Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance v. Moore , 68 S. Ct. 682 ( 1948 )

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,

dissenting.

My brother Jackson's opinion, with which I substantially agree, persuades me that we should decline to exercise jurisdiction in this case. The wise practice governing constitutional adjudication requires it. For this proceeding poses merely hypothetical questions, all of which are intertwined and concern interests not represented before us. Circumstances not more compelling, surely, than this record discloses led us in a series of recent cases to avoid borrowing trouble by declining to adjudicate premature constitutional issues. Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory, 325 U. S. 450; United Public Workers of America v. Mitchell, 330 U. S. 75; Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U. S. 549.

In appearance this is a suit between a few insurance companies and the State of New York. But at the heart of the controversy are the conflicting claims of several States in a hotchpot of undifferentiated obligations. The proceeds of “abandoned” life insurance policies cannot, I assume, be seized as for escheat more than once. Since the rights and liabilities growing out of such policies are, to a vast extent, the result of a process that concerns two or more States, their interests may come into conflict when, in exigent search for revenue, they invoke the opportunities of escheat against unclaimed proceeds from insurance policies. I assume merely conflicting State interests and lay aside considerations that may be drawn from the decision in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association, 322 U. S. 533.

In the vigilant search for new sources of revenue, several States have already sought to tap for their own exchequers the matured obligations of unclaimed policies. It would be impractical not to assume that other States will do likewise. Only New York’s claim is before us. It is vital to define the precise nature of this claim. New York does not lay claim to a particular fund constituting the proceeds of abandoned matured obligations. This litigation, it is conceded, seeks to test abstractly the constitutionality of the New York statute providing for turning over to her the avails of abandoned matured insurance policies. New York asks that her right to the hotchpot of undifferentiated obligations be acknowledged. Of course New York may enable its courts to pass on the validity of a comprehensive statute unrelated to the enforcement of specific claims to specific funds that came into existence under circumstances differing in their constitutional significance. It does not follow, however, that what the New York Court of Appeals has adjudicated we must review.

The New York Court of Appeals sustained the power of New York to claim escheat on abandoned insurance maturities from foreign insurance companies doing business in New York on the basis of the insured’s residence in New York at the time of the delivery of the policy in New York. According to this view, as Mr. Justice Jackson points out, change of residence of the insured or of the beneficiary long before maturity of the policy, or non-residence in New York of a beneficiary, other than the insured, at any time, become utterly immaterial. These are only some of the familiar situations that are encompassed by the Court of Appeals validation of the New York statute.

This Court does not purport to affirm all that is included in the New York judgment. It is fair, however, to say that the Court’s opinion does not enumerate what possible situations included in the judgment below it has not passed upon. It is explicit in putting to one side the validity of the New York statute in “instances where insured persons, after delivery, cease to be residents of New York or where the beneficiary is not a resident of New York at maturity of the policy. As interests of other possible parties not represented here may be affected by our conclusions and as no specific instances of those types appear in the record, we reserve any conclusion as to New York’s power in such situations.” But “no specific instances” of any type appear in the record. Indeed, it may be said that the only instances of types of transactions as to which escheat is claimed that are in the record are the types on which the opinion of the Court declines to pass. The complaint specifically refers to the frequency with which policies are issued upon the lives of New York residents for non-New York beneficiaries, as well as the extent with which holders of policies change their residence. On the state of the pleadings, these allegations must be accepted as true. To be sure, New York lays claim to all funds reflecting these situations, and its highest court has sustained this generalized claim. But, as already indicated, this is not a suit for any specific fund. For all we know there are no funds in New York to which that State could lay claim even within the circumscribed affirmance by this Court of the New York judgment.

Whatever the scope of the Court’s decision, it is a hypothetical decision. New York has been sustained below in an abstract assertion of authority against funds not claimed nor defined, except compendiously defined as the right to go against insurance companies doing business in New York for the proceeds of policies delivered in New York upon the lives of insured then resident in New York. This generalized decision the Court rejects. Instead, it carves out different and limited claims for which New York may go without any indication that there is anything on which such claims could feed. In any event, such a mutilated affirmance of the decision of the New York Court of Appeals, with everything else left open, is bound to hatch a brood of future litigation. Claims of the States of domicile of the insuring companies, claims of the States of residence of the insured at the time of maturity, claims of the States of residence of beneficiaries other than the insured at the time of maturity, are all put to one side here as not presented by the record though they are as much presented as what is decided. To revenue-eager States these are practical situations full of potentialities. This Court is all too familiar with the special position of control claimed by a chartering State and the special powers the domiciliary State of a deceased asserts over his “intangibles.”

How the conflicting interests of the States should be adjusted calls for proper presentation by the various States of their different claims. Words may seek to restrict a decision purporting to pass on a small fragment of what is in truth an organic complexity to that isolated part. But such an effort to circumscribe what has been decided is self-defeating. A decision has a momentum of its own, and it is nothing new that legal doctrines have the faculty of self-generating extension. We ought not to decide any of these interrelated issues until they are duly pressed here by the affected States, so that a mature judgment upon this interrelation may be reached. All the considerations of preventive adjudication — the avoidance of a truncated decision of indeterminate scope, with the inevitable duty of reconsidering it or unconsciously being influenced by implicit overtones of such a decision — require that decision await the ripening process of a defined contest over particular funds as to which different States make concrete claims.

The way is open to secure a determination by this Court of the rights of the different States in the variant situations presented by abandoned obligations on matured insurance policies. It is precisely for the settlement of such controversies among the several States that the Constitution conferred original jurisdiction upon this Court. If Florida, Massachusetts, New York and Texas could bring here for determination their right to levy a death tax in respect to a particular succession, Texas v. Florida, 306 U. S. 398, even more fitting is it that the claims of various States to seize the matured obligations of abandoned insurance policies should be presented by those States at the bar of this Court and be adjudicated here after full reflection on all these claims. Of course the insurance companies have interests to protect and to present. But the essential problem is the legal adjustment of the conflicting interests of different States, because each may have some relation to transactions which give rise to funds that undoubtedly are subject to escheat. Until that is duly before us we should not peck at the problem in an abstract, hypothetical way.

The appeal should be dismissed.