1. Plaintiff, having been required by the defendant Board to pay
charges for passage through a canal lock the use of which was then
by law free, its right to recover the amount was protected by the
federal Constitution against destruction by the state, and could
not be defeated by an act of the legislature purporting to validate
the collection retroactively. P.
258 U. S. 339.
United States v. Heinszen & Co., 206 U.
S. 370, a tax case, distinguished.
2. Generally a ratification of an act is not good if attempted
when the ratifying authority could not lawfully do the act. P.
258 U. S.
339.
80 Fla. 252 reversed.
Error to a judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida which
reversed a judgment recovered by the present plaintiff in error in
its action to recover sums of money it had paid to the defendant
Board as tolls for the passage of its boats through locks in one of
the canals of a drainage system supervised and controlled by the
Board under the state law.
MR. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is a suit, begun in 1917, to recover tolls unlawfully
collected from the plaintiff, the plaintiff in error, for passage
through the lock of a canal. The Supreme Court of Florida sustained
the declaration, 77 Fla. 742, but, on the day of the decision, the
legislature passed an act, c., Acts of 1919, that purported to
validate the collection. The act was pleaded. The plaintiff
demurred, setting up
Page 258 U. S. 339
Article I, Section 10, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the
Constitution of the United States, but the Supreme Court rendered
judgment for the defendant on the ground that the plea was good. 80
Fla. 252.
Stripped of conciliatory phrases, the question is whether a
state legislature can take away from a private party a right to
recover money that is due when the act is passed. The argument that
prevailed below was based on the supposed analogy of
United
States v. Heinszen, 206 U. S. 370
(
Rafferty v. Smith, Bell & Co., 257 U.
S. 226), which held the Congress could ratify the
collection of a tax that had been made without authority of law.
That analogy, however, fails. A tax may be imposed in respect of
past benefits, so that if, instead of calling it a ratification,
Congress had purported to impose the tax for the first time, the
enactment would have been within its power.
Wagner v.
Baltimore, 239 U. S. 207,
239 U. S. 216.
Stockdale v. Atlantic Ins.
Co., 20 Wall. 323. But generally ratification of an
act is not good if attempted at a time when the ratifying authority
could not lawfully do the act.
Bird v. Brown, 4 Exch, 786,
799. If we apply that principle, this statute is invalid. For if
the Legislature of Florida had attempted to make the plaintiff pay
in 1919 for passages through the lock of a canal that took place
before 1917 without any promise of reward, there is nothing in the
case as it stands to indicate that it could have done so any more
effectively than it could have made a man pay a baker for a
gratuitous deposit of rolls.
It is true that the doctrine of ratification has been carried
somewhat beyond the point that we indicate in regard to acts done
in the name of the government by those who assume to represent it.
Tiaco v. Forbes, 228 U. S. 549,
228 U. S. 556.
It is true also that, when rights are asserted on the ground of
some slight technical defect or contrary to some strongly
prevailing view of justice, Courts have
Page 258 U. S. 340
allowed them to be defeated by subsequent legislation and have
used various circumlocutions, some of which are collected in
Danforth v. Groton Water Works, 178 Mass. 472, 477;
Dunbar v. Boston & Providence R. Co., 181 Mass. 383,
385. In those cases, it is suggested that the meaning simply is
that constitutional principles must leave some play to the joints
of the machine.
But courts cannot go very far against the literal meaning and
plain intent of a constitutional text. Defendant owed the plaintiff
a definite sum of money that it had extorted from the plaintiff
without right. It is hard to find any ground for saying that the
promise of the law that the public force shall be at the
plaintiff's disposal is less absolute than it is when the claim is
for goods sold. Yet no one would say that a claim for goods sold
could be abolished without compensation. It would seem from the
first decision of the court below that the transaction was not one
for which payment naturally could have been expected. To say that
the legislature simply was establishing the situation as both
parties knew from the beginning it ought to be would be putting
something of a gloss upon the facts. We must assume that the
plaintiff went through the canal relying upon its legal rights, and
it is not to be deprived of them because the legislature
forgot.
Judgment reversed.