Felix Frankfurter

“ It will not, I believe, be gainsaid that there are thousands of relatively small or moderate size corporations doing exclusively interstate business spread over several States. To subject these corporations to a separate income tax in each of these States means that they will have to keep books, make returns, store records, and engage legal counsel, all to meet the divers and variegated tax laws of forty-nine States, with their different times for filing returns, different tax structures, different modes for determining 'net income,' and different, often conflicting, formulas of apportionment. ”

“ In dealing with those purely local activities the State could properly exert its taxing power in relation to opportunities and advantages which it had given and which it could have withheld by simply not allowing a foreign corporation to do local business, whereas no State may withhold from a foreign corporation within its borders the right to exercise what is part of a process of exclusively interstate commerce. ”

“ It is vital to realize that in no case prior to this decision in which the taxing power of a State has been upheld when applied to corporations engaged in interstate commerce, was there a total absence of activities pursued or advantages conferred within the States severable from the very process which constitutes interstate commerce. ”

“ Australia has resolved the problem of conflicting and burdensome state taxation of commerce by a national arrangement whereby taxes are collected by the Commonwealth and from these revenues appropriate allocations are made annually to the States through the mechanism of a Premiers' Conference-the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth and the Premiers of the several States. ”

“ Wholly apart from that, the necessity for litigation based on these elusive and essentially non-legal questions casts a burden on businesses, and consequently on interstate commerce itself, which should not be imposed. ”

“ The division in this Court on these railroad apportionment cases is a good index of what might reasonably be expected when cases involving the more numerous non-transportation industries come before the Court. ”