Demorest v. City Bank Farmers Trust Co Dyett v. Title Guarantee Trust Co

• Decision Date: 17 January 1944
• Docket Number: 227,Nos. 52,s. 52
• Citation: 321 U.S. 36,64 S.Ct. 384,88 L.Ed. 526
• Parties: DEMOREST et al. v. CITY BANK FARMERS TRUST CO. et al. DYETT v. TITLE GUARANTEE & TRUST CO. et al
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

321 U.S. 36

64 S.Ct. 384

88 L.Ed. 526

DEMOREST et al.

v CITY BANK FARMERS TRUST CO. et al.

DYETT

v. TITLE GUARANTEE & TRUST CO. et al.

Nos. 52, 227.

Argued Dec. 10, 1943.

Decided Jan. 17, 1944.

On Appeals from the Surrogate's Court of New York County, State of New york.

Mr. Francis J. Mahoney, for appellants Demorest.

Mr. James N. Vaughan, for appellant Dyett.

Mr. Albert Stickney, for appellee Emma M. West.

Mr. C. Alexander Capron, for appellee City Bank Farmers Trust Co., trustee.

Mr. Louis J. Merrell, for appellees Title Guarantee & Trust Co. and others.

Mr. Justice JACKSON delivered the opinion of the Court.

Appellants in these two cases challenge the constitutionality of Subdivision 2 of § 17-c of the Personal Property Law of the State of New York, approved April 13, 1940.¹ Because of retroactivity it is said to offend the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution by taking for benefit of income beneficiaries property to which the appellants as beneficiaries of principal claim vested rights. It is asserted, also, to deny equal protection of the laws.

The facts in No. 52 are these: Henry West died in 1934. His will, so far as concerns us, left a residuary estate in trust. Net income less certain payments to a brother was given to his wife during her life or widowhood. Thereafter, subject to certain further trusts, the residue was to go to contingent remaindermen, among whom are the appellants.

At death West owned a number of mortgages. Owing to defaults, titles to nine of the underlying properties were acquired either by foreclosure sale or by deed in lieu thereof, and held in separate accounts as assets of the trust. The trustee's accounting disclosed that two such salvage operations were completed by sale of the properties prior to the enactment of § 17-c of the Personal Property Law. No distribution had been made of the proceeds. Objections on behalf of remaindermen questioned the validity of the statute as applied to apportioning such proceeds between income and principal. Surrogate Foley, however, upheld the statute and resolved the apportionment under its terms. His decree was unanimously affirmed by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for the First Judicial Department and thereafter was affirmed by the Court of Appeals, two judges dissenting. Matter of West's Estate, 289 N.Y. 423, 46 N.E.2d 501. The case is brought here by appeal.

In No. 227, Auguste Schnitzler died in 1930, leaving a will which put her residuary estate in trust with the income payable to a sister for life. The income beneficiary died in 1939. Salvage operations had begun in the lifetime of the beneficiary and were completed after her death. Surrogate Delehanty found that operation of the statute 'resulted over the whole salvage period in taking for income account more than the whole of what the property earned in that period. The deficit in so-called 'income' was made up by taking principal, of course.' (40 N.Y.S.2d 554, 555.) He considered the result startling' but settled the accounts under the statute, leaving its validity to be determined by appellate courts. The Court of Appeals affirmed without opinion on the authority of Matter of West and the case comes here by appeal.

The grievance of remaindermen in these cases is not that they have suffered loss or deprivation of any specific property to which they had legal title. Under the law of New York the whole legal estate vests in the trustee for purposes of the trust,² including title to mortgages and to real estate acquired upon or in lieu of their foreclosure, which becomes personalty for the purposes of the trust.³ Where the instrument creating the trust directs payment of income to one set of beneficiaries and corpus to another, allocation of receipts and disbursements as between capital and income is sometimes attended with difficulty. Mortgage investments may be imperiled by default in interest only, or payments of principal alone, or of both, but in either event both income and capital interests require protection. Advancements often must be made to remove tax liens or other prior charges, pay costs of foreclosure, make property tenantable, or take care of operating losses, watchmen, or insurance. On final sale the price, together with rentals, may leave either a loss or a profit, and to forego income for a period may result in a better sale of the capital asset. The variety of circumstances under which trustees are called upon to allocate items between capital and income are innumerable in salvage operations, the will rarely provides guidance, and the wisest and most faithful trustee is unable to draw the line with any great assurance. Either the income beneficiary or the remaindermen may challenge his accounts, for they have equitable interests which chancery will enforce that the trust be administered diligently and faithfully according to the will and the law. The flood of issues as to allotment of receipts and disbursements to capital or income account, following the depression, led the Court of Appeals to attempt to clarify the chancery rules on the subject for better guidance of trustees and the courts that supervise them.⁴ When this was only partially successful, the problem of clarification was carried further by legislation. The remaindermen claim an unconstitutional taking of their property results from this legislative enactment of rules for distribution as between income and capital beneficiaries of trust property involved in salvage operations, because they are less favorable to the remainder interests in these cases than the rules they claim otherwise would have applied.

Appellants' contention is that the New York Court of Appeals established a rule of apportionment of proceeds of salvage operations of mortgaged property as between income and principal which became a settled rule of property under which property rights vested in them prior to accounting by the trustees. This, they say, was accomplished by the decisions in Matter of Chapal's Will, 1936, 269 N.Y. 464, 199 N.E. 762, 103 A.L.R. 1268, and Matter of Otis' Will, 1937, 276 N.Y. 101, 11 N.E.2d 556, 115 A.L.R. 875. The Court of Appeals, however, in one of the present cases holds to the contrary, saying that those opinions represent tentative judicial efforts to guide the discretion of trustees; that they did not establish rules of property; and that the legislature appears to have done no more than to direct trustees to do what they already had discretion to do, in which case remaindermen could not have insisted upon their being surcharged under the law before the enactment.

In thus rejecting appellants' version of its previous decisions the Court of Appeals disposed of their cases on the ground that appellants have never possessed under New York law such a property right as they claim has been taken from them. If this is the case, appellants have no question for us under the Due Process Clause. Decisions of this Court as to its province in such circumstances were summarized in Broad River Power Co. v. South Carolina, 281 U.S. 537, 540, 50 S.Ct. 401, 402, 74 L.Ed. 1023, as follows: 'Whether the state court has denied to rights asserted under local law the protection which the Constitution guarantees is a question upon which the petitioners are entitled to invoke the judgment of this Court. Even though the constitutional protection invoked be denied on nonfederal grounds, it is the province of this Court to inquire whether the decision of the state court rests upon a fair or substantial basis. If unsubstantial, constitutional obligations may not be thus evaded. * * * But, if there is no evasion of the constitutional issue, * * * and the nonfederal ground of decision has fair support, * * * this Court will not inquire whether the rule applied by the state court is right or wrong, or substitute its own view of what should be deemed the better rule for that of the state court.'⁵

Despite difference of opinion within the Court of Appeals as to the effect of its earlier cases, we think that the decision of the majority that they did not amount to a rule of property does rest on a fair and substantial basis. The opinion in the Otis case had indicated a tentative quality in its pronouncements, saying: 'Perhaps it should be added that a general rule for such situations cannot be attained at a bound, that no rule can be final for all cases, and that any rule must in the end be shaped by considerations of business policy. Accordingly, we have here put aside inadequate legal analogies in the endeavor to express fair, convenient, practical guides that will be largely automatic in their application. Only the sure result of time will tell how far we have succeeded.' And the opinion had pointed out that the disbursement of net income during salvage operations was left to the discretion of the trustee with the admonition that the discretion 'should be exercised with appropriate regard for the fact that unless a life tenant gets cash he does not get anything in the here and now.' 276 N.Y. 101, 115, 11 N.E.2d 556, 559, 115 A.L.R. 875.

The executive committee of the Surrogates' Association of the State of New York, composed of the judicial officers immediately charged with application of these decisions to the instruction of and accountings by trustees held a similar view of the discretion left to trustees. The legislature appears to have been of the same mind in adopting the new legislation.⁶ The judicial effort was to formulate general rules to guide fiduciary discretion. The Chapal decision was rendered in response to a trustee's petition for instructions. But while such decisions were useful as precedents, they were felt not adequate to protect trustees aginst the hazards of litigation in particular cases, and the avowed effort of the court to adapt the law to the situation resulting from the depression failed in practice.⁷ Hence the legislature interven...