Toomer v. Witsell, 415

Decision Date07 June 1948
Docket NumberNo. 415,415
PartiesTOOMER et al. v. WITSELL et al.,
CourtU.S. Supreme Court

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina.

[Syllabus from pages 385-387 intentionally omitted] Messrs. Robert E. Falligant and Aaron Kravitch, both of Savannah, Ga., for appellants.

Messrs. David W. Robinson, of Washington, D.C., and J. Monroe Fulmer, of Columbia, S.C., for appellees.

Mr. Chief Justice VINSON delivered the opinion of the Court.

This is a suit to enjoin as unconstitutional the enforcement of several South Carolina statutes governing commercial shrimp fishing in the three-mile maritime belt off the coast of that State. Appellants, who initiated the action, are five individual fishermen, all citizens and residents of Georgia, and a non-profit fish dealers' organization incorporated in Florida. Appellees are South Carolina officials charged with enforcement of the statutes.

The three-judge Federal District Court which was convened to hear the case1 upheld the statutes, denied an injunction and dismissed the suit. 2 On direct appeal from that judgment3 we noted probable jurisdiction.

The fishery which South Carolina attempts to regulate by the statutes in question is part of a larger shrimp fishery extending from North Carolina to Florida.4 Most of the shrimp in this area are of a migratory type, swimming south in the late summer and fall and returning northward in the spring. Since there is no federal regulation of the fishery, the four States most intimately concerned have gone their separate ways in devising conservation and other regulatory measures. While action by the States has followed somewhat parallel lins , efforts to secure uniformity throughout the fishery have by and large been fruitless.5 Because of the integral nature of the fishery, many commercial shrimpers, including the appellants, would like to start trawling off the Carolinas in the summer and then follow the shrimp down the coast to Florida. Each State has been desirous of securing for its residents the opportunity to shrimp in this way, but some have apparently been more concerned with channeling to their own residents the business derived from local waters. Restrictions on non-resident fishing in the marginal sea, and even prohibitions against it, have now invited retaliation to the point that the fishery is effectively partitioned at the state lines; bilateral bargaining on an official level has come to be the only method whereby any one of the States can obtain for its citizens the right to shrimp in waters adjacent to the other States. 6

South Carolina forbids trawling for shrimp in the State's inland waters,7 which are the habitat of the young shrimp for the first few months of their life. It also provides for a closed season in the three-mile maritime belt during the spawning season, from March 1 to July 1.8 The validity of these regulations is not questioned.

The statutes appellants challenge relate to shrimping during the open season in the three-mile belt: Section 3300 of the South Carolina Code provides that the waters in that area shall be 'a common for the people of the State for the taking of fish.'9 Section 3374 imposes a tax of 1/8¢ a pound on green, or raw, shrimp taken in those waters.10 Section 3379, as amended in 1947, requires payment of a license fee of $25 for each shrimp boat owned by a resident, and of $2,500 for each one owned by a non-resident.11 Another statute, not integrated in the Code, conditions the issuance of non-resident licenses for 1948 and the years thereafter on submission of proof that the applicants have paid South Carolina income taxes on all profits from operations in that State during the preceding year.12 And § 3414 requires that all boats licensed to trawl for shrimp in the State's waters dock at a South Carolina port and unload, pack, and stamp their catch 'before shipping or transporting it to another State or the waters thereof.'13 Violation of the fishing laws enti ls suspension of the violator's license as well as a maximum of a $1,000 fine, imprisonment for a year, or a combination of a $500 fine and a year's imprisonment.14

First. We are confronted at the outset with appellees' contention, rejected by the District Court, that injunctive relief is inappropriate in this case, regardless of the validity of the challenged statutes, since appellants failed to show the imminence of irreparable injury and did not come into court with clean hands.

As to the corporate appellant, we agree with the appellees that there has been no showing that enforcement of the statute would work an irreparable injury. The record shows only that the corporation is an association of fish dealers and that it operates no fishing boats. Indeed, neither the record nor the appellants' brief sheds any light on how the statutes affect the corporation, let alone how their enforcement will cause it irreparable injury. Under such circumstances, the corporation has no standing to ask a federal court to take the extraordinary step of restraining enforcement of the state statutes. The remainder of this opinion will therefore be addressed to the individual appellants' case.

As to them, it is agreed that the appellees were attempting to enforce the statutes. It is also clear that compliance with any but the income tax statute would have required payment of large sums of money for which South Carolina provides no means of recovery, that defiance would have carried with it the risk of heavy fines and long imprisonment, and that withdrawal from further fishing until a test case had been taken through the South Carolina courts and perhaps to this Court would have resulted in a substantial loss of business for which no compensation could be obtained. Except as to the income tax statute, we conclude that appellants sufficiently showed the imminence of irreparable injury for which there was no plain, adequate and complete remedy at law.15

Appellants' position on the income tax statute16 is that it is unconstitutional for South Carolina to require Georgia residents to pay South Carolina income taxes on profits made from operations in South Carolina waters. Another South Carolina statute, however, permits any taxpayer who believes a tax to be 'illegal for any cause' to pay the tax under protest and then sue in a state court to recover the amounts so paid.17 In the absence of any showing by appellants that they could not take advantage of this procedure to raise their constitutional objections to the tax, we cannot say that they do not have an adequate remedy at law.

Some of the individual appellants had previously been convicted of shrimping out of season and in inland waters. The District Court held that this previous misconduct, not having any relation to the constitutionality of the challenged statutes, did not call for application of the clean hands maxim. We agree.

Second. The appellants too press a contention which, if correct, would dispose of the case. They urge that South Carolina has no jurisdiction over coastal waters beyond the low-water mark. In the court below United States v. California, 1947, 332 U.S. 19, 67 S.Ct. 1658, 91 L.Ed. 1889, was relied upon for this proposition. Here appellants seem to concede, and correctly so, that such is neither the holding nor the implication of that case; for in deciding that the United States, where it asserted its claim, had paramount rights in the three-mile belt, the Court pointedly quoted and supplied emphasis to a statement in Skiriotes v. Florida, 1941, 313 U.S. 69, 75, 61 S.Ct. 924, 928, 85 L.Ed. 1193, that 'It is also clear that Florida has an interest in the proper maintenance of the sponge fishery and that the (state) stt ute so far as applied to conduct within the territorial waters of Florida, in the absence of conflicting federal legislation, is within the police power of the State.' 18

Since the present case evinces no conflict between South Carolina's regulatory scheme and any assertion of federal power, the District Court properly concluded that the State has sufficient interests in the shrimp fishery within three miles of its coast so that it may exercise its police power to protect and regulate that fishery.19

It does not follow from the existence of power to regulate, however, that such power need not be exercised within the confines of generally applicable Constitutional limitations. In the view we take, the heart of this case is whether South Carolina's admitted power has been so exercised. We now proceed to various aspects of that problem.

Third. Appellants contend that § 3374,20 which imposes a tax of 1/8¢ a pound on green shrimp taken in the maritime belt, taxes imports and unduly burdens interstate commerce in violation of §§ 8 and 10 of Art. I of the Constitution. We agree with the court below that there is no merit in this position.

Since South Carolina has power to regulate fishing in the three-mile belt, at least where the federal government has made no conflicting assertion of power, fish caught in that belt cannot be considered 'imports' in a realistic sense of the word. Appellants urge, however, that the tax is imposed on shrimp caught outside, as well as within the three-mile limit. On its face the statute has no such effect, and appellants call our attention to no South Carolina decision so interpreting it. Since we do not have the benefit of interpretation by the State courts and since this suit for an injunction does not present a concrete factual situation involving the application of the statute to shrimping beyond the imaginary three-mile line, it is inappropriate for us to rule in the abstract on the extent of the State's power to tax in this regard.21

Nor does the statute violate the commerce clause. It does not discriminate against interstate commerce in shrimp, and the taxable event,...

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