Millsap v. Commissioner’s Empirical Analysis
1968
Citation profile
10 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 144 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2019 · most notably United States v. Generes (1972), Zmuda v. Commissioner (1982)
10 federal appellate ·
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 Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Duberstein D Stanton · Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Glenshaw Glass Company · Whipple v. Commissioner · Trent v. Commissioner
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 144 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Devoting one’s time and energies to the affairs of a corporation is not of itself, and without more, a trade or business of the person so engaged.... Even if the taxpayer demonstrates an independent trade or business of his own, care must be taken to distinguish bad debt losses arising from his own business and those actually arising from activities peculiar to an investor concerned with, and participating in, the conduct of the corporate business. If full-time service to one corporation does not alone amount to a trade or business, which it does not, it is difficult to understand how the same service to many corporations would suffice. To be sure, the presence of more than one corporation might lend support to a finding that the taxpayer ivas engaged in a regular course of promoting corporations for afee or commission, or for a profit on their sale, but in such cases there is compensation other than the normal investor’s return, income received directly for his own services rather than indirectly through the corporate enterprise.... [S]ince the Tax Court found, and the petitioner does not dispute, that there was no intention here of developing the corporations as going businesses for sale to customers in the ordinary course, the case before us inexorably rests upon the claim that one who actively engages in serving his own corporations for the purpose of creating future income through those enterprises is in a trade or business. That argument is untenable ... and we reject i”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“a debt other than— (A) a debt created or acquired (as the case may be) in connection with a trade or business of the taxpayer; or (B) a debt the loss from the worthlessness of which is incurred in -the taxpayer’s trade or business.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[B]eing a salaried corporate executive may be a trade or business,”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Bell v. Commissioner
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.