What Is the Most Heavily-Cited Tax Case?

My friend and colleague Adam Steinman just handed me a reprint of his article, The Irrepressible Myth of Celotex: Reconsidering Summary Judgment Burdens Twenty Years after the Trilogy, 63 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 81 (2006).  Although the subject matter likely is of little interest to most readers of this blog, Adam unearthed a fascinating tidbit:  apparently there has been little empirical work identifying the most frequently cited cases.  With the help of LexisNexis, Adam published fascinating charts in his appendix (at pages 143-45) of the 15 most-cited cases by federal courts and tribunals and the 30 most-cited cases by federal and state courts and tribunals.  Here are the 10 most-cited cases from the latter chart:

There is not a tax case in any of Adam's charts.  So that got me to thinking:  what are the most heavily cited tax cases?  Is there any empirical work addressing the question?  Comments are open.

In our Tax Stories book, we took a stab at identifying what we think are the ten most influential income tax cases of all time.  Here is a back of the envelope calculation of the federal citations to the ten cases in Tax Stories:

Some of these results are surprising (at least to me), especially the dominance of Welch v. Helvering and the comparatively weak showing of Knetsch and Crane.  What other tax cases belong on this list?

For more on Tax Stories:

• Buy the book on amazon.com
• Free digital supplement, with copies of all of the opinions and briefs in the ten cases, along with transcripts and audio files of the oral arguments (where available)
• Free copy of my Introduction:  Tax Archaeology