A number of commentators contended that the Court in Eisner v. Macomber had gone too far in overturning a statute taxing stock dividends (the 1916 Act) that many perceived as being fair and equitable. Henry Simons, a noted tax scholar of the time, in his treatise, observed the following:  Actually, an utterly trivial issue was made the occasion for injecting into our fundamental law a mass of rhetorical confusion which no orderly mind can contemplate respectfully, and for giving constitutional status to naive and ridiculous notions about the nature of income and the rationale for income taxes. Despite this criticism, a number of decisions subsequent to "Eisner v. Macomber" relied on this simplistic definition of income. This in turn led to the question of whether or not this formulation was an "exclusive" definition of income, with any income not clearly covered by its terms deemed to be nontaxable. In "Hawkins v. Commissioner", the Internal Revenue Service argued that compensatory damages received by the taxpayer by way of settlement of a suit for injury to personal reputation and health caused by defamatory statements constituting libel or slander were taxable. While noting that "there may be cases in which taxable income will be judicially found although outside the precise scope of the description already given," the Board of Tax Appeals concluded that such damages would not be taxable. The Board noted that the injury was "wholly personal and nonpecuniary," and that the remedy simply attempts to make the individual whole. Thus, even though the payment was "severable" and lead to a demonstrable increase in net wealth, the Board nonetheless concluded that the payment was not income. Other commentators noted that if "severability" were to be considered a touchstone for the definition of income, it followed that a number of sales or exchanges of property that did not involve immediate realization through severance would not be taxable. Realizing that the "one size fits all" definition of income in "Eisner v. Macomber" was too broad, the U.S. Supreme Court reconsidered the idea of severability in Helvering v. Bruun. In this case, the Court addressed the question of whether or not a lessor recognizes income from the receipt of a leasehold improvement made by a lessee during the lease when the improvement reverts to the lessor at the end of the lease. In ruling that the value of the improvement was taxable, the Court noted that not every gain need be realized in cash to be taxable. There was a clear increase in the taxpayer's wealth, and this increase did not have to be severed to recognize such increase as income for federal income tax purposes.