James Clark McReynolds

“ Unless I am wrong the debt, wherever enforced, is enforced only because it is recognized as such by the law that created it and keeps it still a debt. No doubt sometimes obligations are enforced elsewhere when the statute of limitations has run at home. But such decisions when defensible stand on the ground that the limitation is only procedural and does not extinguish the duty. If the statute extinguishes the debt by lapse of time no foreign jurisdiction that intelligently understood its function would attempt to make the debtor pay. ”

“ No one would doubt that the law of Minnesota was necessary to call the obligation into existence. Other States do not attempt to determine the legal consequences of acts done outside of their jurisdiction, and therefore whether certain acts done in Minnesota constitute a contract or not depends on the law of Minnesota alone. ”

“ Taxation is an intensely practical matter, and laws in respect of it should be construed and applied with a view of avoiding, so far as possible, unjust and oppressive consequences. We have determined that in general intangibles may be properly taxed at the domicile reason for saying that they at the domicile of their owner, and we can are not entitled to enjoy an immunity against taxation at more than one place similar to that accorded to tangibles. ”

“ Nor is it permissible broadly to say that, notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment, two states have power to tax the same personalty on different and inconsistent principles or that a state always may tax according to the fiction that in successions after death mobilia sequuntur personam and domicile govern the whole. ”

“ Another State, if it is civilized, does not undertake to say to the debtor now that we have caught you we will force an obligation upon you whether you still are bound by the law of your own State or not. ”

“ To call debts property of the debtors, is simply to misuse terms. All the property there can be in the nature of things, in debts of corporations, belongs to the creditors, to whom they are payable, and follows their domicil, wherever that may be. ”

“ Primitive conditions have passed; business is now transacted on a national scale. A very large part of the country's wealth is invested in negotiable securities whose protection against discrimination, unjust and oppressive taxation, is matter of the greatest moment. ”

“ Their debts can have no locality separate from the parties to whom they are due. This principle might be stated in many different ways, and supported by citations in numerous adjudications, but no number of authorities and no forms of expression could add anything to its obvious truth, which is recognized upon its simple statement.'
If the situs of the bonds for taxation had been at the debtor's domicile-Pennsylvania-the challenged effort to tax could not have interfered unduly with the debtor's contract to pay interest. ”

“ And, while the creditor may rely on Minnesota law to enforce the debt, that may be equally true of the law of any other state where the debtor or his property may be found. So far as the transfer, as distinguished from the contract itself, is concerned, it is New York law and not that of Minnesota which, by generally accepted rules, it applied there and receives recognition elsewhere. ”

“ Even if the creditor had a complete and adequate remedy elsewhere, I still should think that a correct decision of the case must rest on whether I am right or not about the theoretical cal dependence of the continued existence of the bonds upon Minnesota law.
Blackstone v. Miller, 188 U.S. 189, 23 S.C.t. 277, 47 L. Ed. 439, supports my conclusions and I do not think that it should be overruled. A good deal has to be read into the Fourteenth Amendment to give it any bearing upon this case. The Amendment does not condemn everything that we may think undesirable on economic or social grounds. ”