Court Opinion

ID: 9419065
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:45:27.22778+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:15.093717
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Stone:
I concur in the judgment of reversal on the ground that nothing in the Constitution prevents taxation by Oregon of a gift by its citizen of federal reserve notes located elsewhere.
While I do not question that in the circumstances of this case a state could, if so advised, constitutionally tax its citizen for action taken for no other purpose than the evasion of its taxing statutes, no such question is, I think, presented by the record. Discussion of it seems at most to be academic and not to relieve us of the duty of deciding. the only federal question which could by any possibility be said to be raised by the record, namely, whether the Constitution precludes taxation of the gift of the banknotes merely because of the physical fact that they are located without the state.
In arriving at the conclusion tha^ the gift of federal reserve notes located outside the state was not taxable, the Supreme Court of Oregon necessarily construed the Oregon statute, which imposes a tax on gifts of “all property within the jurisdiction of the state , . . whether tangible or intangible.” The court has said that the banknotes were not within the jurisdiction of the state because their situs was elsewhere, and that the acts of decedent in avoiding the tax by the acquisition of property having an extra-territorial situs were not reached for taxation by state law. If the court did anything more than rule *320that the statute, by its own terms, ..did not extend to the taxation of the gift of the notes because they were located outside the state, it held that the Fourteenth Amendment because of that physical fact withholds, from the state, jurisdiction over the property which the taxing statute asserts.
Petitioner asks us to determine whether that holding is correct. He is entitled to have an answer. We do not rightly avoid giving the answer by saying that, by some statute other than that under review, the state could constitutionally tax its citizen for his action in avoiding the tax, by making the gift in a form of property which is by hypothesis beyond the taxing power. If the state has by its statute undertaken to lay a tax on gifts of banknotes outside the state without more — and we are without jurisdiction if it has not — no purpose is served by saying to the state that it could have reached the same result by another route, which, under its laws, does not appear to be open to it.
As I am of opinion that there is nothing in the Constitution to compel a state to treat federal reserve notes for tax purposes as chattels were treated in Frick v. Pennsylvania, 268 U. S. 473, and as no reason has been advanced, even in Blodgett v. Silberman, 277 U. S. 1, 18, for a different view, cf. Baldwin v. Missouri, 281 U. S. 586, 591, the judgment should, I think, be reversed, upon that ground rather than upon a theory of permissible legislation, of which apparently Oregon’s tax laws do not avail.
Mr. Justice Frankfurter agrees with my views as to Oregon’s power to tax these federal reserve notes, but is of opinion that the record sustains the ground taken in the Court’s opinion.