498
Opinion of the Court
cheat." Texas v. New Jersey, 379 U. S., at 677. On the other hand, intangible property "is not physical matter which can be located on a map," ibid., and frequently no single State can claim an uncontested right to escheat such property.
In Texas v. New Jersey, we discharged "our responsibility in the exercise of our original jurisdiction" to resolve escheat disputes that "the States separately are without constitutional power . . . to settle." Ibid.10 We adopted two rules intended to "settle the question of which State will be allowed to escheat [abandoned] intangible property." Ibid. "[S]ince a debt is property of the creditor, not of the debtor," we reasoned, "fairness among the States requires that the right and power to escheat the debt should be accorded to the State of the creditor's last known address as shown by the debtor's books and records." Id., at 680-681 (footnote omitted). This primary rule had the virtue of "involv[ing] a factual issue simple and easy to resolve," made even simpler by the Court's resort to "last known address, rather than technical legal concepts of residence and domicile." Id., at 681. It also achieved rough equity in that it "tend[ed] to distribute escheats among the States in the proportion of the commercial activities of their residents." Ibid. We recognized, however, that the primary rule could not resolve escheat claims over "property owed persons (1) as to whom there is no record of any address at all, or (2) whose last known address is in a State which does not provide for es-cheat of the property owed them." Id., at 682. For these situations, we adopted a secondary rule awarding the right to escheat to the debtor's "State of corporate domicile," subject to the claims of the State with "a superior right to es-cheat" under the primary rule. Ibid. We characterized the Texas scheme as "the fairest, . . . easy to apply, and in the
10 See also Western Union Telegraph Co. v. Pennsylvania, 368 U. S. 71, 75 (1961); Standard Oil Co. v. New Jersey, 341 U. S. 428, 443 (1951).
Page: Index Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007