Owen J. Roberts

“ Will permission to an employee to enjoy patent rights as against all others than the government tend to the improvement of the public service by attracting a higher class of employees? Is there in fact greater benefit to the people in a dedication to the public of inventions conceived by officers of government than in their exploitation under patents by private industry? Should certain classes of invention be treated in one way and other classes differently? ”

“ There is nothing arbitrary in rescuing a government from the labor and expense of setting up the huge and unwieldy machinery of an income tax department with a swarm of investigators and accountants and legal and financial experts. ”

“ The statute, as construed and applied, amounts merely to a dragnet which may enmesh any one who agitates for a change of government if a jury can be persuaded that he ought to have foreseen his words would have some effect in the future conduct of others. No reasonably ascertainable standard of guilt is prescribed. So vague and indeterminate are the boundaries thus set to the freedom of speech and assembly that the law necessarily violates the guarantees of liberty embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment. ”

“ To frame a system of taxation in avoidance of evils such as these is no act of sheer oppression, no abandonment of reason, no exercise of the general will in a perverse or vengeful spirit. Far from being these or any of them, it is a pursuit of legitimate ends by methods honestly conceived and rationally chosen. ”

“ The question is not what power the federal government ought to have, but what powers in fact have been given by the people. It hardly seems necessary to reiterate that ours is a dual form of government; that in every state there are two governments; the state and the United States. Each state has all governmental powers save such as the people, by their Constitution, have conferred upon the United States, denied to the states, or reserved to themselves. The federal union is a government of delegated powers. ”

“ We have no doubt that, because of the fundamental conceptions which underlie our system, any attempt by a state to measure the tax on one person's property or income by reference to the property or income of another is contrary to due process of law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That which is not in fact the taxpayer's income cannot be made such by calling it income. ”

“ Thus a monopoly takes something from the people. An inventor deprives the public of nothing which it enjoyed before his discovery, but gives something of value to the community by adding to the sum of human knowledge. ”

“ Like the Supreme Court of California, we disapprove the violations of law involved in the treatment of the petitioner, and we think it right to add that where a prisoner held incommunicado is subjected to questioning by officers for long periods, and deprived of the advice of counsel, we shall scrutinize the record with care to determine whether, by the use of his confession, he is deprived of liberty or life through tyrannical or oppressive means. Officers of the law must realize that if they indulge in such practices they may, in the end, defeat rather than further the ends of justice. ”

“ The inability of a State to measure a tax by certain assets exempted by federal law does not preclude it from reckoning in the tax base all those it can reach. And the principle of equal protection does not demand that because one company owns wholly exempt securities, with consequent exemption of its shareholders from the exaction, the State shall abstain from taxing the shareholders of another company whose investments carry no such exemption. ”

“ Do the people of this land-in the providence of God, favored, as they sometimes boast, above all others in the plenitude of their liberties-desire to preserve those so carefully protected by the First Amendment: liberty of religious worship, freedom of speech and of the press, and the right as freemen peaceably to assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances? ”

“ We derive much of our strength as a nation from our dual system of federal government. To promote the harmonious working of that system the general clauses of the Constitution which broadly delineate the boundaries of state and national power should be construed by appraising the respective state and national interests involved and striking a balance which gives appropriate recognition to the legitimate concerns of each government. ”

“ Once the confusion is avoided between an act of amnesty and an act which gives immunity in order 'to make evidence available and compulsory that otherwise could not be got' because it could be withheld upon a claim of constitutional privilege, it becomes clear that a witness is not 'entrapped' by requiring him to claim his constitutional privilege before affording him a substitute. A witness is no more entrapped by the requirement that he must stand upon his constitutional rights, if he desires their protection, when there is an immunity statute than he is where there is none at all. ”

“ If we allow consequential damages to be shown here, I do not see how we can refuse such an offer of proof when a 10 year lease, a 99 year lease, or a fee interest is condemned. If cost of moving is relevant to market price in one case, I cannot say it is irrelevant in the other. And if one type of consequential damage is relevant to market price, I do not see why almost any type may not be. If we allow the offer of proof in the present case, the result will be to let consequential damages in under a new guise. If we take that step we demonstrate that hard cases do indeed make bad law. ”

“ An attempted distinction as to pension measures for employees retired by reason of age, because old age is not in itself a consequency of employment, is but superficial. The common judgment takes note of the fact that the retirement of workers by reason of incapacity due to advancing years is an incident of employment and that a fair consideration of their plight justifies retirement allowances as a feature of the service to which they have long been devoted. ”