Lawton-v-Steele

Substance Over Form

The doctrinal name for what colloquial argument calls the duck test: courts will look past the nominal label of a transaction or arrangement to what it actually is and does. The doctrine has nearly a century of force in U.S. law — Gregory v. Helvering (1935), Knetsch (1960), the codified economic-substance doctrine at 26 U.S.C. § 7701(o) — and the police power has its own internal version (Lawton v. Steele's three-part test). What is worth naming, though, is the asymmetry: substance over form is overwhelmingly the system's sword against parties (especially taxpayers and corporate gamesters); it is much less often the shield citizens get to wield against the system, particularly at the individual case level (Whren v. United States closes that door for police-power enforcement). The critique lives one level up — structural pattern-and-practice analysis and the long-run legitimacy question — not in individual defenses.