Lemery v. Commissioner’s Empirical Analysis
1969
Citation profile
5 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 45 later decisions — most recently September 2013 · most notably Fox v. Commissioner (1983), Jackson v. Commissioner (1986)
5 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 Higgins v. Smith · Crane v. Commissioner · Schulz v. Commissioner · O. H. Kruse Grain & Milling v. Commissioner · Schulz 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 45 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is respondent’s position that the obligation was contingent and indefinite and, therefore, not part of the cost basis for amortization purposes, . . . . Petitioners agree that a contingent liability is not part of the basis for amortization but contend that here, although payment of the obligation was contingent on the ‘net profit’ earned by the business, the liability created by the purchase agreement was not contingent, and that the cost of the property includes the amount of such liability even though no payments were made to discharge it, citing Crane v. Commissioner . . . . The difficulty with petitioners’ contention is that although the stock purchase agreement states the overall purchase price to be $1,131,000 of which $646,664.83 represented mortgages and other indebtedness which the corporations themselves were obligated to pay and $40,000 was paid by the petitioners in cash, the remaining $444,335.17 which included the $200,000 assigned to the covenant was to be paid only out of ‘net profit’ of the companies. There was no provision that this balance or any portion thereof was to be paid by petitioners if the companies did not show a ‘net profit.’ Under these circumstances we think the obligation, as well as the payment, was contingent.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“To provide a basis for such deductions the “covenant must have some independent basis in fact or some arguable relationship with business reality such that reasonable men, genuinely concerned with their economic future, might bargain for such an agreement.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.