What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
McBRIER v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE.
No. 7155.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Third Circuit.
Dec. 19, 1939.
Elmer K. Weppner, of Buffalo, N. Y., for petitioner.
Samuel O. Clark, Jr., Asst. Atty. Gen., and Sewall Key, Norman D. Keller, and Edward M. English, Sp. Assts. to Atty. Gen., for respondent.
Before MARIS, CLARK, and JONES, Circuit Judges.
CLARK, Circuit Judge.
What is a person? To one conversant with the English language it is primarily a human being or individual. To the lawyer it also suggests a corporation. The lexicographer goes further, listing numerous gradations and differences of meaning, i.e., a role, a personage, or “the body in its external aspect”, New Century Dictionary p. 1288. The Congress, however, outdoes them all. As defined by it in the Revenue Act of 1932:
“Sec. 1111. (a) When used in this Act—
“(1) The term ‘person’ means an individual, a trust or estate, a partnership, or a corporation.” 47 Stat. 289, cf. 26 U.S.C.A. § 1696(1).
This definition carries over into the statute governing the circumstance at bar. Embodied in the same Act, it taxes gifts and reads in part: “(b) Gifts less than $5,000. In the case of gifts (other than of future interests in property) made to any person by the donor during the calendar year, the first $5,000 of such gifts to such person shall not, for the purposes of subsection (a), be included in the total amount of gifts made during such year.” 26 U.S.C. A. § 553(b).
We are asked to determine to what “person” a gift in trust is made. The Commissioner, as respondent-appellee, thinks it is the trust person, so that one trust with ten beneficiaries should be given one exemption and, startlingly, vice versa. The taxpayer, having set up a trust for ten grandchildren, advocates, needless to say, the individual person theory with its far less drastic consequences from the standpoint of tax avoidance.
These opposing views are, of course, the direct result of an express statutory ambiguity. It is appropriate, therefore, to resolve that ambiguity by recourse to pertinent Congressional sources. They are explicit: “Such exemption, on the one hand, is to obviate the necessity of keeping an account of and reporting numerous small gifts, and, on the other, to fix the amount sufficiently large to cover in most cases wedding and Christmas gifts and occasional gifts of relatively small amounts. The exemption does not apply with respect to a gift to any donee to whom is given a future interest. The term ‘future interests in property’ refers to any interest or estate whether vested or contingent, limited to commerce in possession or enjoyment at a future date. The exemption being available only in so far as the donees are ascertainable, the denial of the exemption in the case of gifts of future interests is dictated by the apprehended difficulty in many instances of determining the number of eventual donees and the values of their respective gifts.” 72 Cong. 1st Sess. Sen. Rept. No. 665, p. 41; 72 Cong. 1st Sess. H. Rept. No. 708, p. 29.
To be sure, wedding and Christmas presents are not ordinarily given in trust, nor, on the. other hand, do trusts ever celebrate Christmas or marry. However that may be, a conclusive indication of legislative intent exists, we think, in the reason for the denial of the exemption for gifts of future interests. The trust as an abstraction is immortal. If it is the donee, what becomes of the postulated difficulties of ascertainment and valuation? Other and further grounds for regarding “person” as meaning individual have been summed up in this wise: “ * * * It appears from the Committee Reports on the Revenue Act of 1932 discussing the tax generally that Congress believed that the beneficiary and not the trust whs the donee. Similarly Congress recognized that the beneficiary was the real donee when it exempted from the tax that portion of the present value of a transfer in trust which inured to charity. Furthermore, it has been recognized that where a settlor has irrevocably transferred property to a trust, reserving only the power to change the beneficiary to persons other than himself, there is no taxable gift since the cestuis que trust are not finally determined, and a gift requires a definite donee. Therefore, while it is difficult to overlook the usual recognition of an irrevocable trust as a legal entity for tax purposes and to avoid the fact that the trustee and not the beneficiary is the only one having an immediate legal interest in the property, it seems wiser to recognize that the gift tax should apply to the shifting of economic benefit rather than of bare legal title.” 86 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 907, 908.
The writers’ views are amply sustained by the authorities cited in their support. See, also, Sanford’s Estate v. Commissioner, 60 S.Ct. 51, 84 L.Ed.-. Furthermore, every case on the question has reached the same conclusion, Welch v. Davidson, 1 Cir., 102 F.2d 100; Rheinstrom v. Commissioner, 8 Cir., 105 F.2d 642; Ryerson v. United States, D.C., 28 F.Supp. 265.
One case, not on the question, is the be all and end all of the Commissioner’s contrary attitude, Commissioner v. Wells, 7 Cir., 88 F.2d 339. It holds that the trust is the donee for the purpose of determining whether a gift is of a “future interest in property”. The decision expressly excludes any consideration of the Committee Reports quoted above, and overlooks the possibility of tax avoidance engendered by its doctrine. We feel, therefore, despite the dicta of this court in Commissioner v. Krebs, 3 Cir., 90 F.2d 880, 881 that the Wells case cannot be followed without misgivings, much less extended into the field at bar.
In conclusion it is fitting to observe that the trust person theory has been viewed with Congressional alarm. The Senate Committee on Finance reported in 1938: “ * * * The Board of Tax Appeals and several of the Federal courts have held, with respect to gifts in trust, that the trust entities were the donees and on that account the gifts were of present and not of future interests. The statute, as thus construed, affords ready means of tax avoidance, since a donor may create any number of trusts in the same year in favor of the same beneficiary with a $5,000 exclusion applying to each trust, whereas the gifts, if made otherwise than in trust, would in no case be subject to more than a single exclusion of $5,000.” 75th Cong. 3d Sess. S. Rep. No. 1567, p. 41.
Accordingly, the statute under construction has been amended to withhold the exemption from gifts in trusts as well as those of “future interests”, Act May 28, 1938, § 505(a), 52 Stat. 565, 26 U.S.C.A. § 553(b). A re-definition of the latter term would, of course, have been the more exact solution, and that being so, the plug exceeds the loophole. But this excess does not, we think, indicate any implied legislative disapproval of the interpretation we have adopted. It is only because the apprehended avoidance extended to present as well as future interests in trust that the exemption has been denied to both. Our interpretation excludes that apprehension.
The decision of the Board of Tax Appeals is reversed.
Mr. Justice Frankfurter in the recent ease of Neirbo Company and A. P. Smith Manufacturing Company et al. v. Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, Ltd., 60 S.Ct. 153, 155, 84 L.Ed. —, sums up the success of this suggestion. He says with the lucidity that is now enriching the Supreme Court decisions: “ * * * It has done so largely by assimilating corporations to natural persons. The long, tortuous evolution of the methods whereby foreign corporations gained access to courts or could be brought there, is the history of judicial groping for a reconciliation between the practical position achieved by the corporation in society and a natural desire to confine the powers of these artificial creations.”, citing Henderson, The Position of Foreign Corporations in American Constitutional Law, pp. 163-194. See also Warren, History of the Supreme Court, Vol. 1, p. 389, Vol. 2, p. 394, Vol. 3, p. 427; Warren, History of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, 37 Harvard Law Review 49, 90; Russell, Congress Should Abrogate Federal Jurisdiction over Corporations, 7 Harvard Law Review 16; Thompson, Federal Jurisdiction in Cases of Corporations, 29 American Law Review 864; Trieber, Jurisdiction of Federal Courts in Actions in Which Corporations are Parties, 39 American Law Review 564; Baldwin, A Legal Fiction with Its Wings Clipped, 41 American Law Review 38; Alitzer, Jurisdiction of Federal Courts over State Corporations, 43 American Law Review 409; Frankfurter, Distribution of Judicial Power Between United States and State Courts, 13 Cornell Law Quarterly 499; Friendly, The Historic Basis of Diversity Jurisdiction, 41 Harvard Law Review 483; compare Australasian Temperance and General Mutual Assurance Society, Ltd., v. Howe, 31 C.L.R. 290, and as to the Fourteenth Amendment, Graham, The “Conspiracy Theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment, 47 Yale Law Journal 371, Part 1; 48 Yale Law Journal 171, Part 2.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0