Territory of Alaska v. American Can Co.

In the face of the Alaska Legislature’s mandate in 1953 that the Territory’s Property Tax Act of 1949 “is hereby repealed,” with certain specific and limited exceptions embodied in a special saving clause clearly not applicable here, the appellant insists that it can still “collect accrued and unpaid taxes for the years 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1952.”

It is urged that this saving clause merely bestowed an “important additional right in the form of a pecuniary advantage [to] municipalities, schools and public utilities * * * but denied to the Territorial Government”; but that this “alleged special savings [Ac] clause” should not protect the appellees from being held “personally liable for the unpaid taxes” for the earlier years.

In this connection, we may observe in passing that hoth parties repeatedly refer in their briefs to “savings” clauses — the appellant 44 times and the appellees 58 times. *282 This palpable error, in which the Court below joined, and which, because of its frequency, can scarcely be regarded as typographical, occasionally is encountered even in some legal encyclopedias. For example, in 50 Am.Jur., Statutes, § 528, page 535, under the caption “Express Saving…

(dissenting).

I disagree with the holding of the majority that section 2(a) of chapter 22, Alaska Session Laws of 1953, nullifies the effect here of the Alaska General Savings Statute, section 19-1-1, Alaska Compiled Laws 1949. The relevant provisions of the latter are quoted below. 1 It is not at all *296 clear that it was the legislative intent to wipe out the liability of those in the situation of appellees for unpaid taxes levied for the years 1949 through 1952, but rather that section 2(a) had another and different purpose.

Significantly, the history of the 1953 legislation shows that section 2 of the original bill was deleted in the course of the bill’s consideration. That section in unmistakable terms had forgiven and abrogated all pre-1953 taxes. Concurrently, the phrase “and abrogating and repealing all accrued and unpaid taxes levied thereunder” was deleted from the bill’s title. Thus the legislature had before it in the original bill clear language which would have forgiven the taxes here in question. It chose, instead, to reject the language.

In material part section 2(a) of the Act as finally passed reads:

In light of what has been said above, the section is…