Jones v. Helvering’s Empirical Analysis
71 F.2d 214 · 1934
Citation profile
64 federal appellate · 2 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 125 later decisions (6 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 1980 · most notably Gregory v. Helvering (1935), Higgins v. Smith (1940)
64 federal appellate · 2 district · 4 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.
Relationships
Relies on Burnet v. Clark · Burnet v. Commonwealth Improvement Co. · Dalton v. Bowers · Bullen v. State of Wisconsin · United States v. Isham
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 125 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““That brings us back to the single query whether the possession of the power to do the thing the Board denounces, that is to say, the ability through stock ownership to control the corporate action, is sufficient to make a sale otherwise unobjectionable subject to be treated as a nullity for tax purposes. The only argument that can be urged in the affirmative is that it is against public policy to allow a taxpayer to incorporate his business in such a way as through manipulation or transfers between himself and it he can place the one or the other beyond the reach of the taxing statutes, and there is great force to the argument. But, so far as we know, in cases where the element of fraud in fact is lacking, it has been the invariable holding that a taxpayer may resort to any legal methods available to him to diminish the amount of his tax liability. Bullen v. State of Wisconsin, 240 U.S. 625, 630 , 36 S.Ct. 473 , 60 L.Ed. 830 . In Iowa Bridge Co. v. Commissioner, supra, 39 F.2d 777 , at page 781, Judge Gardner, speaking for the Court of Appeals in the Eighth Circuit, said: ‘In fact, it is held that even though the transaction is a device to avoid the burden of taxation, or to lessen that burden, it is not for that reason alone illegal.’ * * * “Here, as we have seen, the Commission^ er makes no charge of actual fraud, but on the contrary concedes that there was none. The corporation itself was legally organized and possessed all the powers and attributes of an ordinary busines”
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.