Commissioner v. Banks’s Empirical Analysis
2005
Citation profile
37 federal appellate · 10 district · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 270 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2025 · most notably Speltz v. Comm'r (2005), Green v. Commissioner (2007)
37 federal appellate · 10 district · 32 state decisions — followed in 10 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedBanks v. Commissioner (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 26 U.S.C. § 1 (Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2008) · 26 U.S.C. § 61 (Payment-in-Kind Tax Treatment Act of 1983) · 26 U.S.C. § 702 · 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (Civil Rights Act of 1866) · 42 U.S.C. § 2000E (§ 701 of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964)
Relies on Hensley v. Eckerhart · Commissioner v. Sunnen · Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Glenshaw Glass Company · Helvering v. Horst · Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Culbertson
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 270 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“is a quintessential principal-agent relationship”
4 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Allum v. Comm'r · Connors v. Comm'r“The attorney is an agent who is dutybound to act only in the interests of the principal, and so it is appropriate to treat the full amount of the recovery as income to the principal.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The contingent-fee lawyer is not a joint owner of his client's claim in the legal sense any more than the commission salesman is a joint owner of his employer’s accounts receivable. In both cases a principal relies on an agent to realize an economic gain, and the gain realized by the agent’s efforts is income to the principal. The portion paid to the agent may be deductible, but absent some other provision of law it is not excludable from the principal’s gross income. This rule applies whether or not the attorney-client contract or state law confers any special rights or protections on the attorney, so long as these protections do not alter the fimdamen-tal principal-agent character of the relationship.”
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.