Intangible property

“ It matters not in what this intangible property consists,-whether privileges, corporate franchises, contracts, or obligations. It is enough that it is property which, though intangible, exists, which has value, produces income, and passes current in the markets of the world. ”

“ DIFFICULTY OF TAXING INTABGIBLE PROPERTY.—Where taxation is on the basis of assessment, it often happens that the tax burden rests unequally upon different forms of property. Property in tangible form, such as land, cattle, and houses, is easily discoverable, and hence cannot easily evade the payment of taxes. But intangible property, such as bonds, stocks, or mortgage, can easily be hidden, so that owners of this type of property often evade their share of the tax burden. ”

“ Generally speaking, intangible property in the nature of a debt may be regarded, for the purposes of taxation, as situated at the domicil of the creditor and within the jurisdiction of the state where he has such domicil. ”

“ We do not believe that the fact that an intangible is income from real property with a fixed situs is significant enough to justify treating it as an exception to a general rule concerning escheat of intangibles.↑ On this point Florida stresses what is essentially a variation of the old concept of 'mobilia sequuntur personam,' according to which intangible personal property is found at the domicile of its owner. ”

“ But intangible property, such as a debt which a person is entitled to collect, is not physical matter which can be located on a map. The creditor may live in one State, the debtor in another, and matters may be further complicated if, as in the case before us, the debtor is a corporation which has connections with many States and each creditor is a person who may have had connections with several others and whose present address in unknown. ”

“ Intangible property has no spatial existence, but consists of an obligation owed one person by another. The power to escheat such property has traditionally been thought to be lodged in the domiciliary State of one of the parties to the obligation. In a case such as this the domicile of the creditor is by hypothesis unknown; only the domicile of the debtor is known. This Court has thrice ruled that where the creditor has disappeared, the State of the debtor's domicile may escheat the intangible property. ”

“ If tangible property having a situs outside the state be included in the valuation of the company's intangible property, the purpose of the law, being to tax only intangible property, is defeated. We therefore read the act, as the supreme court seems to have read it in Adams Exp. ”

“ Com. Rep. 595, 11 Sup. Ct. Rep. 876; Tappan v. Merchants' Nat. Bank, 19 Wall. 490, 22 L. ed. 189; People ex rel. Hoyt v. Tax & A. Comrs. 23 N. Y. 224, 240. The same rule applies to intangible property. ”

“ If it was real estate it would be equivalent to the conveyance of the tract subject to ground rent, and the grantee taking the title would hold it liable to taxation upon its value. If this be true in reference to a grant of tangible property, it is equally true in respect to a grant of a franchise, for a franchise, though intangible, is none the less property, and oftentimes property of great value. Indeed, growing out of the conditions of modern business, a large proportion of valuable property is to be found in intangible things like franchises. ”

“ While the valuation must be just it need not be limited to mere worth of the articles considered separately but may include as well 'the intangible value due to what we have called the organic relation of the property in the state to the whole system.' How to appraise them fairly when the tangibles constitute part of a going concern operating in many states often presents grave difficulties; and absolute accuracy is generally impossible. ”

“ This may be in the nature of a legal fiction; but legal fictions have an appropriate place in the administration of the law when they are required by the demands of convenience and justice. Thus, intangible personal property has been held to have a situs at the domicile of the owner, although intangibles ordinarily have no actual situs and the paper evidence of their existence may be elsewhere. ”

“ New York Life Ins. Co., 216 U.S. 517, 523, 30 S.Ct. 385, 386, 54 L.Ed. 597. In some of these cases, the property would appear to be tangible as well as intangible in nature.↑ This is generally discussed as in interstate commerce question. ”

“ But if one tenant in common enters into actual and exclusive possession of the land, taking the rents and profits to his own use, and openly assert his own exclusive property in the lands, and deny the title of any other, it will be considered as an adverse possession by him, and those claiming under him, and an ouster of the other claimants. ”

“ It cannot be denied that inheritance, assessment, commerce, industry, labor, and wages require the most important modifications.”
You wish, proletaires, to regulate property; that is, you wish to destroy it and reduce it to the right of possession. For to regulate property without the consent of the proprietors is to deny the right of domain; to associate employees with proprietors is to destroy the eminent right; to suppress or even reduce farm-rent, house-rent, revenue, and increase generally, is to annihilate perfect property. ”

“ To assert that those who are in possession are intruders upon the land and have forfeited their property, and therefore are not entitled to be heard upon the question whether those who claim the property have complied with the law, is to say that one in possession and claiming to be the owner may be deprived of his property without due process of law. ”

“ But the thief and the robber place themselves outside the legal domain of property. In my property they deny both the idea of property, and, at the same time, an essential condition of the existence of my person. If we suppose their mode of action to become general, to become a maxim of the law, property is denied both in theory and in practice. ”

“ One who had simply a right to recover lands by action was not only destitute of anything transmissible to his heirs or to a purchaser, but had nothing which could be reached by an act of attainder. It is a noteworthy fact in this connection that our common law has never provided, either as to real or personal property, any form of action for litigating title or right of property independently of possession—a curious circumstance, unmistakably attesting that our legal remedies took form before the conception of property as distinct from possession had received practical recognition in our law. ”

“ Their right of property, that is, the right of exclusive possession, is therefore completed and conditioned by mutual recognition, and does not exist without it. All property is based upon the union of many wills into one will. ”

“ Possession is one of the strongest evidences of title to this class of property, and cannot be rightfully separated from the title, except in the manner pointed out by the statute. The courts of Illinois say that to suffer, without notice to the world, the real ownership to be in one person, and the ostensible ownership in another, gives a false credit to the latter, and in this way works an injury to third persons. ”

“ Intangibles, which are legal relationships between persons and which in fact have no geographical location, are so associated with the owner that they and their transfer at death are taxable at the place of his domicile where his person and the exercise of his property rights are subject to the control of the sovereign power. ”

“ The object of the statute is to prevent parties from being misled by apparent ownership of property where real ownership does not exist, but where a secret transfer has been made to another. This object would be defeated if a sale like the present one could be upheld. ”

“ It is only when the rights of property have gained a sanction from long practical inviolability and when the vast majority of the objects of enjoyment have been subjected to private ownership, that mere possession is allowed to invest the first possessor with dominion over commodities in which no prior proprietorship has been asserted. ”

“ The right to dispose both of the possession and estate follows necessarily from the ownership of the property, and, this being so, no valid objection can be urged against incorporating the contract and power in the same instrument with the mortgage. ”

“ I ask, then, in the first place, how possession can become property by the lapse of time? Continue possession as long as you wish, continue it for years and for centuries, you never can give duration—which of itself creates nothing, changes nothing, modifies nothing—the power to change the usufructuary into a proprietor. Let the civil law secure against chance-comers the honest possessor who has held his position for many years,—that only confirms a right already respected ”

“ As the possession of property, of which a person cannot be deprived, doubtless implies that such property may be acquired, it is safe to say that a state law which undertakes to deprive any class of persons of the general power to acquire property would also be obnoxious to the same provision. Indeed, we may go a step further and say that, as property can only be legally acquired as between living persons by contract, a general prohibition against entering into contracts with respect to property, or having as their object the acquisition of property, should be equally invalid. ”

“ These considerations show that the 'owner,' spoken of in the third section of the Captured and Abandoned Property Act, 'having a right to the proceeds thereof,' is he who has the legal interest in those proceeds, and that a factor who made advances before the capture can, at most, recover only to the extent of his lien. ”

“ Now that may seem commonplace enough; but it is interesting to note, as in the law, personal property did not come first; property in land was many centuries earlier. And this suggests the legal basis and present tendency of the law of property. "Property exists only by the law"; and extreme socialists say that all private property is robbery. No law, no property; this is true. Property is an artificial thing. It is a creation of law. In other words, where there is now no law except statute, it is the creation of statute. ”

“ Property is an eternal right, independent of time, indestructible except by the act and at the will of the proprietor; and here this right is taken from the proprietor, and on what ground? Good God! on the ground of absence! Is it not true that legists are governed by caprice in giving and taking away rights? When it pleases these gentlemen, idleness, unworthiness, or absence can invalidate a right which, under quite similar circumstances, labor, residence, and virtue are inadequate to obtain. Do not be astonished that legists reject the absolute. ”

“ Finally, as to the time required for prescription, it would be superfluous to show that the right of property in general cannot be acquired by simple possession for ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, or one hundred thousand years; and that, so long as there exists a human head capable of understanding and combating the right of property, this right will never be prescribed. For principles of jurisprudence and axioms of reason are different from accidental and contingent facts. ”

“ Given the elaborate system of title records relating to real property which prevails in all of our states, a lienor need not obtain possession or use of real property belonging to a debtor in order to significantly impair its value to him. ”

“ And when the code prohibits the reception of actions possessoires, in cases where the possession is not of a year’s duration, it simply means that if, before a year has elapsed, the holder relinquishes possession, and ceases actually to occupy in propria persona, he cannot avail himself of an action possessoire against his successor. In a word, the code treats possession of less than a year as it ought to treat all possession, however long it has existed,—that is, the condition of property ought to be, not merely seisin for a year, but perpetual seisin. ”

“ With equal gravity it might have sanctioned any species of theft or spoliation, by promulgating the principle, that when a man can no longer keep possession of his goods, “all property has passed 94 away from the original owner.” ”

“ This mode of acquisition is known in Roman law as occupatio.
On the other hand, the thing of which possession is taken may already be the property of some one else. In this case the title acquired by possession is good, indeed, against all third persons, but is of no validity at all against the true owner. Possession, even when consciously wrongful, is allowed as a title of right against all persons who cannot show a better, because a prior, title in themselves. ”

“ You have defined and legalized property as everything on your earth capable and possible of being possessed, and owned, including intangibles. It even includes the waters of your rivers, your seas, and the atmosphere over your earth surface, and you seem to be disputing the ownership of the clouds. Sunshine and air, for the time being, are still free and cannot be owned and claimed. ”

“ They all arise from a false theory of property. In principle, property is inviolable, but it can and must be checked and disciplined.” Such are the conclusions of the professor.
When one thus remains in the clouds, he need not fear to equivocate. Nevertheless, I would like him to define these abuses of property, to show their cause, to explain this true theory from which no abuse is to spring; in short, to tell me how, without destroying property, it can be governed for the greatest good of all. “Our civil code,” says M. Wolowski, in speaking of this subject, “leaves much to be desired.” ”

“ A proprietor shall have the right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of assets either individually or jointly with others. The inviolability of property and the right to inherit property shall be protected by law. ”