Commissioner v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
1965
Citation profile
375 federal appellate · 21 district · 44 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 969 later decisions (30 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2025 · most notably United States v. Turkette (1981), Roadway Express, Inc. v. Piper (1980)
375 federal appellate · 21 district · 44 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
reviewedCommissioner v. Brown (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 26 U.S.C. § 1201 · 26 U.S.C. § 1222 · 26 U.S.C. § 514
Relies on Commissioner v. Sunnen · Helvering v. Clifford · Burnet v. Harmel · Corliss v. Bowers · Corn Products Refining Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue
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 969 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the common and ordinary meaning [of a word] should at least be persuasive of its meaning as used in the Internal Revenue Code [except when such a reading] would lead to absurd results ... or would thwart the obvious purpose of the statute.”
37 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the Government might more profitably have broken the transaction into components and attempted to distinguish between the interest which [the taxpayers] retained and the interest which they exchanged. The worth of a business depends upon its ability to produce income over time. What [the taxpayers] gave up was not the entire business, but only their interest in the business’ ability to produce income in excess of that which was necessary to pay them off under the terms of the transaction. The value of such a residual interest is a function of the risk element of the business and the amount of income it is capable of producing per year, and will necessarily be substantially less than the value of the total business. Had the Government argued that it was that interest which [the taxpayers] exchanged, and only to that extent should they have received capital gains treatment, we would perhaps have had a different case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“In dealing with what constitutes a sale for capital gains purposes, this Court has been careful to look through formal legal arrangements to the underlying economic realities. "In Thomas v. Perkins, 301 U.S. 655 , 57 S.Ct. 911, 81 L.Ed. 1324, . . . [the] risks run by the transferor of making or losing money from the oil were shifted so slightly by the transfer that no Sec. 1222(3) sale existed, notwithstanding the fact that the transaction conveyed title as a matter of state law, and once the payout was complete, full ownership of the minerals was to vest in the purchaser.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.