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jurisdiction over all the counterclaims, and the Government
appealed this holding. The parties agreed that the counterclaims
could cancel the Government's general claim for damages of
$68,279.72. The issue in dispute was whether the counterclaims
could also be asserted against the Government's claim for the
reclamation of its property, so that the whole of the
counterclaims could have effect. The Court of Appeals found that
they could not be asserted to that extent, since the Government
had not waived its sovereign immunity to that extent. In
holding, in effect, that the property claim did not involve the
same transaction, the Court of Appeals gave a particularly narrow
reading of the single-transaction requirement, especially for a
bankruptcy case. That issue would almost certainly be decided
differently today,38 so that there would be no question of
38Cf. In re Pullman Constr. Indus., Inc., 142 Bankr. 280
(Bankr. N.D. Ill. 1992) (questioning In re Greenstreet, Inc., 209
F.2d 660 (7th Cir. 1954), on the basis of later Seventh Circuit
decisions about the single-transaction issue, making the test for
deciding whether sovereign immunity is waived with respect to a
counterclaim whether the counterclaim is a compulsory
counterclaim to the claim in question, and holding on that basis
that sovereign immunity had been waived with respect to the
counterclaim), affd. sub nom. United States v. Pullman Constr.
Indus., Inc., 153 Bankr. 539 (N.D. Ill. 1993), appeal dismissed
sub nom. Pullman Constr. Indus., Inc. v. United States, 23 F.3d
1166 (7th Cir. 1994). Query whether if there has been such a
liberalization of the single-transaction requirement for
equitable recoupment in bankruptcy, there should not be a similar
liberalization in the tax area, and whether the post-Rothensies
v. Electric Storage Battery Co. cases cited in the discussion of
the single-transaction requirement do not demonstrate precisely
(continued...)
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