How the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Should Interpret \u3ci\u3eWynne\u3c/i\u3e

In this special report, Knoll and Mason discuss how the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court should apply Wynne when it hears on remand First Marblehead v. Commissioner of Revenue. The authors conclude that when it originally heard the case, the Massachusetts court mistakenly considered, as part of its internal consistency analysis, whether Gate Holdings Inc. experienced double state taxation. As developed by the U.S. Supreme Court and most recently applied in Wynne, the internal consistency test is not concerned with actual double taxation that may arise from the interaction of different states’ laws. Rather, the test is designed to determine whether the challenged state’s law alone discriminates against interstate commerce. The authors show how this standard applies to the challenged Massachusetts apportionment rules, and they conclude that in order to ascertain the constitutionality of the challenged Massachusetts law, the Massachusetts court must determine how the other states would tax Gate if the other states applied Massachusetts law for non-domiciled taxpayers

The Dormant Foreign Commerce Clause After \u3ci\u3eWynne\u3c/i\u3e

This Essay surveys dormant foreign Commerce Clause doctrine to determine what limits it places on state taxation of international income, including both income earned by foreigners in a U.S. state and income earned by U.S. residents abroad. The dormant Commerce Clause similarly limits states’ powers to tax interstate and foreign commerce; in particular, it forbids states from discriminating against interstate or international commerce. But there are differences between the interstate and foreign commerce contexts, including differences in the nationality of affected taxpayers and differences in the impact of state taxes on federal tax and foreign-relations goals. Given current Supreme Court doctrine, we provide states guidance as to how to conform their regimes for taxing international income to constitutional requirements

\u3ci\u3eSteiner v. Utah\u3c/i\u3e: Designing a Constitutional Remedy

In an earlier article, we argued that the Utah Supreme Court failed to follow and correctly apply clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Steiner v. Utah when the Utah high court held that an internally inconsistent and discriminatory state tax regime did not violate the dormant commerce clause. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court recently declined certiorari in Steiner, but the issue is unlikely to go away. Not every state high court will defy the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to apply the dormant commerce clause, and so the Court will sooner or later likely find itself facing conflicting interpretations of the dormant foreign commerce clause. Accordingly, in this article we address an issue that we did not cover in our earlier article: how Utah could revise its tax system to satisfy the Constitution

Amicus Brief in \u3ci\u3eMaryland Comptroller v. Wynne\u3c/i\u3e

The internal consistency test reveals that Maryland applies systematically higher “county” taxes to interstate commerce than to in-state commerce. Economic analysis of Maryland’s tax regime — including its taxes on inbound, outbound, and domestic activities — confirms what the internal consistency test suggests, namely, that the Maryland “county” tax discourages interstate commerce. Specifically, the Maryland tax regime discourages Maryland residents from earning income outside of Maryland, and it simultaneously discourages nonresidents from earning income in Maryland. Maryland alone causes this distortion; the distortion does not depend on the taxes imposed by any other state. Petitioner’s argument that Maryland’s outbound tax regime should be upheld because it is facially neutral when compared to Maryland’s domestic tax requires the Court to ignore Maryland’s inbound tax on nonresidents. Ignoring relevant parts of a state’s tax regime obscures the overall effect of that regime on interstate commerce. Although crediting other states’ taxes would cure Maryland’s dormant Commerce Clause violation, other practical and legitimate alternatives for curing the violation exist. Maryland, not the courts, should decide how to cure the constitutional infirmity in Maryland’s tax regime

\u3ci\u3eComptroller v. Wynne\u3c/i\u3e: Internal Consistency, a National Marketplace, and Limits on State Sovereignty to Tax

On November 12, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Comptroller of the Treasury v. Wynne. The case, which has already been called the Court’s most important state tax case in decades, asks how the dormant Commerce Clause restrains state taxation of individual income. Because Wynne lacks the usual indicia of “certworthiness,” the case raises the possibility that the Court will reshape the constitutional balance between the states’ sovereign interest in collecting taxes and the national interest in maintaining an open economy. The challenge for the Court, whose dormant Commerce Clause rulings have attracted intense criticism, is to delineate clear limits on state taxation that promote a national market economy without unduly restricting the states’ taxing authority. In earlier writings, we developed a framework to resolve tax discrimination cases in a consistent and intuitive manner that provides states with broad flexibility while maintaining an open interstate market. In this Essay, we apply that framework to Wynne to demonstrate how Maryland’s current system violates the dormant Commerce Clause. We also describe how our approach addresses Maryland’s arguments and resolves many issues that seemed to trouble the Justices at oral argument. The rest of this Essay proceeds as follows. After providing the factual and legal background of the case, we show that the contested Maryland income tax regime fails the Court’s long-standing internal consistency test and so would be struck down were the Court to apply that test. We then respond to Maryland’s three major arguments why the Court should not apply the internal consistency test. Drawing on our earlier work, we first show that Maryland’s principal claim, that its tax law does not discourage cross-border commerce because residents are taxed at the same rate on in-state and out-of-state income, whereas non-residents are taxed at a lower rate on in-state income and not at all on out-of-state income, is not dispositive. Maryland’s argument should not prevail because economic analysis shows that the comparison of tax rates that Maryland offers is too simplistic to reveal whether the Maryland tax system discourages cross-border commerce. Second, Maryland claims that any interference with the Wynnes’ cross-border commerce stems from the interaction of different states’ tax systems rather than Maryland’s tax regime alone. This claim is wrong, and we show that Maryland’s tax system would burden interstate commerce even if no other state imposed taxes. Third, we show that Maryland’s claim that a decision for the taxpayer would allow residents with out-of-state income to free-ride on Maryland’s public services is overstated because the internal consistency test provides states with wide flexibility to tax. The arguments in Wynne largely followed the outline above, with an important exception. The taxpayer argued that the dormant Commerce Clause requires Maryland to eliminate double taxation of their interstate commerce for the simple reason that Maryland is their state of residence. But the Court’s dormant Commerce Clause doctrine does not clearly support the interpretation that the state of residence must eliminate double taxation. Nor is such an interpretation needed for the Wynnes to win their case. Rather than requiring elimination of double taxation, the dormant Commerce Clause prohibits states from discriminating against interstate commerce. We show that Maryland discriminates against interstate taxation, and this discrimination would persist even if no other states imposed taxes. It is, therefore, independent of any double taxation that arises under the Maryland tax, and it is also independent of any action other states take. Double taxation is not the focus of the dormant Commerce Clause, and avoiding double taxation is not the same as not discouraging cross-border commerce. As we show, a state can discourage cross-border commerce even though there is no double taxation, and double taxation can occur without discouraging cross-border commerce

The Economic Foundation of the Dormant Commerce Clause

Last Term, a sharply divided Supreme Court decided a landmark dormant Commerce Clause case, Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne. Wynne represents the Court’s first clear acknowledgement of the economic underpinnings of one of its main doctrinal tools for resolving tax discrimination cases, the internal consistency test. In deciding Wynne, the Court relied on economic analysis we provided. This Essay explains that analysis, why the majority accepted it, why the dissenters’ objections to the majority’s reasoning miss their mark, and what Wynne means for state taxation. Essential to our analysis and the Court’s decision in Wynne is the idea that states are capable of discriminating not only on an inbound basis, but also on an outbound basis, and that the Commerce Clause prohibits discrimination on either basis. To aid in explicating our position, this Essay introduces the term “retentionism” as an analogue to protectionism. Whereas taxes or regulations are protectionist when they discourage outsiders from engaging in economic activities within a state, taxes or regulations are retentionist when then discourage in-state economic actors from engaging in out-of-state activities. As we show, the tax struck down in Wynne was both protectionist and retentionist

What Is Tax Discrimination?

Prohibitions of tax discrimination have long appeared in constitutions, tax treaties, trade treaties, and other sources, but despite their ubiquity, little agreement exists as to how such provisions should be interpreted. Some commentators have concluded that tax discrimination is an incoherent concept. In this Article, we argue that in common markets, like the EU and the United States, the best interpretation of the nondiscrimination principle is that it requires what we call “competitive neutrality,” which prevents states from putting residents at a tax-induced competitive advantage or disadvantage relative to nonresidents in securing jobs. We show that, contrary to the prevailing view, maintaining a level playing field between resident and nonresident taxpayers requires neither tax rate harmonization nor equal taxation of residents and nonresidents. Our approach produces simple rules of thumb that provide states and courts with clear direction in writing tax laws and evaluating challenges to those laws