Court Opinion

ID: 9698957
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 20:05:22.364412+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:44.931231
License: Public Domain

Smith, J.,
dissenting.
Neither the court nor the board has developed a practicable model for statewide equalization. Difficulties besetting the board are inferable from a model proposed by Pao Lun Cheng, “The Common Level of Assessment in Property Taxation,” 23 National Tax Journal 50 (1970). “As the secretary of one equalization board has said, ‘inter-county equalization is like a mule — no hope of progeny and no pride in. ancestry.’ ” Hellerstein, State and Local Taxation 139 (1969).
In this state of affairs I would try to maintain some balance between data and intuition. “But the action does not appear to have been arbitrary except in the sense in which many honest and sensible judgments are so. They express an intuition of experience which outruns analysis and sum up many unnamed and tangled impressions; impressions which may lie beneath consciousness without losing their worth.” Chicago, B. & Q. Ry. Co. v. Babcock, 204 U. S. 585, 27 S. Ct. 326, 51 L. Ed. 636 (1907) (Holmes, J.).
I would affirm the orders of the board.