Court Opinion

ID: 9747353
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 15:12:26.867612+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:23.128365
License: Public Domain

MADDEN,
Judge (concurring).
If, without any previous orders establishing priorities, and forbidding the further processing of materials on hand, the Government had requisitioned the plaintiffs’ stock, it could have said, as it says here, that the only sale value which the stock had, in the condition in which it was taken, was a scrap value. No purchaser could have made any use of it except to remelt it and again fabricate it for his intended use. The more value the plaintiffs had added to it, for their particular use, the less value it would have for anyone else, until the plaintiffs’ manufacturing and assembling process was completed. Yet, in such a case, the Government could hardly claim that scrap value was just compensation. The values which the plaintiffs had added to the property for their purposes, 'by their unfinished fabrication, which values they would realize only when they had completed the process and *591sold the product, would have to be included to make the compensation just.
In the case before us, exactly the same elements of value, from the plaintiffs’ standpoint, were present when the property was requisitioned, except that the realization of the values, by completion and sale, were to be postponed until the priorities were removed. Considering the relatively small bulk and high value of the material, its slight susceptibility to physical deterioration or to obsolescence, it was not unnatural that the plaintiffs should have decided to hold the property, to realize, when they could, its value. A relatively certain future value, realizable at a future time regarded as certain to come before many years, though uncertain as to when it would come, seems to me to be an element which cannot be discarded in determining just' compensation. In fixing upon such a value, realizable only in the future, proper discounts should be made for the costs and risks of holding the property. But the sum arrived at, after such deductions, is not speculative but reasonably certain.
The effect, then, of the wartime restrictions lawfully imposed by the sovereign, was not, as to the kind of material here in question, to depreciate its value by converting it to scrap, but to postpone the realization of its value as building hardware until the restrictions were removed. Since that value can be, and could, at the time of taking, have been, determined without undue speculation, the plaintiffs should receive it.
WHALEY, Chief Justice, took no part in .the decision of this case.