Cite as: 511 U. S. 224 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
otherwise be authorized, taxation of the transfer following Mrs. Irvine's disclaimer would violate this limitation. The language that respondents use to frame this claim reveals the flaw in their position. Respondents argue that "[t]he government's interpretation of the 1986 Regulation to apply to interests created before enactment of the Act [i. e., to result in taxability] would be a retroactive application of the Act clearly contrary to Congressional intent." Brief for Respondents 26. But § 501 merely prohibited application of the gift tax statute to transfers antedating the enactment of the Act; it did not prohibit taxation when interests created before the Act were transferred after enactment. Such postenactment transfers are all that happened on the occasion of Mrs. Irvine's disclaimer. The critical events, the transfers of fractional portions of Mrs. Irvine's remainder to her children, occurred after enactment of the gift tax, though the interests transferred were created before that date. To argue otherwise, that the transfer to be taxed antedated the Act, would be to cling to the legal fiction that the disclaimer related back to the moment in 1917 when Lucius P. Ordway established the trust. This fiction may be indulged under state law as a device to regulate creditors' rights, but the Jewett Court clearly held that Congress enacted no such fantasy.19 In sum, the retroactivity argument is sufficiently answered by our statement in United States v. Jacobs, 306 U. S. 363, 367 (1939), that a tax "does not operate retroactively merely because some of the facts or conditions upon which its application depends came into being prior to the enactment of the tax."
19 While respondents do not take the further step of arguing that § 502 should be read to embody the fiction because due process would otherwise be violated, they do argue that taxation here would violate due process because Mrs. Irvine would not have been allowed to make a tax-free disclaimer within a reasonable time after adoption of the Act. But those facts are not presented here, as Mrs. Irvine did not disclaim until 1979. See supra, at 235.
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