Case ID: mann-unrep-cas_1/html/0334-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "De Blanc, J., Manning, C. J.,", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

No. 7465.
    City of New Orleans vs. Edward Bermudez.
    The repeal of an Act of the Legislature that provided for the issue, or for the exchange of bonds theretofore issued by the City oí New Orleans, and for the levying a tax to pay the interest thereon, is not an enactment impairing the obligation of a contract.
    Appeal from the Sixth District Court of New Orleans. Rightor, J.
    
      Blanc for Plaintiff. Bermudez in pp. Appellant.
    The suit was for the taxes of 1878, and was resisted on the ground that the defendant is the holder and owner of a number of bonds issued under the thirty-seventh section of the Act of February 28, 1852, and that as the city had failed to levy a tax for the years 1874-8 inclusive to pay the maturing coupons and to redeem the bonds as provided in that section, the ordinance imposing the tax on him, now sought to be recovered, impaired the obligation of a contract. The judgment below was for the city.
   De Blanc, J.,

delivered the opinion affirming the judgment, and citing State ex rel. Southern Bank v. Pilsbury, 31 La. Ann. 1., then before the U. S. Supreme Court on a writ of error, and which that court afterwards reversed.

Manning, C. J.,

dissented from the principle announced in the Southern Bank v. Pilsbury, herein reaffirmed, and refused to accept it as authoritative while that decision was pending on a writ of error, but concurred in the decree in this case on the ground that neither the State nor a municipal corporation can by its own act deprive itself of the power to collect taxes.

And this from the nature of government — certainly of that kind of government which is regulated by law. Government cannot subsist without taxes. The only substitute to taxes is forced loans and arbitrary exactions, and as the latter cannot be tolerated, the former must be resorted to, and no goverment can agree to its own extinction by agreeing that it shall not collect them.