Cite as: 513 U. S. 106 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
scheme is "clear and certain." Due process, we should add, also allows the State to maintain an exclusively postdeprivation regime, see, e. g., Bob Jones Univ. v. Simon, 416 U. S. 725, 746-748 (1974), or a hybrid regime. A State is free as well to reconfigure its remedial scheme over time, to fit its changing needs. Such choices are generally a matter only of state law.
But what a State may not do, and what Georgia did here, is to reconfigure its scheme, unfairly, in mid-course—to "bait and switch," as some have described it. Specifically, in the mid-1980's, Georgia held out what plainly appeared to be a "clear and certain" postdeprivation remedy, in the form of its tax refund statute, and then declared, only after Reich and others had paid the disputed taxes, that no such remedy exists. In this regard, the Georgia Supreme Court's reliance on Georgia's predeprivation procedures was entirely beside the point (and thus error), because even assuming the constitutional adequacy of these procedures—an issue on which we express no view—no reasonable taxpayer would have thought that they represented, in light of the apparent applicability of the refund statute, the exclusive remedy for unlawful taxes. See generally Rakowski, Harper and Its Aftermath, 1 Fla. Tax Rev. 445, 474 (1993).
Nor can there be any question that, during the 1980's, prior to Reich I, Georgia did appear to hold out a "clear and certain" postdeprivation remedy. To recall, the Georgia refund statute says that the State "shall" refund "any and all taxes or fees which are determined to have been erroneously or illegally assessed and collected from [a taxpayer] under the laws of this state, whether paid voluntarily or involuntarily . . . ." Ga. Code Ann. § 48-2-35(a) (Supp. 1994) (emphasis added). In our view, the average taxpayer reading this language would think it obvious that state taxes assessed in violation of federal law are "illegally assessed" taxes. Certainly the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit thought this conclusion was obvious when,
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