Campbell v. Commissioner’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
6 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently April 1991
6 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 Gilbert v. California · Kerestes v. United States · Bercaw v. Commissioner · Matheson v. Commissioner · Bertrand W. Cohn v. United States of America, William R. Kent v. United States of America, Louise C. Kent v. United States
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Taxpayers have cited no case where a deduction as a casualty loss has ever been allowed for plant life afflicted with disease. The nearest approach is the [termite] cases! 10 ! In those cases, the damage was inflicted by the termites themselves. In the case at bar, the beetles inflicted little or no damage, but acted merely as a carrier of a disease with which the tree became infected. The carrying of disease germs is not peculiar to insects. Disease germs are carried in a variety of ways, even by human beings and by the air which we breathe. There is nothing sudden, unusual or unexpected for a beetle (or any other insect) to feed on a tree, or to deposit its eggs underneath the bark in the tree lining or to act as a carrier of disease or for the tree to become infected with disease and die in consequence thereof. These are everyday occurrences of nature. While it is true that the tree was removed within a relatively short period of time, the reason for its removal was the disease which would have ultimately caused its death. The action of the disease is a progressive one. The reason for removing the tree before this progressive force ran its natural course was to prevent the spread of the disease to other trees in the area. To allow recovery here would necessitate an extension of the doctrine of [the termite cases]. The result would be to open wide the door to all sorts of claims for casualty deduction on account of loss or damage to plant life or animals caused by any kind ”
2 later decisions 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.