Provident Life & Trust Co. v. Hammond

Citations

• 230 Pa. 407
• 79 A. 628
• 1911 Pa. LEXIS 625

Syllabus

<p>Constitutional law — Title of act — Taxation—Corporations—Act of June 7, 1907, P. L. 480.</p> <p>1. The Act of June 7, 1907, P. L. 430, entitled “An Act to further amend Section twenty-one of an Act entitled ‘An Act to provide revenue by taxation’ approved June twenty-seventh, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine,” violates art. Ill, sec. 3, of the constitution of Pennsylvania which provides that “no bill, except general appropriation bills shall be passed containing more than one subject which shall be clearly expressed in its title,” inasmuch as no acts of assembly were approved on June 27, 1879, and the title specified was borne by two different acts approved in different years neither one of which ever had a twenty-first section, and neither of which acts referred to the subject-matter embodied in the act of June 7, 1907.</p> <p>2. The word “clearly” used in art. Ill, sec. 3, of the constitution of Pennsylvania, is omitted from similar provisions of the constitutions of most of the other states of the Union, and consequently the decisions in those states cannot be relied upon as precedents in determining the construction of the Pennsylvania constitutional provision.</p> <p>3. The purpose of the constitutional enactment was to prevent fraud and deception by requiring the title of the bill to disclose fully and clearly its subject so that all interested parties could be heard for and against the proposed legislation if they desired. It was not the title to an act which the constitutional provision required to be clearly expressed, but the title to the bill.</p> <p>4. There is no law authorizing the secretary of the commonwealth or the statute clerk to insert in the pamphlet laws marginal notes of an explanatory character. Such notes are useful as aiding in an examination of the laws, but cannot be used as an aid in the construction of them.</p> <p>5. The marginal note on page 430 of the pamphlet laws of 1907, viz., “Section 21 Act of June 8, 1893, cited