WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

Not at all, said the Supreme Court, in substance, when it was asked to
“interpret” and apply the statute. In the first place, we have a general principle to the
effect that tax statutes are to be strictly construed in favor of the taxpayer. True, we
also have a general principle of statutory construction tot he effect that words are to
be read in the light of their customary and accepted meaning (presumably the Court
did not care to deny that “enjoyment” meant “enjoyment”) but the prior principle
seems her to carry more weight. The fact that various state courts have interpreted
identical words in their state death tax statutes so as to cover the type of transfer here
at issue (the state courts had, almost unanimously) is not controlling upon us (the
Supreme Court). Finally there is the compelling fact that the decedent (i.e. the dead
man) had completely divested himself of title to the property before his death.
(Indeed he had, according to The Law, but Congress had said nothing about legal
title; it was the taking effect of enjoyment that was supposed to matter.) At any rate,
concluded the nine solons, the dodge works; the statute doesn’t cover this case; no
tax.
The pay-off came the very day after the decision was handed down. On that
day Congress amended the statute so that the estate tax even more specifically
applied to transfers of property in which the original owner hung on to the income
for himself until his death. Of course a couple of tax lawyers hopefully asked the
Supreme Court to rule that, under certain circumstances at least, this didn’t mean
what it said either. But this time the Court upheld the tax; this time the second
principle of statutory construction as outlined above outweighed the first principle.
For yet another example of Supreme Court “interpretation” of written laws,
take the old Congressional statute, still on the books, which says that collection of
federal taxes may not be enjoined “in any court” – a legal injunction being, of
course, no more than a court order forbidding someone from doing something. The
idea, whether wise or unwise, was to keep innumerable injunction suits from holding
up the collection of federal revenues; if a man, or a company, thought a tax was too
big or too raw or just plain illegal, he was supposed to pay it anyway and then sue to
get it back. Certainly the statute itself was, and is, so short, blunt, and simple that no
sensible person, no non-lawyer, could possibly miss its meaning. But strangely
enough, the commonest way of protesting a new federal tax today is to sue for an
injunction. The Supreme Court, in the course of “interpreting” the statute in the light
of general principles of Law, has so cluttered it with exceptions that the exceptions
all but blot out the statute.
Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. For when the Supreme
Court sets out to tell Congress and the world what an act of Congress really means,
only the sky and such abstract legal principles as can be drawn from the sky are the
limit. And all that Congress can do, after such an “interpretation,” is patiently to
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