Court Opinion

ID: 9419990
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:26.009379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.532962
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
The dissenting views lead me to add a few words to the Court's opinion, in which I join.
Nearly thirty-five years ago Mr. Justice Holmes observed that “one in my place sees how often a local policy prevails with those who are not trained to national views and how often action is taken that embodies what the Commerce Clause was meant to end.” (Holmes, Speeches, Law and the Court, 98, 102). His concern has not lost force with time, and it is important to be duly mindful of it whenever a State claims the power to tax in a situation like that now before us.
Equally relevant are other observations by Mr. Justice Holmes regarding this problem. “It being once admitted, as of course it must be, that not every law that affects commerce among the States is a regulation of it in a constitutional sense, nice distinctions are to be expected. Regulation and commerce among the States both are practical rather than technical conceptions, and, naturally, their limits must be fixed by practical lines.” Galveston, Harrisburg, etc. R. Co. v. Texas, 210 U. S. 217, 225. And so, this Court has sustained a tax upon the mining of ore although substantially all the ore left the State and was put upon cars for that purpose by the same act by which it was produced. Oliver Iron Co. v. Lord, 262 U. S. 172. Mr. Justice Holmes joined in that opinion although “There could not be a case of a State’s product more certainly destined to interstate commerce.” Holmes, J., dissenting in Pennsylvania v. West Virginia, 262 U. S. *90653, 600, 601. Again, the Court has held that a State may impose a non-discriminatory tax on goods which, although connected “as a general course of business” with “a flow of interstate commerce,” “has come to rest and has acquired a situs within the State” at “a depot . . . for another interstate journey.” Minnesota v. Blasius, 290 U. S. 1, 8, 11. For the practical purposes which determine the constitutional issue there can be no difference between taxing such goods as property and taxing the business of being a depot for such goods. In striking the constitutional balance between State and national powers, figures of speech are treacherous. The ore which Minnesota was allowed to tax in the Lord case, and the cattle which Minnesota was allowed to tax in the Blasius case, were in no practical sense less in the “flow of commerce” than the coal the storage of which was the business subjected to a non-discriminatory license tax by New Jersey.
Nor can it make a difference that this storage business was conducted by a concern controlled by the coal-carrying road. If a wholly independent storage concern would have had to pay a license tax, the controlling constitutional principles require no different result because the storage facility is a subsidiary of a railroad. Presumably there are good business reasons for the use of such a subsidiary corporation. Compare Edwards v. Chile Copper Co., 270 U. S. 452, 456. Those reasons are equally valid for the State's taxing purposes. It cannot be said that New Jersey has given no opportunities, has afforded no protection, and has conferred no benefits upon Independent Warehouses, Inc., merely because in an ultimate sense there is a financial identification between Independent Warehouses and the Erie Railroad. Compare Wisconsin v. J. C. Penney Co., 311 U. S. 435, 444. If what was here involved were merely an occasional and transient storage *91of coal moving from Pennsylvania to New York, New Jersey could not levy a property tax on the coal nor a license tax for the storing of it. The controlling consideration here is that there was storage of the coal precisely like the holding of the cattle in the Blasius case. In both cases there was a sufficiently distinct and permanent break in the process of transportation between the States so as to give rise to interests in the State of storage to justify the exertion of its non-discriminatory taxing power. For me this case is controlled by Susquehanna Coal Co. v. South Amboy, 228 U. S. 665. Here, as in that case, there was something more “than an incidental interruption of the continuity” of the coal’s “journey through the State.” There was “a business purpose and advantage in the delay which was availed of, and while it was availed of, the products secured the protection of the State.” 228 U. S. at 668 and 669. Thereby the State’s power to tax arose.
The fact that for railroad-rate purposes this storage was treated as part of a transit privilege does not affect the relation of the storage to the taxing powers of the State. Assuming that such a storage may properly be treated as a stop-over privilege under the Interstate Commerce Act, it does not follow that the break in the process of interstate transportation is not of such significance in its relation to a State as to allow that State to tax the protection given to the property during the break as well as the opportunity afforded in conducting the business for such separable and enduring storage in the State.