Pullman Co. v. Adams, 189 U.S. 420
Decided March 2, 1903.
A scant three-page opinion. No dissent written or noted.
This is an action for taxes, brought by the revenue agent of the state of Mississippi against the Pullman Company.
This is a dumb case is what this is.
Mississippi is dumb. Always has been dumb. It is the Supreme Court's, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s, disagreeable duty to assume sense where there is an explicit want of it. Holmes is gentle on Mississippi in this opinion and that is in keeping with pragmatism's gentility. Everybody has got their story, even the humblest, and we should listen to them respectfully, a posture also adopted in the preceding case, Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. Mississippi was here trying to do a simple thing: tax a railroad for the privilege of operating within its borders. Easy shit. But its laws were dumb:
"§ 3317. A tax on privileges is levied as follows, to-wit: . . . § 3387. Sleeping car companies: on each sleeping and palace car company carrying passengers from one point to another within the state, one hundred dollars, and twenty-five cents per mile for each mile of railroad track over which the company runs its cars."
We assume that the last words mean what afterwards was expressed by an amendment, "over which the company runs its cars in this state."The Pullman Company is an Illinois corporation.
And they contended that the tax on their "assumed" intrastate traffic was an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce.
So that was a fail.
Then they contended that,
...section 195 of the state constitution, which declares sleeping car companies to be common carriers...
And thus that they were forced to carry Mississippians point-to-point intrastate.
Fail:
The company cannot complain of being taxed for the privilege of doing a local business which it is free to renounce. Both parties agree that the tax is a privilege tax.
But the Supreme Court got no help from Mississippi's laws:
We are somewhat embarrassed in dealing with the case because we are not quite certain whether we rightly interpret the intimations upon the subject in the judgment under review. If the Constitution of Mississippi should be read as imposing an obligation to take local passengers, the question for us might be which, if not both, the clause of the Constitution or the tax act, is invalid. But we assume that the opinion of the Supreme Court of Mississippi intends to meet the difficulty frankly, and when it says that the argument against the tax drawn from the above interpretation of the Constitution is fallacious, we take it as meaning that no such interpretation will be attempted in the future, and we take it so the more readily that we can see no ground for a different view. If we are right in our understanding, the judgment of the supreme court was correct for the reason sufficiently stated above.
Judgment affirmed.
