The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston takes a more relaxed view of what is necessary to show the benefit. Last week, in United States v. McPhail, it upheld the conviction of a defendant who tipped off his golfing buddies at a country club outside Boston about developments at American Semiconductor that he learned from another golfing friend who worked for the company.

Prosecutors pointed to two benefits that showed the quid pro quo requirement for insider trading. First, there were “concrete” ones that involved his expectations of a free dinner, wine and a visit to a massage parlor with the friends trading on the information, who earned more than $500,000 in profits.

The second was more subtle, that the tipper “stood to benefit from the group’s general gratitude for his largess” so that “it makes him one of the guys, they’re all kind of impressed.” This is the “Caddyshack” element of insider trading in which tipping is as beneficial to one’s reputation as the confidential information itself. The appeals court found the combination of the two enough to support the conviction.

We usually think of federal law as uniform throughout the country, but the question of what is enough to prove tipping inside information has resulted in what the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit called “some inter-circuit tension.” The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the issue in a case, Salman v. United States, in early October. In this case members of a close-knit family passed along confidential information without anything tangible exchanged among them. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which heard the case, is more closely aligned with the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on the benefit issue.

The Supreme Court could decide the case by simply reiterating its position in the decision on the Dirks case about gifts between family members, which would not require proving anything of monetary value passed between the tipper and tippee. One way to confine the gift theory would be to limit it to particularly close relationships, so that more casual friendships — golfing buddies, for example — would require something of actual value passed in exchange for the information.

The defendant in the Salman case filed a brief urging the court to adopt the Newman test that would require some proof of a valuable benefit exchanged between the tipper and tippee, not just warm feelings generated by making a gift to a family member. The question that the justices would have to confront if they take that approach is how much of a benefit is enough so that the lower courts can figure out whether a parent paying for a child’s wedding rehearsal dinner might be sufficient to prove insider trading.

The Salman case could drag the Supreme Court into a quagmire of providing rules about what is and is not required to show a benefit and how different types of personal relationships might affect the analysis. The justices are often reluctant to rewrite the law in detail, but that is what they will have to do if they require proof of a particular benefit in tipping cases.