Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-529_1b7d.pdf
Page Number: 15.0

Cite as:  602 U. S. ____ (2024) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

accounts were abandoned—and thus its rule was “as old as 
the common law itself.”  321 U. S., at 251.  So the Kentucky 
law  could  produce  no  such  deterrent  effect—and  it  could
apply to national banks.  Id., at 252. 

Barnett Bank also cited two other examples of state laws 
that  could  apply  to  national  banks.    In  National  Bank  v. 
Commonwealth, 9 Wall. 353 (1870), the Court determined 
that a Kentucky tax law was not preempted.  The Kentucky
law  at  issue  there  taxed  the  shareholders  of  all  banks 
(including  national  banks)  on  their  shares  of  bank  stock. 
Id., at 360.  The Court explained that national banks are
“exempted from State legislation, so far as that legislation
may interfere with, or impair their efficiency in performing
the functions” that federal law authorizes them to perform. 
Id., at 362.  But national banks are not “wholly withdrawn 
from the operation of State legislation”; rather, they remain 
subject  to  state  law  governing  “their  daily  course  of
business”  such  as  generally  applicable  state  contract, 
property,  and  debt-collection  laws.    Id.,  at  361–362. 
Because  the  Kentucky  tax  “in  no  manner  hinder[ed]”  the
national  bank’s  banking  operations,  and  produced  “no 
greater interference with the functions of the bank than any 
other” 
law  was  not 
preempted.  Id., at 362–363. 

law  governing  businesses,  the 

For similar reasons, the Court in McClellan v. Chipman, 
164  U. S.  347  (1896),  another  example  cited  by  Barnett 
Bank, concluded that a generally applicable Massachusetts 
contract  law  was  not  preempted  as  applied  to  national 
banks.  164 U. S., at 357–358, 361.  The Court noted that a 
generally  applicable  contract  law  like  Massachusetts’s 
could  be  said  to  act  as  “a  restraint  upon  the  power  of  a 
national  bank  within  the  State  to  make  such  contracts.” 
Id.,  at  358.    But  even  so,  such  state  laws  could  apply  to 
national banks as long as the state laws did not “in any way 
impai[r] the efficiency of national banks or frustrat[e] the
purpose for which they were created.”  Ibid.