Fidelity Trust Safety-Vault Company v. Louisville/Opinion of the Court

by Rufus Wheeler Peckham

United States Supreme Court

174 U.S. 429

Fidelity Trust Safety-Vault Company  v.  Louisville

It is unnecessary to determine whether the distinction between the business of a bank and that of a trust company was such as to cause it to be illegal to have agreed that the liability of the trust companies to taxation contrary to the Hewitt act should abide the result of the controversy as to the Louisville Banking Company, since we have just decided in Stone v. Bank (No. 362) 174 U.S. 412, 19 Sup. Ct. 747, that, irrespective of any distinction which might exist between the business of a bank eo nomine and that of a trust company, the commissioners of the sinking fund and the city attorney were without power to have made the agreement upon which the complainants relied in order to establish that they were privies to the decision in favor of the Louisville Banking Company. The plea of the thing adjudged depending upon the existence of privity being thus disposed of, there remains only to consider the alleged existence of an irrevocable contract arising from the Hewitt act. That no such contract arose from that act as to corporations chartered after 1856, or whose charters were extended subsequent to that year, was decided in Citizens' Sav. Bank of Owensboro v. City of Owensboro, 173 U.S. 636, 19 Sup. Ct. 530, 571. Indeed, the opinion in that case and the opinion announced in Stone v. Bank, supra, are decisive against the appellants, who were complainants below, as to every issue which arises for decision on these records, and the decrees below rendered are therefore affirmed.

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