that typhus bacteria could survive the long journey from the Windy to the Gateway Cityâthe Court concluded that the evidence was insufficient for it to act, and it dismissed Missouriâs complaint. St. Louis, Iâm afraid, hasnât been the same since.
Tax disputes make up a third set of cases. My favorite cases within this category are those where the plaintiff state and the defendant state are far away from each other. If the boundary and water-rights cases resemble college football matchups between teams from the same conference, then cases involving distant states are like the games where a team from theACC plays a school from the Big Ten. One of these cases involved a claim by California against Texas for the right to tax the estate of Howard Hughes, but that case actually turns out to be quite boring. A far more interesting case is
Texas v. Florida et al.,
where Texas sued Florida, Massachusetts, and New York because it thought that Edward H. R. Green, the rich son of a prominent Massachusetts whaling family who died in New York in the mid-1930s, had been âdomiciledâ in Texas at his death, thus giving Texas rather than these other states the right to tax his estate. The Court had to decide which of these four states best represented Greenâs home, in the sense of where he spent most of his time and where he intended to stay in the future. Analyzing the facts of Greenâs life in excruciating detail, the justices found that Greenâs real domicile at his death was Massachusetts, where he had built a $7 million estate, complete with âswimming pools, tennis courts, radio broadcasting stations, an airport, airship hangar and dock.â In the Courtâs view, this investment, along with the fact that Green spent more time in Massachusetts than in any other state during his later years, trumped his connections with the other states, even though he did spend the winters in Florida (often on a houseboat) and continued to his dying day to say that he was a resident of Texas, where he had lived for twenty years earlier in his life and thereafter had even rented a room (occupied only by âa box containing a pair of trousers and a vestâ). Inexplicably, the Court did not inquire into why anyone would ever want to wear a vest in Texas.
Okay, so by now you get the point that I like these cases because they remind me of college football games. At one point while working on this book, I thought it would be fun to figure out which states have brought the most original-jurisdiction cases, which have had the most cases brought against them, and which states have done the best and worst in terms of their won-loss records. I envisioned a standingschart like you see for the NFL in the newspaper. To put my plan into effect, I went to my computer legal database and pulled up all the state-versus-state cases from our two-hundred-plus-year history. There are a lot of them. I started making notes. I worked on the project for maybe an hour and a half. I got through about three of the cases (some of these old cases are hard to read). Then I decided,
Who the hell am I kidding, I have a family, my editor is a stickler about her deadlines, Iâm not doing this.
And then I went home.
I mentioned before that the justices of the Supreme Court would probably prefer not to hear any original-jurisdiction cases at all, because the Court is set up to consider cases on appeal, which means that by the time it gets the case, the lower courts have already sifted through the testimony and evidence and figured out what actually happened. The Supreme Court doesnât generally busy itself with this painstaking task; instead it focuses primarily on deciding purely legal issues (e.g., Does the Clean Air Act allow agencies to weigh costs and benefits when setting pollution standards? Does the equal-protection clause require states to allow gay marriage? Does the thirty-day clock governing removal of actions from
Tax disputes make up a third set of cases. My favorite cases within this category are those where the plaintiff state and the defendant state are far away from each other. If the boundary and water-rights cases resemble college football matchups between teams from the same conference, then cases involving distant states are like the games where a team from theACC plays a school from the Big Ten. One of these cases involved a claim by California against Texas for the right to tax the estate of Howard Hughes, but that case actually turns out to be quite boring. A far more interesting case is
Texas v. Florida et al.,
where Texas sued Florida, Massachusetts, and New York because it thought that Edward H. R. Green, the rich son of a prominent Massachusetts whaling family who died in New York in the mid-1930s, had been âdomiciledâ in Texas at his death, thus giving Texas rather than these other states the right to tax his estate. The Court had to decide which of these four states best represented Greenâs home, in the sense of where he spent most of his time and where he intended to stay in the future. Analyzing the facts of Greenâs life in excruciating detail, the justices found that Greenâs real domicile at his death was Massachusetts, where he had built a $7 million estate, complete with âswimming pools, tennis courts, radio broadcasting stations, an airport, airship hangar and dock.â In the Courtâs view, this investment, along with the fact that Green spent more time in Massachusetts than in any other state during his later years, trumped his connections with the other states, even though he did spend the winters in Florida (often on a houseboat) and continued to his dying day to say that he was a resident of Texas, where he had lived for twenty years earlier in his life and thereafter had even rented a room (occupied only by âa box containing a pair of trousers and a vestâ). Inexplicably, the Court did not inquire into why anyone would ever want to wear a vest in Texas.
Okay, so by now you get the point that I like these cases because they remind me of college football games. At one point while working on this book, I thought it would be fun to figure out which states have brought the most original-jurisdiction cases, which have had the most cases brought against them, and which states have done the best and worst in terms of their won-loss records. I envisioned a standingschart like you see for the NFL in the newspaper. To put my plan into effect, I went to my computer legal database and pulled up all the state-versus-state cases from our two-hundred-plus-year history. There are a lot of them. I started making notes. I worked on the project for maybe an hour and a half. I got through about three of the cases (some of these old cases are hard to read). Then I decided,
Who the hell am I kidding, I have a family, my editor is a stickler about her deadlines, Iâm not doing this.
And then I went home.
I mentioned before that the justices of the Supreme Court would probably prefer not to hear any original-jurisdiction cases at all, because the Court is set up to consider cases on appeal, which means that by the time it gets the case, the lower courts have already sifted through the testimony and evidence and figured out what actually happened. The Supreme Court doesnât generally busy itself with this painstaking task; instead it focuses primarily on deciding purely legal issues (e.g., Does the Clean Air Act allow agencies to weigh costs and benefits when setting pollution standards? Does the equal-protection clause require states to allow gay marriage? Does the thirty-day clock governing removal of actions from
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