sixteenth amendment
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 240 U.S. 1 - Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad · 1916Most cited · 1,718 citing opinions
It is clear on the face of this text that it does not purport to confer power to levy income taxes in a generic sense,—an authority already possessed and never questioned,—or to limit and distinguish between one kind of income taxes and another, but that the whole purpose of the Amendment was to relieve all income taxes when imposed from apportionment from a consideration of the source whence the income was derived.
How the Supreme Court has restated “sixteenth amendment”
Each Supreme Court definition of “sixteenth amendment,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “sixteenth amendment”
Court decisions citing the 3 opinions that defined “sixteenth amendment” — 2,402 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 3 definitions, chronological · 1916–1926
- ORIGINAL
The provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation, but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged, and being placed in the category of direct taxation subject to apportionment by a consideration of the sources from which the income was derived.
no new power
It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power. The Amendment relieved from that requirement and obliterated the distinction in that respect between taxes on income that are direct taxes and those that are not, and so put on the same basis all incomes 'from whatever source derived.