WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

states try to tax that kind of property at the same time and the owners of the property
don’t like it. The Supreme Court has obligingly enshrined in The Law various
complicated sub-principles telling which states have “jurisdiction” to tax that kind of
property and which haven’t. And these “jurisdiction” rules have been carried over,
with refinements and exceptions, to other kinds of taxes than property taxes –
especially to inheritance taxes.
Where inheritance taxes are concerned, the Court has laid down the principle
that if two states try to tax the transfer of the same property at the death of its owner,
then invariably one of the states has no “jurisdiction” to tax that transfer – even
though the owner may have lived in one state and kept the property in another. This
is what the Supreme Court was talking about in Senior v. Braden when it mentioned
“views now accepted here in respect of double taxation” and named several cases.
All the cases named dealt either with inheritance taxes, or else with the application
of various sub-principles of the “jurisdiction” rule to property taxes on other kinds of
property than land.
The state of Ohio, not unnaturally, had assumed that all these cases had very
little to do with the problem in Senior v. Braden. The state of Ohio thought it was
arguing about an income tax, since the tax it was trying to collect from Max Senior
was computed by taking 5% of part of his income. And the Supreme Court had
never before stretched any of its “jurisdiction” rules so far as to stop a state form
taxing the income of someone who lived in the sate. That is why the state of Ohio
thought the case of Maguire v. Trefry, which allowed an income tax very much like
the tax on Max Senior, was, even though older, more to the point than all the
inheritance tax and property tax cases the Court named.
The Court, however, seemed to say that the principles of Maguire v. Trefry
were no longer “controlling” because the inheritance tax and property tax cases
decided since then had made other principles more important – even for income
taxes. But as a matter of fact, the Court seemed to forget what it had decided in an
even more recent case called Lawrence v. State Tax Commission – although the
Lawrence case was actually mentioned in the opinion, in another connection. For in
Lawrence v. State Tax Commission, which dealt with an income tax, the principles
of Maguire v. Trefry had been followed as perfectly good Law. In short, the Court
had held, even after laying down the principles that limited state “jurisdiction” to tax
in the inheritance tax and property tax cases named, that it was quite all right – and
no violation of the Fourteenth Amendment – for a state to tax the income of someone
who lived in the state.
So, in order to make any sense at all out of Senior v. Braden, the Supreme
Court must have been saying that the tax on Max Senior wasn’t an income tax but a
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