Court Opinion

ID: 9426604
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:25.608058+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:01.880261
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Stevens,
concurring.
Me. Justice Blackmun advances persuasive policy arguments against the Court’s reading of § 172. But the same *49arguments apply equally to the Code’s treatment of an operating loss which occurs in the same year as an offsetting capital gain. In paragraph 7 of his opinion Mr. Justice Blackmun seems to accept the necessity of a “wooden and unimaginative reading” of the statute in the “same year” situation though he rejects such a reading in a case involving different years. Since the statutory language seems rather plain in both situations, I think we have the same duty in both to resist the temptation to attempt any creative rewriting of the Internal Revenue Code. The relevant Code provisions were perfectly clear in 1939 and there is simply no basis for concluding that the 1954 Code was intended to achieve the result favored by Mr. Justice Blackmun, no matter how sensible such a result would be. Accordingly, as much as I would like to reach the result advocated by the dissent, I find the arguments in the Court’s opinion, which I join, unanswerable.