depletion
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 274 U.S. 295 - United States v. Ludey · 1927Most cited · 811 citing opinions
The depletion charge permitted as a deduction from the gross income in determining the taxable income of mines for any year represents the reduction in the mineral contents of the reserves from which the product is taken. The reserves are recognized as wasting assets. The depletion effected by operation is likened to the using up of raw material in making the product of a manufacturing establishment.
How the Supreme Court has restated “depletion”
Each Supreme Court definition of “depletion,” 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 “depletion”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “depletion” — 1,575 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 4 definitions, chronological · 1925–1945
- ORIGINAL
In the case of mines, a specific kind of property, the exhaustion is described as depletion, and is limited to an amount not exceeding the market value in the mine of the product mined and sold during the year.
a deduction allowed for the exhaustion of the property—the ore mass; Congress has allowed a recovery of the capital invested in a mine but allowed nothing beyond that investment; the depletion deduction is allowed in the ore extracted or expected to be extracted
Depletion is applicable to wasting assets—to the exhaustion of natural resources, not of property used in a business.