In the Matter of William W. Wagner, Debtor-Appellant’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
11 federal appellate · 2 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 61 later decisions — most recently June 2014 · most notably Elscint, Inc. v. First Wisconsin Financial Corp. (1987), Reichman v. United States Fire Insurance (1987)
11 federal appellate · 2 district ·
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 71496 Morse Electric Company Inc Hoosier Fence Company Inc · Riggsby Suburban Bank of Cary Grove v. W Riggsby · J. Catton Farms Inc. v. First National Bank of Chicago · Goldblatt Bros Inc Firestone Tire Rubber Company v. Goldblatt Bros Inc · Howell 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 61 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Often and here creditors know a fair amount about their debtor’s income ... and can readily determine what his gross income for tax purposes was last year and how much of it came from farming; if they don’t know, and file a petition for involuntary bankruptcy, and in fact the debtor derives more than 80 percent of his gross income (in the tax sense) from farming, the debtor will quickly tell them, and prove it by his tax return. But for either creditor or debtor to decide what the debtor’s gross income is in some sense of “gross income” that is significant for the policy of the bankruptcy law would be an altogether more uncertain undertaking, at least until the courts had evolved a jurisprudence of gross income for this purpose. The threshold determination of eligibility for the exemption should not be subject to such uncertainty. Debtors and creditors ought to be able to know from the start whether the debtor is exempt from bankruptcy; they would not know till much later if we embarked on the protracted undertaking of constructing, in common law manner, case by case, a new jurisprudence of gross income. Wagner, supra at 547 (emphasis added)””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. In Re Shepherd · In Re Smith“The way to make Section 101(17) work best is to make it work simply. That is most easily done by deeming the statute to incorporate the definition of gross income in federal income tax law. Then everyone will know where he stands. Given the arbitrary nature of the statutory definition of farmer, no higher value than certainty can be served by the interpretation of the words gross income; and the interpretation that best serves that value is the one that equates gross income in the Bankruptcy Code to gross income in the tax code.”
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.