Pollock was never overruled — only circumvented by the Sixteenth Amendment

The claim

Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429 (1895), struck down the 1894 income tax as an unapportioned direct tax. Pollock has never been formally overruled by the Supreme Court. Some advocates argue this means Pollock still controls outside the narrow scope the Sixteenth Amendment addresses — specifically, that a tax on income from sources other than those contemplated by the amendment is still subject to Pollock’s apportionment requirement.

What’s true about this

Pollock genuinely was never overruled. The Sixteenth Amendment did not say “Pollock is overruled”; it said taxes on incomes “from whatever source derived” need not be apportioned. Brushaber later characterized this as removing the direct-tax obstacle for the income-tax category, but the characterization preserves Pollock’s underlying analysis of what direct taxes are.

So the textual point is correct: a federal tax that meets Pollock’s definition of a direct tax — a tax on the ownership of property as such — would still require apportionment, even today. This is why estate and gift taxes are structured as taxes on the transfer rather than as taxes on the wealth itself, and why proposals for a federal wealth tax raise serious constitutional questions.

What’s overstated

The argument that Pollock survives in a way that limits the income tax is where the claim stops working. The Sixteenth Amendment broadly authorizes taxation of “incomes, from whatever source derived” without apportionment. The Court has consistently held that this language captures wage income, investment income, business income, and any other recognizable form of income. There is no serious argument that any garden-variety income source falls outside the amendment’s reach.

Verdict

Partially supported. Pollock is technically still good law and is doctrinally relevant to the wealth-tax debate. But the claim that this somehow limits the modern income tax is unsupported. The amendment did the work; the non-overruling of Pollock is a curiosity, not a constraint.

• pollock
• sixteenth-amendment
• direct-tax
• apportionment