Court Opinion

ID: 9651515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:21:37.147847+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:34.618781
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The statute does not define what a social club is; we are to interpret the gloss *688of the regulation. I doubt if it is possible 'to make any general statement Which will not beg the question; and perhaps for this reason the decisions have left the test chaotic, though hitherto faculty clubs have been held taxable. Faculty Club v. U. S., 65 Ct. Cl. 754; Quadrangle Club v. U. S., 64 F.(2d) 80 (C. C. A. 7). I think they ought to be. Of course every academic activity is subordinate and incidental to the main purpose of the college, which is at least avowedly educational. There would be no faculty clubs, if there were no colleges; they are organized to make a teacher’s life pleasanter on the notion that he will be a better teacher if it is. But the club’s activities taken by themselves are substantially the same as those of any other club, at least any other professional club, and it is these which control, not the profession which underlies them and makes them appropriate. The incidental social features which the regulation has in mind seem to me to be the rooms of a singing society and the supper that follows a rehearsal; or a series of dinners given by a society for the promotion of peace, or the propagation of the gospel, before the members begin to discuss and resolve. I do not believe that a teachers’ club ought to be any more exempt than an engineers’ club or a lawyers’ club.