 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Carter v. Department of Transportation11/13/1995
burdened with the tax, Carter is not a distributor. Since the dispositive language in Montana's statute clearly places the burden on the distributor, the legal incidence of the tax does not fall on Carter. Since Carter is unable to show she has been personally affected by this tax, she lacks the necessary standing to pursue this claim. Therefore summary judgment was appropriate.
We affirm the District Court's granting of summary judgment based on the appellant's lack of standing.
Affirmed.
CHIEF JUSTICE TURNAGE and JUSTICE LEAPHART concur.
JUSTICE NELSON specially concurs.
I concur with the result of our decision but not in our analysis. In determining whether Carter was personally injured by the gasoline tax, we analyze where the legal incidence of the tax falls. Although the United States Supreme Court noted in Chickasaw that often the dispositive question in Indian tax cases is who bears the legal incidence of the tax, the legal incidence analysis goes to the merits of the taxation issue. Chickasaw did not involve a standing issue, and thus, properly resolved the taxation issue presented there on the basis of a legal incidence analysis. In the instant case, we need not and should not reach the merits, but need only affirm the District Court's grant of summary judgment based on Carter's lack of standing. Therefore, we should limit our analysis to standing and should not implicitly reach the merits of Carter's claims by addressing the legal incidence of the tax.
The sole issue on review is whether the District Court properly granted summary judgment to the Montana Department of Transportation. The District Court granted summary judgment because it found that Carter did not have standing to challenge the validity of Montana's gasoline license tax as applied to Indian retailers inside the boundaries of the Rocky Boy Reservation.
Standing is a justiciability doctrine designed to control access to the judicial system by determining who is entitled to have a case adjudicated. See Olson v. Department of Revenue (1986), 223 Mont. 464, 469-70, 726 P.2d 1162, 1166. Originating in Article VII, section 4 of the Montana Constitution, the standing doctrine limits judicial power to "cases at law and equity." This Court has interpreted "cases at law and equity" to embody the same limitations as the Article III "case or controversy" provision in the United States Constitution. Olson, 726 P.2d at 1166; Stewart v. Bd. of Cty. Comm'rs of Big Horn Cty. (1977), 175 Mont. 197, 201, 573 P.2d 184, 186.
The fundamental aspect of standing is that it focuses on the party seeking to get a complaint before a court and not on the issues the party wishes to have adjudicated. Flast v. Cohen (1968), 392 U.S. 83, 99, 88 S.Ct. 1942, 1952, 20 L.Ed.2d 947, 961. Courts approach standing in two ways. The first approach focuses on the constitutional provisions of standing and the second approach focuses on the prudential restrictions that courts use to preserve judicial credibility and to deny standing. Olson, 726 P.2d at 1166; Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State (1982), 454 U.S. 464, 475, 102 S.Ct. 752, 760, 70 L.Ed.2d 700, 711.
At a minimum, the constitutional provisions require that a plaintiff be personally injured or be threatened with immediate injury by the alleged constitutional or statutory violation. Olson, 726 P.2d at 1166-67; Chovanak v. Matthews (1948), 120 Mont. 520, 526-27, 188 P.2d 582, 585. Thus, at the threshold of every case, especially those where a statutory or constitutional violation is alleged to have occurred, is the requ
Page 1 2 3 4 Montana Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|