intangibles
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 307 U.S. 357 - Curry v. McCanless · 1939Most cited · 614 citing opinions
intangibles, that is, rights which are not related to physical things. Such rights are but relationships between persons, natural or corporate, which the law recognizes by attaching to them certain sanctions enforceable in courts.
How the Supreme Court has restated “intangibles”
Each Supreme Court definition of “intangibles,” 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 “intangibles”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “intangibles” — 1,192 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 · 1939–1947
Intangibles, which are legal relationships between persons and which in fact have no geographical location, are so associated with the owner that they and their transfer at death are taxable at the place of his domicile where his person and the exercise of his property rights are subject to the control of the sovereign power.
rights to intangibles 'are but relationships between persons, natural or corporate, which the law recognizes by attaching to them certain sanctions enforceable in courts. The power of government over them and the protection which it gives them cannot be exerted through control of a physical thing. They can be made effective only through control over and protection afforded to those persons whose relationships are the origin of the rights. * * * Obviously, as sources of actual or potential wealth—which is an appropriate measure of any tax imposed on ownership or its exercise—they cannot be dissociated from the persons from whose relationships they are derived. These are not in any sense fictions. They are indisputable realities.
Since the intangibles themselves have no real situs, the domicile of the owner is the nearest approximation, although other taxing jurisdictions may also have power to tax the same intangibles.
tax situs