Court Opinion

ID: 9637149
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:58:51.339353+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:53.867837
License: Public Domain

SIMONS, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I agree with the result reached in the opinion of the court, but on other grounds. I am not so confident, as are my colleagues, that the latest amendment to the Michigan Escheats Statute has not been held generally retroactive in Evans Products Co. v. State Board of Escheats, 307 Mich. 506, 12 N.W.2d 448, 461, notwithstanding the reservations in the opinion in that case confining decision to the depositories there involved. I see no way to avoid the general conclusion therein recited, “A reading of the entire act clearly indicates a legislative intent to give it retroactive ef*561feet.” The temporal sequence of events following our decision in Starr v. O’Connor, 6 Cir., 118 F.2d 548, would seem to indicate clearly the intention of the legislature to make the amendment retroactive in respect to dormant deposits in the banks here involved.
I think, however, that the amended Act, at least insofar as it permits the state administrator to exercise powers of visitation and inquisition, and insofar as it imposes penalties upon an agency of the federal government in possession of the assets of an insolvent national bank, operates as an unlawful interference with the liquidation of a national bank provided for in § 194, 12 U.S.C.A., of the National Banking Act. That section, it has repeatedly been held, provides a complete and comprehensive scheme for the liquidation of insolvent national banks. Nothing in Anderson Nat’l Bank v. Luckett, collides with this view. It may very well be that the protective custody of the state reaches inactive bank accounts in solvent national banks. Such banks, though subject to federal regulations, are owned and operated by private corporations, and subject to state law. Where, however, custody has passed to the federal government in the exercise of constitutional and legal powers under federal law, I think the state is not empowered to interfere with it without the government’s consent, clearly expressed in Congressional enactment. The distinction, it seems to me, is basic.