Kehrer v. Stewart

Citations

• 197 U.S. 60
• 25 S. Ct. 403
• 49 L. Ed. 663
• 1905 U.S. LEXIS 1220

Syllabus

<p>As a tax upon the seller of goods is a tax upon the goods themselves, and a tax upon goods sold in one State delivered to a common carrier and consigned to the purchaser in another State is an illegal interference with interstate commerce, a State cannot impose a privilege tax on agents of packing houses as to meats shipped to him from another State merely for distribution to purchasers from his principal; but where the Supreme Court of the State has held that the tax is void as to interstate shipments</p> <p>■ and applies only to the domestic business of the agent in the ordinary course of trade, and all other such agents, whether of domestic or foreign packing houses, are subject to the tax, that construction will be accepted by this court as in reality a part of the statute itself, and the tax is within the power of the State and is not as to his domestic business an interference with interstate commerce even though all of the goods sold by an agent may be shipped to him from another State.</p> <p>Nor is such a tax void because it is laid upon the agents themselves and cannot be apportioned between the interstate and the domestic business carried on by the same person. •</p> <p>While such a tax might not apply to an agent whose domestic business was purely nominal and strictly incidental tó his interstate business, it does apply to one whose domestic- business is a definite, although a minor, part of his business in the State -as the application of the tax does not depend on the greater or less magnitude of the business.</p> <p>Where such a tax is imposed alike upon the managing agent both of domestic and foreign houses, it does not deny, to the agent of a foreign house the equal protection of the laws. •</p> <p>A State has the right to classify occupations and impose different taxes upon different occupations. The necessity for, and the amount of, the tax are exclusively within the control of the state legislature, and, in the absence of discrimination agains