High Levity

Jaunty on many a British jurists' brow there perches the halo of high levity. Thus girt are Viscount Haldane and (notoriously) Baron Darling. Both are members of Britain's highest court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Both grew quipful last week when the Committee considered an appeal by the Canadian Ministry of Finance against a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada respecting one Cecil Smith, confessed bootlegger. Succinctly put, the question at issue was: "Ought the Crown to reap taxes from incomes known to be drawn from illegal sources, or is the $90,000 annual income of Cecil Smith nontaxable because he is a bootlegger?"

Without impaling themselves on either horn of this dilemma Lords Haldane and Darling reminisced and became all but raucous:

Viscount Haldane: "Once, when a burglar in the Exchequer Court asked for an accounting against his partner, the Court clapped both into prison. A man cannot invoke his own wrong-doing against the law."

Attorney Britt (council for Bootlegger Smith) : "But suppose a man should set himself up as a professional murderer of Cabinet Ministers . . . . Would not the Crown refuse to receive taxes from the murderer's source of income, lucrative though it might be?"

A. C. Clauson (attorney for the Crown) : "One has only to look into a man's pockets, and if there are profits there, that is enough for the tax gatherer. I do not say that if the pockets be full of stolen spoons one spoon should be taken as a tax on burglary. There is a valid distinction between profits and loot."

Baron Darling: "After all the bootlegger is only a smuggler and in the eighteenth century everybody traded with smugglers. . . . Now if a man were a pirate the Law should say 'although you are a pirate I will tax you and because you are a pirate I will hang you. . . .'

"The State, I may remark, has taken the estates of numerous hanged criminals; but no one calls that going into partnership with felons. . . .

"I recall, however that once when a highwayman took a case into one of the courts the presiding Justice suffered a fit from which he never recovered."

Throughout the week their Lordships reserved judgment.