234
Opinion of the Court
already noted, the Jewett Court held that "the transfer" in the 1958 version of the Regulation refers to the creation of the interest being disclaimed, with the "reasonable time" therefore beginning to run upon knowledge of the creation of the trust. See supra, at 229.
III
A
On one point there cannot be any serious dispute, for it is clear that if the Regulation applies to Mrs. Irvine's disclaimer, her act resulted in taxable gifts. The knowledge and capacity to act, which are presupposed by the requirement that a tax-free disclaimer be made within a reasonable time of the disclaimant's knowledge of the transfer of the interest to her, were present in this instance at least as early as Mrs. Irvine's 21st birthday in 1931.10 We need not decide whether a disclaimer good for gift tax purposes could be required to have been made before enactment of the gift tax, for Mrs. Irvine did not disclaim shortly after enactment of the Act, and the timeliness determination in this case would be the same whether the reasonable time was calculated from Mrs. Irvine's first knowledge of the interest (1931) or from the enactment of the federal gift tax statute (1932). Moreover, we understand the Government to have conceded that it would not have contested the timeliness of a disclaimer made within a reasonable time after the enactment of the Act. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 12.
The determination of the amount of "reasonable time" that remained after Mrs. Irvine learned of the interest and reached majority status must be based upon the gift tax's purpose to curb avoidance of the estate tax. We have al-10 Arguably, occasion and capacity occurred under applicable Minnesota law in 1928 when Mrs. Irvine became 18 years old, the age of majority for women at the time. 1866 Minn. Gen. Stat., ch. 59, § 2; see Vlasek v. Vlasek, 204 Minn. 331, 331-332, 283 N. W. 489, 490 (1939).
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