Reich v. Collins, 513 U.S. 106, 7 (1994)

Page:   Index   Previous  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  Next

112

REICH v. COLLINS

Opinion of the Court

in a 1986 case, it denied federal court relief to taxpayers raising claims similar to Reich's, in part because it thought Georgia's refund statute applied to the claims. See Waldron v. Collins, 788 F. 2d 736, 738, cert. denied, 479 U. S. 884 (1986).

Respondents, moreover, do not point to any Georgia Supreme Court cases prior to Reich I that put any limiting construction on the statute's sweeping language; indeed, the cases we have found are all entirely consistent with that language's apparent breadth. See, e. g., Georgia v. Private Truck Council of America, Inc., 258 Ga. 531, 371 S. E. 2d 378 (1988); Henderson v. Carter, 229 Ga. 876, 195 S. E. 2d 4 (1972); Parke, Davis & Co. v. Cook, 198 Ga. 457, 31 S. E. 2d 728 (1944); Wright v. Forrester, 192 Ga. 864, 16 S. E. 2d 873 (1941). Even apart from the statute and the cases, we find it significant that, for obvious reasons, States ordinarily prefer that taxpayers pursue only postdeprivation remedies, i. e., that taxpayers "pay first, litigate later." This preference is significant in that it would seem especially unfair to penalize taxpayers who may have ignored the possibility of pursuing predeprivation remedies out of respect for that preference.

In many ways, then, this case bears a remarkable resemblance to NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U. S. 449 (1958) (Harlan, J.). There, an Alabama trial court held the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in contempt for failing to comply with a discovery order to produce its membership lists, and the Alabama Supreme Court denied review of the constitutionality of the contempt judgment on the grounds that the organization failed earlier to pursue a mandamus action to quash the underlying discovery order. The Court found that the Alabama high court's refusal to review the contempt judgment was in error. Prior Alabama law, the Court said, showed "unambiguous[ly]" that judicial review of contempt judgments had consistently been available, the existence of man-

Page:   Index   Previous  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  Next

Last modified: October 4, 2007