540
Opinion of the Court
See, e. g., Burden, supra, at 120; Schultz, supra, at 234; In re Virtual Network, supra, at 1250.
Section 510(c) may of course be applied to subordinate a tax penalty, since the Code's requirement that a Chapter 7 trustee must distribute assets "in the order specified in . . . section 507" (which gives a first priority to administrative expense tax penalties) is subject to the qualification, "[e]xcept as provided in section 510 of this title . . . ." 11 U. S. C. § 726(a). Thus, "principles of equitable subordination" may allow a bankruptcy court to reorder a tax penalty in a given case. It is almost as clear that Congress meant to give courts some leeway to develop the doctrine, 124 Cong. Rec. 33998 (1978), rather than to freeze the pre-1978 law in place. The question is whether that leeway is broad enough to allow subordination at odds with the congressional ordering of priorities by category.
The answer turns on Congress's probable intent to preserve the distinction between the relative levels of generality at which trial courts and legislatures respectively function in the normal course. Hence, the adoption in § 510(c) of "principles of equitable subordination" permits a court to make exceptions to a general rule when justified by particular facts, cf. Hecht Co. v. Bowles, 321 U. S. 321, 329 (1944) ("The essence of equity jurisdiction has been the power of the Chancellor to do equity and to mould each decree to the necessities of the particular case"). But if the provision also authorized a court to conclude on a general, categorical level that tax penalties should not be treated as administrative expenses to be paid first, it would empower a court to modify the operation of the priority statute at the same level at which Congress operated when it made its characteristically general judgment to establish the hierarchy of claims in the first place. That is, the distinction between characteristic legislative and trial court functions would simply be swept away, and the statute would delegate legislative revision, not authorize equitable exception. We find such a reading im-
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