Court Opinion

ID: 9707332
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:08:55.784117+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:31.180161
License: Public Domain

Justice RIVERA-SOTO,
concurring.
Without reservation, I join Justice Hoens’s clear and comprehensive opinion. I write separately, however, to place the concurrence submitted by Justice Albin in its proper context.
In Justice Albin’s view, “there may be cases in which a taxpayer inadvertently files false information and quickly attempts to remedy the mistake.” Ante at 251, 989 A.2d at 853. Having created that straw man, Justice Albin proceeds to knock it down, stating he “do[es] not read the Court’s opinion to preclude—in rare circumstances—the tax court from exercising its equitable powers to deny a municipality’s dilatory motion to dismiss, provided the taxpayer does not have unclean hands.” Ante at 251, 989 A.2d at 853.
The scenario posed by Justice Albin, that is, the application of a plainly worded statutory remedy to instances where a taxpayer “inadvertently file[d] false information and quickly attempt[ed] to remedy the mistake” is entirely absent in this case. As Justice Hoens’s opinion clearly sets forth, the taxpayer in the controversy presently before us filed clearly false and fraudulent responses to a tax assessor’s request for income information under N.J.S.A. 54:4-34, a conclusion reached by the trial court that stands unchallenged on appeal. In that context, extrapolating legal principles needlessly past their proper context, as the concurrence does, has a name: it is dicta, something that “is unnecessary to the decision in the case and therefore not precedential!.]” Black’s Law Dictionary 1100 (7th ed.1999).
Justice Albin’s bogeyman is simply not present in this case. Any consideration of it lies outside of this case’s decisional authority and belongs instead somewhere in the non-precedent netherworld of dicta.
*253For reversal and remandment—Chief Justice RABNER and Justices LONG, LaVECCHIA, ALBIN, WALLACE, RIVERA-SOTO and HOENS—7.
Concurred—ALBIN, LONG, RIVERA-SOTO.
Opposed—N one.