Charles Evans Whittaker

“ The failure of the Federal Act itself to require the open disclosure of tobacco types as well as tobacco grades cannot by any stretch of the imagination be taken as evidence of a congressional intent that tobacco types should remain a secret on the market. For the Act itself plainly shows why that omission was made. Congress knew that the various types of tobacco were grown in geographically separate 'type areas' and further knew that under the marketing practices then being used in the tobacco industry tobacco was marketed in the 'type area' in which it was grown. ”

“ In none of these cases has it been suggested that a taxable gain might be realized by the debtor at any time prior to the effective date of discharge, and as Wilcox recognized, there is no rational basis on which to justify such a rule where the debt arises through embezzlement.
An embezzler, like a common thief, acquires not a semblance of right, title, or interest in his plunder, and whether he spends it or not, he is indebted to his victim in the full amount taken as surely as if he had left a signed promissory note at the scene of the crime. ”

“ The presumption of innocence, deep in our criminal law, has been one of our most important safeguards against oppression. So far as I can find, this is the first instance where we have dispensed with it. We do so today by shifting the burden to a witness to show that he is not an officer or agent of the organization in question and that he is not able to produce the documents, without requiring any proof whatsoever by the prosecution that connects the defendant either with the organization or with the documents. ”

“ Whether foreign goods are receiving a tax advantage over similar domestic goods can only be determined by an evaluation of the full range of imposts and duties which the importer has been required to pay to the National Government. Only then can we know, as a matter of economic reality, whether, in fact, there is discrimination. And if we find discrimination, it is the result of the decision of the Congress and the President that the goods involved should, as a matter of national policy, receive preferential treatment. ”

“ Yet this is a heavy burden to carry, especially for an accused who has no lawyer and who cannot afford to hire one. It is a burden placed on an accused solely by reason of his poverty. Its only sanction is Betts v. Brady which is so at war with our concept of equal justice under law that it should be overruled. [12] Are we to wait to overrule it until a case arises where the indigent is unable to make a convincing demonstration that the absence of counsel prejudiced him? ”

“ Direct taxation of 'exclusively interstate commerce' is a substantial regulation of it and, therefore, in the absence of congressional consent, the States may not directly tax it. This Court has so held every time the question has been presented here until today. Without congressional consent, the States of Minnesota and Georgia have laid taxes directly on what they admit was 'exclusively interstate commerce.' Hence, in my view, those levies plainly violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and cannot stand consistently therewith and with our prior cases. ”

“ We turn, first, to the taxpayers' contention that, in substance, the purchaser, not the dealer, obtains the loan directly from a finance company, and that the percentage of the loan which is retained by the finance company-although credited on its books to a reserve account in the name of the dealer as collateral security for the payment of his liabilities to the finance company-is the property of the purchaser of the vehicle, not the dealer, and therefore may not be regarded as accrued income to the dealer. ”

“ When dealing with their proper domestic concerns, and not trenching upon the prerogatives of the National Government or violating the guaranties of the Federal Constitution, the States have the attribute of sovereign powers in devising their fiscal systems to ensure revenue and foster their local interests. Of course, the States, in the exercise of their taxing power, are subject to the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. ”

“ The relevance of a state procedure requiring that constitutional issues be presented in their narrowest possible scope is confirmed by the practice of this Court. The Court has long insisted, certainly in precept, on rigorous requirements that must be fulfilled before it will pass on the constitutionality of legislation, on avoidance of such determinations even by strained statutory construction, and on keeping constitutional adjudication, when unavoidable, as narrow as circumstances will permit. ”

“ But embezzled funds, like stolen property generally, are not 'earnings' in any sense and are held without a vestige of a colorable claim of right; they constitute the principal of a debt. Of no significance whatever is the formality of 'consensual recognition, express or implied' of an obligation to repay. By substituting this meaningless abstraction in place of the omitted portion of the North American Oil test of when a receipt constitutes taxable income, the prevailing opinion today goes far beyond overruling Wilcox-it reduces a substantial body of tax law into uncertainty and confusion. ”

“ We allow a man to go to prison for doing no more, so far as this record reveals, than challenging the right of a Committee to ask him to produce documents. The Congress had the right to get these documents from someone. But, when it comes to criminal prosecutions, the Government must turn square corners. If Congress desires to have the judiciary adjudge a man guilty for failure to produce documents, the prosecution should be required to prove that the man whom we send to prison had the power to produce them. ”

“ We know that many States provide a longer period, and others a shorter period, for the commencement of a suit for unseaworthiness than is provided by Congress for the commencement of an action for damages for negligence under the Jones Act. I cannot escape the conviction that the long-established rule, expressive of the meaning of the silence of Congress in fixing a statute of limitations, should be enforced in all unseaworthiness cases or in none. ”

“ It is more important that the ordinary operation of our judicial system not be needlessly disrupted by such a case than it is to insure that every case which may turn out to be constitutional be heard by three judges. ”

“ In fact the heart of petitioners' effort to escape their conviction is the claim that the skulduggeries of which the jury found them guilty do not fall within the scope of the Mail Fraud statute because in sending out the tax bills they were the neutral vehicles of legal compulsion, although at the time that they sent them out, and having full governmental control of the process of controlling revenue and expending it, they had predetermined that the proceeds were not to be fully applied to school purposes but were in part to be diverted into their private pockets. ”

“ At least as early in the history of this country as 1619, when Virginia passed its first tobacco inspection act, the States have sought to protect honest sellers of tobacco from those who were willing for a profit to damage the integrity of the product. [11] Yet the Court now holds that Congress, by passing the Federal Tobacco Inspection Act, intended to cover the entire field of tobacco regulation, even to the extent of compelling States to abandon historic laws that are not only completely in harmony with federal type classifications, but are actually necessary to give them full effect. ”

“ Like my Brother CLARK who writes for the Court today, I am unable to find any basis in the Constitution to support the view that Congress may not constitutionally provide for the court-martial trial and punishment of civilian dependents for capital offenses but may do so for noncapital ones. ”

“ Orderly and effective policy would be impossible if thirteen States, each with their distinctive interests, and often conflicting, one with another, were allowed to exercise their own initiative in the regulation of foreign economic affairs. And so the States were prohibited from such regulation-they were forbidden, except by leave of Congress, to lay any duties on imports or on exports. Second only to this goal in importance, was the need to secure to the National Government an important source of revenue. ”

“ Any assumption that evidence sufficient to support a magistrate's disinterested determination to issue a search warrant will justify the officers in making a search without a warrant would reduce the Amendment to a nullity and leave the people's homes secure only in the discretion of police officers. * * * The right of officers to thrust themselves into a home is also a grave concern, not only to the individual but to a society which chooses to dwell in reasonable security and freedom from surveillance. ”

“ This draws a line between rich and poor that is repugnant to due process. The need of counsel is the same, whatever the economic status of the accused. If due process requires that a rich man who wants a lawyer be allowed the opportunity to obtain one before he is tried, why should not due process give the same protection to the accused who is indigent? Even penniless vagrants [11] are at times caught in a tangle of laws that only an astute lawyer can resolve, as our own decisions show. ”

“ Under the common law as declared by this Court, petitioner was liable for all damages caused by its negligence unless exonerated therefrom, in whole or in part, by a constitutional rule of law. No statute has limited its liability, and it was not a party to nor a beneficiary of the contract of carriage between the shipper and the carrier, and hence its liability was not limited by that contract. It follows that petitioner's common-law liability for damages caused by its negligence was in no way limited, and the judgment below so holding was correct and must be affirmed. ”

“ This Court held in the Twin City case, supra, that the owner of adjoining fast lands has no interest in the waters of a navigable river, and that those waters do not, as against the Government, attribute to the value of such lands. It said:
'If the owner of the fast lands can demand water-power value as part of his compensation, he gets the value of a right that the Government in the exercise of its dominant servitude can grant or withhold as it chooses. The right has value or is an empty one dependent solely on the Government. ”

“ I think a wrongfully discharged employee may maintain in his own right an action at law, triable by a jury, under either § 16 (b) or the common law, or the Secretary may do so by an action at law under § 16 (c) , to recover wages lost by the employee as a result of his wrongful discharge. But, for the reasons hereinbefore stated, it seems to me that the Court of Appeals was correct in holding that the District Court was without jurisdiction to make an award of reparations for lost wages in this injunction action brought by the Secretary under § 17, and I would affirm its judgment. ”

“ Enforcement of the criminal laws of the States rests principally with the state courts, and generally their findings of fact, fairly made upon substantial and conflicting testimony as to the circumstances producing the contested confession-as distinguished from inadequately supported findings or conclusions drawn from uncontroverted happenings-are not this Court's concern; [2] yet where the claim is that the prisoner's confession is the product of coercion we are bound to make our own examination of the record to determine whether the claim is meritorious. ”

“ For this reason I believe that so much of the judgment of the Court of Appeals as directed the District Court to enter judgment for respondent deprives petitioner of his right to adduce rebuttal evidence upon the issue of respondent's prima facie established jurisdictional defense, and, therefore, cannot stand. ”

“ So if anything is plain it is that we are not presented with cases involving the doing of any intrastate commerce in Minnesota or Georgia by the taxpayers. The courts of those States have expressly found that there was none. Therefore, we do not have a situation where a taxpayer was doing both intrastate and interstate commerce within the taxing State, thus to invoke application of the State's apportionment statute in order to determine how much of the total income of the taxpayer had derived from intrastate commerce in the taxing State, and was, therefore, subject to its taxing power. ”

“ It is argued that the Virginia case is distinguishable on the ground that it dealt with an employer-dominated union. But the question is one of power. The fact that the unfair labor practice there was by the employer rather than by the union, as here, is not a distinguishing difference. Nor does the fact that employees' rights were there infringed by a violation of § 8 (a) (1) , (2) and (3) of the Act, whereas they are here infringed by a violation of §§ 8 (b) (1) (A) and 8 (b) (2) of the Act, make any difference. ”

“ It is surely clear that the Michigan tax is not imposed upon national banks or upon their assets; instead, it is imposed upon the owners of the bank's shares, measured solely by the value of those shares-'determined by dividing (the) capital account by the number of shares of such common stock.' See note 2.
Respondents' argument, and the Court's decision, put out of consideration the liability of national banks to repay their deposits and other debts, and would impose the tax on their gross assets, in direct opposition to the plain terms of the Michigan statute. ”

“ The result of such a rule would be that before trial on the merits a defendant could always insist on a kind of preliminary trial to determine the competency and adequacy of the evidence before the grand jury. This is not required by the Fifth Amendment. An indictment returned by a legally constituted and unbiased grand jury, like an information drawn by the prosecutor, if valid on its face, is enough to call for trial of the charge on the merits. ”

“ They contend that to hold their appeals to have been untimely, in these circumstances, would be to mutilate that plain language of Rule 37 (a) (2) and to make of it a trap even for the wary-including their experienced and competent counsel who were doing their best to protect petitioners' rights of appeal. And they insist that such a snare should not be permitted to deprive one of the valuable right of an appeal upon which his liberty, or even his life, may well depend. ”

“ Since any consideration which may have passed is not legally recoverable, its recipient has realized a taxable gain, an 'accession to in come,' as clearly as if his 'indebtedness' had been descharged by a full release or by the running of a Statute of Limitations. As we have already shown at length, quite the opposite is true when an embezzlement occurs; for then the victim acquires an immediately ripe and enforceable claim to repayment, and the embezzler assumes a legal debt equal to his acquisition. ”

“ Legislating is for Congress. Applying what Congress has enacted requires oftener than not construction. That is a judicial function. This is particularly true of judiciary legislation which is mainly concerned with the distribution of judicial power through deployment of the judicial force and the effective exercise of appellate review. It is also true to state that Congress seldom concerns itself with this Court's decisions construing judiciary legislation unless some dramatic result arouses its interest. ”

“ On August 20, North Western filed a complaint against the Union and various of its officials in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that the Union's contract demand was not a lawfully bargainable subject under the Railway Labor Act; that the impending strike, called to force acceptance of that demand by North Western, would be illegal; that North Western had a right arising under the laws of the United States, particularly the Interstate Commerce Act and the Railway Labor Act, to be free of such an illegal strike, and it prayed that it be enjoined. ”

“ The petitioners themselves controlled the entire conduct of the District's fiscal affairs, and their own decision, limited only by a statutory ceiling, determined the amount of the tax that would be collected. Petitioners' exercise of their power to fix the amount of the tax, an exercise which ultimately assured to themselves an excess of funds over their intended expenditures or reserves for school purposes, was necessarily central to their scheme. Such control obliterates the line they seek to draw between themselves and the entity it was their duty to serve. ”

“ When the right of privacy must reasonably yield to the right of search is, as a rule, to be decided by a judicial officer, not by a policeman or Government enforcement agent.
'There are exceptional circumstances in which, on balancing the need for effective law enforcement against the right of privacy, it may be contended that a magistrate's warrant for search may be dispensed with. ”

“ While the power to review the denial by a state court of a nonfrivolous claim under the United States Constitution has been centered in this Court, carrying with it the responsibility to see that the opportunity to assert such a claim be not thwarted by any local procedural device, equally important is observance by this Court of the wide discretion in the States to formulate their own procedures for bringing issues appropriately to the attention of their local courts, either in shaping litigation or by appeal. ”

“ It would seem too obvious for debate that if a taxpayer maintains its factory and produces all its goods in one State but sells the whole in other States in interstate commerce, it has derived some portion of its income in the State of manufacture or production. ”

“ This tremendous influx of unidentified commercially inferior tobacco threatens literally to destroy the Georgia market for Type 14 tobacco and rob the tobacco growers of that State of the value of their labor. By attempting to eliminate claimed unfairness and outright fraud in the sale of tobacco on the Georgia federal markets, the Georgia Act thus seeks to do no more than prevent a partial frustration through changing commercial practices of the very objective Congress itself sought to attain by the enactment of the Tobacco Inspection Act. ”

“ Thus, the considerations governing its interpretation marked out for it a special path in the stream of constitutional adjudication-a course which diverged in many respects from the history of the Commerce Clause: that broad grant of power designed primarily to assure national control over commercial trade among the States. ”

“ Even when the Board wins such a case on the merits, as in Inland Empire Council, while the case is dragging through the courts the threat will be ever present of the industrial strife sought to be averted by Congress in providing only drastically limited judicial review under § 9 (d) . Both union and management will be able to use the tactic of litigation to delay the initiation of collective bargaining when it suits their purposes. A striking example of this was recently disclosed to the Select Committee of the Senate on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. ”