Court Opinion

ID: 9426741
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:48.794533+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.841612
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the result.
I am not at all convinced that the Court’s facile distinction of Miller Bros. Co. v. Maryland, 347 U. S. 340 (1954), on the ground that in that case “the seller obviously could not know whether the goods sold over the counter in Delaware were transported to Maryland prior to their use,” ante, at 559, and that there was a “lack of certainty that the merchandise sold over the counter to Maryland customers in Delaware was transported to Maryland prior to its use,” ante, at 561 and this page, is a proper and acceptable distinction. I thought that one of the factual difficulties of Miller, in the focus of the present case, was the Delaware seller’s own delivery of goods to Maryland, some by common carrier and some by the seller’s own truck. 347 U. S., at 341-342. Indeed, Miller Bros, stipulated that during the taxable period, it delivered or paid a common carrier to deliver $9,500 worth of merchandise to customers in Maryland ($8,000 through use of its truck, $1,500 by common carrier). Id., at 350-351, n. 5. Miller Bros. exhibited no uncertainty as to the destination of those goods.
*563The Court appears to find an additional distinction in the fact that the goods in Miller Bros. were “sold to residents of Maryland at Miller's Delaware store,” ante, at 561. If the Court intends thereby to rest a distinction on the fact that the sales were made out of State, I am at a loss to follow its reasoning. By definition, a use tax is imposed only on sales made out of State. In short, Miller Bros. is not so easily explained away.
Thus, it seems to me, we have another instance where this Court’s past decisions in the tax area are not fully consistent. See Complete Auto Transit, Inc. v. Brady, ante, p. 274, and its development from its immediate predecessor, Colonial Pipeline Co. v. Traigle, 421 U. S. 100, 101 (1975).
In any event, I find myself in accord with the Court’s result in the present case. If, as I suspect, the result today is not fully consistent with the result in Miller, I am content to let Miller go.