Fabreeka Products Co. v. Commissioner

ALDRICH, Circuit Judge.

These three cases illustrate that there is nothing more conducive to disagreement than the matter of interpreting a statute whose apparent meaning would produce in the particular instance a result distasteful to the court. The common question is how far a court should go in analyzing a transaction or series of transactions literally within a statute, in the light of a finding that a taxpayer's sole motivation was tax-avoidance, and interpreting the statute to deny a claimed deduction. The Fabreeka Products Co. and Sherman cases led to five different approaches in the…