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72 Minn. 519

State v. Weyerhauser

Supreme Court of Minnesota

Decided June 9, 1898

Supreme Court of Minnesota · decided 1898-06-09

Proceedings in the district court for Itasca county to enforce payment of taxes for the year 1894. Judgment in favor of the state having been entered in accordance with the mandate of this court, pursuant to the decision reported in 68 Minn. 358, at the request of defendants the case was certified to this court.

Relies on State v. Weyerhauser

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Affirmed · Decided 1898-06-09

How this case has been cited

Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently February 2012

10 state decisions

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Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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MITCHELL, J.

¶1These proceedings were under the same statute, and are identical in all material facts with those of the same title considered in 68 Minn. 353, 71 N. W. 265, in which the statute (Laws 1893, c. 151, G. S. 1894, § 1633), was assailed as being in violation of certain provisions of the constitution of the state. In addition to the objections there urged against the validity of the statute, it is now urged that it is in violation of certain provisions of the federal constitution, particularly article 1, § 10, providing that no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts, and the fourteenth amendment, which provides that no state shall deprive any person of his property without due process of law7, or deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

¶2These fundamental constitutional principles are common to both the federal and the state constitutions, and the only effect of making them a part of the former is to render the supreme court of the United States the final arbiter in cases where their violation by a *520state is complained of. Therefore, inasmuch as our former decision covers every question now raised, and as the principal object of bringing the present proceedings before this court is to> make a record upon which the constitutionality of the statute referred to may be passed upon by the supreme court of the United States, we do not feel called upon to do much more than to affirm the judgment upon the grounds stated in our former opinion.

¶3We shall only make the following suggestions, viz.: Real-estate taxes assessed under this statute cannot be collected or enforced by distraint of goods, but can be collected or enforced only by proceedings in the nature of a civil action against the land, of which the owner has notice, which is “due process of law” as applied to such proceedings, and in which he may interpose by way of defense all objections to the tax which go to the merits of the proceedings; also, that there is no distinction in principle between a case where land has wholly escaped taxation by reason of its omission from the assessment roll and one where, by reason of a fraudulent or grossly inadequate assessment, it has escaped a part of its just share of the public burdens.

¶4Judgment affirmed.

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