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Pollock, Macomber, And The Role Of The Federal Courts In The Development Of The Income Tax In The United States, Charlotte Crane

Law and Contemporary Problems

Crane notes that the federal income tax is much more a lawyer's tax than either the income taxes of other jurisdictions or the several nonincome federal taxes. She locates the source of the legalistic nature of the tax in the Supreme Court's 1895 opinion in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., invalidating the income tax of 1894 as a constitutionally impermissible unapportioned direct tax. She describes how the ghost of Pollock hovered over the income tax for decades after its reintroduction in 1913, inspiring Eisner v. Macomber and other judicial explorations of the constitutional meaning of income. Moreover, she …