The uncomfortable parts, said plainly.

No. A standard of value is a definition supplied to the parties by law or by contract; intrinsic value is an analyst’s conclusion about what something is truly worth. The profession’s own glossaries and standards sort the two terms differently, and the popular “four standards of value” list admits one term that is not a standard while omitting one that is.

Usually the formula governs, and the disappointment of the party it binds is not a defense. What changes the answer is the proceeding: a price the owners fixed for a voluntary sale does not automatically become the fair value a statute directs a court to find, and in New York it did not.

It depends first on whether the departing owner is owed anything at all. The Uniform Partnership Act gives a dissociated partner a mandatory buyout at a price the statute defines; the Uniform Limited Liability Company Act (2006) gives a dissociated member nothing but the transferable interest already held, and several states go further and deny any right to withdraw. The operating agreement displaces almost all of it.

Because section 2036(a) does not care what the partnership interest is worth. If the decedent kept the enjoyment of what was contributed, the statute pulls the contributed property back into the gross estate at its own value, and the discount on the partnership interest stops mattering — unless the transfer fits the bona fide sale exception, which is argued on why the entity was formed and what it then did, not on the appraisal.

Not in Delaware, where the appraisal statute directs the court to determine fair value “exclusive of any element of value arising from the accomplishment or expectation of the merger.” What that exclusion reaches, how a court subtracts it, and whether any of it travels to another state are three separate questions, and the third one has no national answer.

Filing the return does not start the clock. Treasury Regulation section 301.6501(c)-1(f) sets out what the return or an attached statement has to say about the gift, and if it does not say it, the gift tax on that transfer may be assessed at any time — which means the value reported can be reopened decades later, long after the appraiser, the financial statements and the witnesses have gone.

Usually not on its own. Internal Revenue Code §2703 directs that property be valued without regard to the agreement unless it meets three statutory requirements — and clearing them is only half the test, because courts read §2703 alongside an older regulation, and the case law reading that regulation demands a price that is fixed or determinable and binding throughout life and death.

A unanimous Supreme Court says the proceeds count, and the company’s obligation to buy the shares back does not cancel them out. The insurance bought to fund the redemption enlarged the value of the shares it redeemed — decided on summary judgment, on a record in which nothing about the rest of the company was in dispute.

Yes. The objection most people expect — that the family still controls the company after the gift — was abandoned by the Internal Revenue Service in Rev. Rul. 93-12, which revoked the ruling that had made it. What stays contestable is the size of the discount, the restrictions relied on to support it, and whether the return disclosed enough to start the limitations period running.

It depends on the forum, and the disagreement is not at the margins: the reputational value of a sole practitioner's practice that New Jersey distributes as property, Texas holds is not property in the marital estate at all. Whether goodwill is divisible is a characterization question answered by state law before an appraiser opens a spreadsheet.

Appraisal is an exit a corporate action triggers, and no wrongdoing need be pleaded or proved. An oppression buyout exists only because misconduct is alleged, the election to buy usually belongs to the other side, Texas has no buyout remedy at all, and the words "fair value" do not carry the same instruction in the two statutes.

Sometimes, and it is answered as a question of law by the forum rather than by the appraisal. Two different discounts are in play, they do not travel together, and a state can bar one while permitting the other — while in Texas the prior question is whether a court-ordered buyout exists at all.

Not the appraiser. The proceeding fixes it, sometimes in the statute's own words and sometimes by handing the choice to the trial judge, and the difference between those two regimes is worth knowing before anything is filed.

No. And the question that decides more matters comes first: whether the proceeding permits a marketability discount at all. That is fixed by the governing statute and the law of the forum rather than by the appraiser, and in the states that have enacted the Model Business Corporation Act's appraisal definition the statute answers it on the face of the text.

Fair market value is one definition, supplied by regulation and carried in the same words through the authorities that use it. Fair value is a label whose content is supplied separately by whichever statute, court or contract imposed it — which is why, in a dispute, the first question is not what the business is worth but which definition the law has already chosen, and that question is argued as law.