Cite as: 538 U. S. 216 (2003)
Scalia, J., dissenting
from which it was seized, leaving others to incur the accounting costs in the event petitioners seek to extract their interest from the account.
In any event, our cases that have distinguished the "property owner's loss" from the "government's gain" say nothing whatever about reducing this value to some "net" amount. Remarkably, the Court does not cite the recent case of ours that specifically addresses this issue, and that does so in the very context of an IOLTA-type scheme. Phillips flatly rejected the notion that just compensation may be reduced by transaction costs the former owner would have sustained in retaining his property. See 524 U. S., at 170 ("The government may not seize rents received by the owner of a building simply because it can prove that the costs incurred in collecting the rents exceed the amount collected"); 5 see also Olson v. United States, 292 U. S., at 255 ("It is the property and not the cost of it that is safeguarded by [the] Constitutio[n]").
5 All the Court can muster in response to Phillips' rejection of its view that the government may seize property for which the administrative costs of retention exceed market value is a hypothetical posed by the Ninth Circuit dissenters in support of their suggestion to remand. Ante, at 238-239, n. 10. The doctrine of stare decisis adopts a different hierarchy: This Court's precedents are to be followed over dissenting opinions in the Courts of Appeals.
The Court also suggests that the confiscation of petitioners' property is "comparable to" the clerk's fee under Fla. Stat. § 28.24 (1977), which we discussed in Webb's Fabulous Pharmacies, Inc. v. Beckwith, 449 U. S. 155 (1980). Ante, at 238-239, n. 10. The clerk's fee imposed pursuant to § 28.24(14) had nothing to do with "transaction costs" but was a fee for services rendered by the State itself. 449 U. S., at 157. Here, the State does not even attempt to characterize its retention of petitioners' interest in that fashion. While petitioners, their escrow companies, and the banks holding their funds may very well incur costs in returning the IOLTA-generated interest to the clients, this does not convert the State's seizure into a fee. In any event, as noted earlier, supra, at 246, n. 3, we neither approved nor disapproved the State's retention of fees pursuant to § 28.24(14) in Webb's because the parties did not challenge it. 449 U. S., at 158.
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