklahoma Tax Commission’s Empirical Analysis
334 U.S. 717 · 1948
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 78 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2021 · most notably United States v. Wells Fargo Bank (1988), United States v. Mason (1973)
13 federal appellate · 31 state decisions — followed in 11 states
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
Relies on M'Culloch v. State of Maryland · United States v. Allegheny County Pa · Van Brocklin v. Anderson · United States v. Rickert · Helvering v. Mountain Producers Corp.
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 78 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * An inheritance or estate tax is not levied on the property of which an estate is composed. Rather it is imposed upon the shifting of economic benefits and the privilege of transmitting or receiving such benefits. United States Trust Co. of New York v. Helvering, 307 U.S. 57 , 60, 59 S.Ct. 692 , 693, 83 L.Ed. 1104 ; Whitney v. State Tax Commission, 309 U.S. 530 , 538, 60 S.Ct. 635 , 638, 84 L.Ed. 909 . In this case, for example, the decedent had a vested interest in his Osage headright; and he had the right to receive the annual income from the trust properties and to receive all the properties at the end of the trust period. At his death, these interests and rights passed to his heir. It is the transfer of these incidents, rather than the trust properties themselves, that is the subject of the inheritance tax in question. In this setting, refinements of title are immaterial. Whether legal title to the properties is in the United States or in the decedent and his heir is of no consequence to the taxability of the transfer. The result of permitting the imposition of the inheritance tax on the transfer of trust properties may be, as we have noted, to deplete the trust corpus and to create lien difficulties. But those are normal and intended consequences of the inheritance tax. And until Congress has in some affirmative way indicated that these burdens require that the transfer be immune from the inheritance tax liability, the Oklahoma Tax Commission ease permits that liabi”
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.