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The Legal Information Institute of Cornell University emails a bulletin of information about decisions of US SCt. The "liibulletin - Feb. 21, 1996" contains information about a case which may be of interest to members of this list. I have extracted some of it; at the end of the message are addresses of where to go for further information. It seems to me that is Woolwich, Air Canada (Murphy v. AG [1982] IR 241) territory. The SCt holds a tax unconstitutional, and remands to North Carolina for a hearing on consequential remedies. What are the US remedies here ? Of course, there is Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway v. O'Connor 223 U.S. 280 (1911) which figured in Woolwich, and has relatively recently been affirmed in Reich v. Collins -- U.S. -- (1994) O'Connor J.). Is there more ? And, can anyone offer a prediction as to what will happen on remand ?

Eoin O'Dell.

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FULTON CORP. v. FAULKNER, SECRETARY OF REVENUE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Docket 94-1239 -- Decided February 21, 1996
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During the period in question here, North Carolina levied an - intangibles tax on a fraction of the value of corporate stock owned by state residents inversely proportional to the corporation's exposure to the State's income tax. Petitioner Fulton Corporation, a North Carolina company, filed a state- court action against respondent State Secretary of Revenue, seeking a declaratory judgment that this tax violated the Commerce Clause and a refund of the 1990 tax it had paid on stock it owned in out-of-state corporations that did only part or none of their business in the State. The trial court ruled for the Secretary, but the Court of Appeals reversed. In reversing the Court of Appeals, the North Carolina Supreme Court found that the State's scheme imposed a valid compensatory tax under Darnell v. Indiana, 226 U.S. 390. It thus rejected Fulton's contention that Darnell had been overruled by this Court's more recent decisions and found that the intangibles tax imposed less of a burden on interstate commerce than the corporate income tax placed on intrastate commerce.

Held:

North Carolina's intangibles tax discriminates against interstate commerce in violation of the dormant Commerce Clause.

The state courts should determine in the first instance the proper remedy and whether Fulton has complied with the procedural requirements of the State's tax refund statute.

Pp. 21-23. 338 N.C. 472, 450 S.E.2d 728, reversed and remanded.

Souter, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
Rehnquist, C. J., filed a concurring opinion.

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HOW TO ACCESS OR ORDER EMAIL DELIVERY
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The full text of these decisions is archived at the ftp site ftp.cwru.edu in several formats (filtered ascii, original ascii, and WordPerfect).

You can also access the decisions using the LII's gopher server at gopher.law.cornell.edu, or through our World Wide Web server at http://www.law.cornell.edu/.

Finally, if you have only email access to the internet, you can retrieve these documents by sending a mail message to liideliver@lii.law.cornell.edu. Put your document requests in the body of the message like:

request 94-1239

You can request several decisions at once by putting them on separate lines. Request court decisions using the docket number as it appears with the syllabus.

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EOIN O'DELL
Barrister, Lecturer in Law

Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland

ph (+ 353 - 1) 608 1178
fax (+ 353 - 1) 677 0449

(All opinions are personal; no legal responsibility whatsoever is accepted.)
Live Long and Prosper !!