Court Opinion

ID: 9419505
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:51.035534+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:18.607879
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Jackson,
concurring:
This case considers for the first time constitutional limitations upon state power to tax airplanes. Several principles of limitation have been judicially evolved in reference to ships and to railroad rolling stock. The question is which, if any, of these should be transferred to air transport.
We are at a stage in development of air commerce roughly comparable to that of steamship- navigation in 1824 when Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, came before this Court. Any authorization of local burdens on our national air commerce will lead to their multiplication in this country. Moreover, such an example is not likely to- be neglected by other revenue-needy nations as international air transport expands.
Aviation has added a new dimension to travel and to our ideas. The ancient idea that landlordism and sovereignty extend from the center of the world to the periph*303ery of the universe has been modified. Today the landowner no more possesses a vertical control of all the air above him than a shore owner possesses horizontal control of all the sea before him. The air is too precious as an open highway to permit it to be “owned” to the exclusion or embarrassment of air navigation by surface landlords who could put it to little real use.
Students of our legal evolution know how this Court interpreted the commerce clause of the Constitution to lift navigable waters of the United States out of local controls and into the domain of federal control. Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, to United States v. Appalachian Power Co., 311 U. S. 377. Air as an element in which to navigate is even more inevitably federalized by the commerce clause than is navigable water. Local exactions and barriers to free transit in the air would neutralize its indifference to space and its conquest of time.
Congress has recognized the national responsibility for regulating air commerce. Federal control is intensive and exclusive. Planes do not wander about in the sky like vagrant clouds. They move only by federal permission, subject to federal inspection, in the hands of federally certified personnel and under an intricate system of federal commands. The moment a ship taxis onto a runway it is caught up in an elaborate and detailed system of controls. It takes off only by instruction from the control tower, it travels on prescribed beams, it may be diverted from its intended landing, and it obeys signals and orders. Its privileges, rights and protection, so far as transit is concerned, it owes to the Federal Government alone and not to any state government.
Congress has not extended its protection and control to the field of taxation, although I take it no one denies that constitutionally it may do so. It may exact a single uniform federal tax on the property or the business to *304the exclusion of taxation by the states. It may subject the vehicles or other incidents to any type of state and local taxation, or it may declare them tax-free altogether. Our function is to determine what rule governs in the absence of such legislative enactment.
Certainly today flight over a state either casually or on regular routes and schedules confers no jurisdiction to tax. Earlier ideas of a state’s sovereignty over the air above it might argue for such a right to tax, but it is one of those cases where legal philosophy has to take account of the fact that the world does move.
Does the act of landing within a state, even regularly and on schedule, confer jurisdiction to tax? Undoubtedly a plane, like any other article of personal property, could land or remain within a state in such a way as to become a part of the property within the state. But when a plane lands to receive and discharge passengers, to undergo servicing or repairs, or to await a convenient departing schedule, it does not in my opinion lose its character as a plane in transit. Long ago this Court held that the landing of a ship within the ports1 of a state for similar purposes did not confer jurisdiction to tax. Hays v. Pacific Mail S. S. Co., 17 How. 596; St. Louis v. Ferry Co., 11 Wall. 423; Morgan v. Parham, 16 Wall. 471; cf. Ayer & Lord Tie Co. v. Kentucky, 202 U. S. 409: I cannot consider that to alight out of the skies onto a landing field and take off again into the air confers any greater taxing jurisdiction on a state than for a ship for the same purposes to come alongside a wharf on the water and get under way again.
What, then, remains as a basis for Minnesota’s claim to tax this entire fleet of planes at their full value as property of the State of Minnesota? They have been within the state only transiently and in the same manner in which they have been in many states: to serve the public and to be serviced. The planes have received no “protection” *305or “benefit” from Minnesota that they have not received from many others. It might be difficult, in view of the complete control of this type of activity by the Federal Government, to find what benefits or protection any state extends. But no distinction whatever can be pointed out between those extended by Minnesota and those extended by any state where there is a terminal or a stopping place.
But it is said that Minnesota incorporated the company. Of course it is her right to tax the company she has created and the franchise she has granted. I suppose there are many ways that she might constitutionally measure the value of this privilege. If she chartered a corporation on condition that all property it might acquire, tangible or intangible, should be taxable under her laws, I do not think a company which accepted such a charter could appeal to the Constitution to give back what it voluntarily contracted away. But no such stipulation has been made in the charter in this case. The tax imposed here is a general ad valorem property tax on the full value of every plane of the fleet operated by this company. Domicile of an owner is a usual test of power to tax intangibles, but has not generally been a conclusive test of taxability of tangible property situated elsewhere. If we should suppose that this corporation had a Delaware charter instead of a Minnesota one, and had nothing in Delaware except its agent, but operated otherwise in Minnesota exactly as it has done, would we say that the entire right to tax the fleet moved to Delaware because it was the corporation’s state of domicile? I do not think that domicile, in the facts of this case, is decisive of Minnesota’s claim to tax the tangible property of the company wherever situate.
It is strongly and plausibly advocated that the theory of apportionment of the total value among the several states of operation, heretofore applied to state taxation *306of railroad rolling stock, be transferred to air transportation. This would mean that each state of operation (no one ventures to say whether flight alone or both flight and landing would be required) could tax a proportion of the total value.
The apportionment theory is a mongrel one, a cross between desire not to interfere with state taxation and desire at the same time not utterly to crush out interstate commerce. It is a practical, but rather illogical, device to prevent duplication of tax burdens on vehicles in transit. It is established in our decisions and has been found more or less workable with more or less arbitrary formulae of apportionment. Nothing either in theory or in practice commends it for transfer to air commerce. A state has a different relation to rolling stock of railroads than it has to airplanes. Rolling stock is useless without surface rights and continuous structures on every inch of land over which it operates. Surface rights the railroad has acquired from the state or under its law. There is a physical basis within the state for the taxation of rolling stock which is lacking in the case of airplanes.
It seems more than likely that no solution of the competition among states to tax this transportation agency can be devised by the judicial process without legislative help. The best analogy that I find in existing decisions is the “home port” theory applied to ships. See Hays v. Pacific Mail S. S. Co., St. Louis v. Ferry Co., Morgan v. Parham, supra. There is difficulty in the application of this doctrine to air commerce, I grant. There is no statutory machinery for fixing the home port. If federal registration established statehood as it establishes nationality, the home port doctrine would be easy to apply. However, on the record before us it seems unquestioned that Minnesota is in an operational as well as in a domiciliary sense the home port of this fleet. On that doctrine Minnesota can tax the fleet, but its right to do so is exclusive, *307for no other state can acquire jurisdiction to tax merely because it provides a port.of call. I therefore concur in the conclusion reached by the opinion of Me. Justice ErankfukteR. I do not accept the opinion because it falls short of commitment that Minnesota’s right is exclusive of any similar right elsewhere. It is, I know, difficult to judge and dangerous to foreclose claims of other states that are not before us. That is the weakness of the judicial process in these tax questions where the total problem that faces an industry reaches us only in installments. If the reasoning should hereafter be extended to support full taxation everywhere, it would offend the commerce clause, as I see it, even more seriously than apportioned taxation everywhere.
The evils of local taxation of goods or vehicles in transit are not measured by the exaction of one locality alone, but by the aggregation of them. I certainly do not favor exemption of interstate commerce from its “just share of taxation.” But history shows that fair judgment as to what exactions are just to the passer-by cannot be left to local opinion. When local authority is taxing its own, the taxed ones may be assumed to be able to protect themselves at the polls. No such sanction enforces fair dealing to the transient. In all ages and climes those who are settled in strategic localities have made the moving world pay dearly. This the commerce clause was designed to end in the United States.
The rule I suggest seems most consonant with the purposes of the commerce clause among those found in our precedents. But the whole problem we deal with is unprecedented. I do not think we can derive from decisional law a satisfactory adjustment of the conflicting needs of the nation for free air commerce and the natural desire of localities to have revenue from the business that goes on about them.
*308I concur in the affirmance of the' judgment below, but only because the record seems to me to establish Minnesota as a “home port” within the meaning of the old and somewhat neglected but to me wise authorities cited.