Court Opinion

ID: 9652567
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:26:33.17423+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:52.415671
License: Public Domain

HAND, Circuit Judge
(concurring). I agree with Judge ROGERS’ opinion, except in one particular. It seems' to me unnecessary to accept as authoritative what was said by Justice Strong, obiter, in Dollar Savings Bank v. United States, 19 Wall. 227, 239, 22 L. Ed. 80; that is, that the United States has all the prerogatives of the British crown as parens patrias. A tax is an exaction imposed by the sovereign for its own purposes, which we should assume to be of an importance paramount to the rights of an individual. Besides, it does not presuppose, like a debt, any voluntary acceptance of the hazard of the taxpayer’s continued solvency. Perhaps it is easier to deduce the priority from such considerations than to establish it by precedent. In any ease the result does not appear to me to require us to accept as law the language cited, and I should think it quite possible that the implied prerogatives of a republic against its citizens may not go so far. The prerogatives of the British crown depend upon traditions and conceptions in some respects alien to those popular at the end of the eighteenth century and since. Whatever may be the final upshot, it seems to me unnecessary for the present to go further than the facts at bar, or to say more than that the nature of a tax gives it, independently of statute, priority to debts due individuals, certainly to such as sound in contract, and these are all we have now to consider..