complete gift
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 308 U.S. 39 - Sanford's Estate v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue · 1939Most cited · 1,071 citing opinions
a retention of control over the disposition of the trust property, whether for the benefit of the donor or others, renders the gift incomplete until the power is relinquished whether in life or at death. The rule was thus established, and has ever since been consistently followed by the Court, that a transfer of property upon trust, with power reserved to the donor either to revoke it and recapture the trust property or to modify its terms so as to designate new beneficiaries other than himself is incomplete, and becomes complete so as to subject the transfer to death taxes only on relinquishment of the power at death.
How often courts cite the case defining “complete gift”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “complete gift” — 1,062 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case 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.