576
Souter, J., dissenting
will defer to a tax regulation so long as it "implement[s] the congressional mandate in some reasonable manner"); National Muffler Dealers Assn., Inc. v. United States, 440 U. S. 472, 477 (1979) (listing historical considerations that may give a regulation "particular force"); see also Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837, 843-845 (1984) (reasonable agency interpretations of statutory provisions will be upheld).
I cannot deny, however, that the regulation would suffer real internal tension between its specific, categorical treatment of goodwill and its general analytical test (turning on the existence of a limited life of ascertainable duration), if modern accounting techniques were to develop a subtlety sufficient to make an accurate estimate of goodwill's useful life. Fortunately or not, however, the record in this case raises no such tension.
B
Even under Ledger's revision of the regulation, a depreciation deduction would depend on showing the Booth newspapers' goodwill to have a useful life both limited and measurable with some reasonable degree of certainty. The further step needed for victory is thus evidentiary in nature, and
nondepreciable. Subject to this prohibition, the law concerning the depreciation of intangible assets related to goodwill has developed on a case-by-case basis, and the Government has accepted some of the distinctions that courts have drawn, including the principle that customer lists sold separately from a going business may be depreciable. See Brief for United States 36, n. 34; Rev. Rul. 74-456, 1974-2 Cum. Bull. 65, 66 (modifying earlier rulings "to remove any implication that customer and subscription lists, location contracts, insurance expirations, etc., are, as a matter of law, indistinguishable from goodwill"). Such matters are not at issue in this case, however, because the asset that Ledger seeks to depreciate is indistinguishable from goodwill. See 945 F. 2d 555, 568 (CA3 1991) (Newark Morning Ledger did not attempt, in this case, to claim a separate depreciation allowance for the subscriber lists it acquired).
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