Cite as: 519 U. S. 213 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
also infra, at 223 (citing cases in which state governance law has been applied to national banks). Indeed, the Comptroller of the Currency, acting through regulation, permits considerable disparity in the standard of care applicable to federally chartered banks other than savings banks (which are under the jurisdiction of the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), 12 U. S. C. §§ 1462a, 1463(a)). See 61 Fed. Reg. 4866 (1996) (to be codified in 12 CFR § 7.2000) (permitting banks, within broad limits, "to follow the corporate governance procedures of the law of the state in which the main office of the bank is located . . . [or] the Delaware General Corporation Law . . . or the [Model Business Corporation Act]").
Second, the FDIC at times suggests that courts must apply a federal common-law standard of care simply because the banks in question are federally chartered. This argument, with little more, might have seemed a strong one during most of the first century of our Nation's history, for then state-chartered banks were the norm and federally chartered banks an exception—and federal banks often encountered hostility and deleterious state laws. See B. Klebaner, American Commercial Banking: A History 4-11 (1990) (tracing the origin of the dual banking system to the 1780 Philadelphia Bank and discussing proposals of a then-young Alexander Hamilton); B. Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War 41-66 (1957) (describing the controversial, but successful, Federalist proposals for the first and second federally chartered Bank of the United States).
After President Madison helped to create the second Bank of the United States, for example, many States enacted laws that taxed the federal bank in an effort to weaken it. This Court held those taxes unconstitutional. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 431 (1819) ("[T]he power to tax involves the power to destroy"). See also Osborn v. Bank of United States, 9 Wheat. 738 (1824) (federal marshals acted lawfully in seizing funds from a state tax collector who had
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