Court Case Brief, National Bellas Hess Inc. (Essay Sample)

Court Case Brief:
Name
Institution
Introduction
The appellant, National Bellas Hess Inc. is a mail order house of various customer merchandises, with its primary place of trade in Kansas City, Missouri. The appellant has no touchable holdings in Illinois and has no representative, sales channels, solicitors, or telephones catalog in Illinois and does the mail order house advertise thereby neither television, radio, newspaper, nor billboards (National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue, 1967). The Department of Revenue (appellee), obtained a judgment that National Bellas Hess Inc. is expected to accumulate and pay use taxes to the State from the Illinois Supreme Court, upon customers who buy National Bellas Hess goods for consumption within the state. The appellant mailed catalogues to clients throughout the U.S. including Illinois. Illinois State attempted to force the appellant to collect a use tax from its clients.
Facts
Citation: [386 U.S. 753, 754]
The Supreme Court in 1967 held in National Belles Hess, Inc. v. Department of Revenue that Illinois cannot require Bellas Hess to collect its use tax. Initially, this decision had a small and limited effect on the state taxes (Jennings, 2017). First, the decision was one in a long line of cases holding that the Constitution prohibited states from imposing sales taxes on businesses operating in interstate commerce (National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue, 1967). Second, the holding applied to a narrow class of transactions; mail order retails sales made by a company outside the state, which had no physical manifestation in the market state (Justia Legal Resources, 2017). The Court thought that such retailers comprised only a small percentage of all retailers in existence and that the rate would remain small for the near future. The appellant received orders from Illinois residents and delivered the merchandise through a common carrier. National Bellas Hess is only licensed to transact business just in Missouri where it is principally located and Delaware where it is incorporated (JLR, 2017). The Illinois court gave a ruling wanting the petitioner to pay and collect to the state use tax from the appellant’s consumers based in the Illinois state despite the seller having no tangible property or representatives in the State.
Issue
The appellant sent catalogues to its clients all through U.S. and supplemented this by promoting flyers. The clients send orders for products to the organization, and the organization sends the requested merchandise through a common carrier (JLR, 2017). One of the inquiries that emerge is whether the appellant conducts its operations according to Illinois statute (Jennings, 2017). The Commerce clause disallows a State from forcing the responsibility of use tax payment and collection upon a vendor whose only association with a client in the Government is by common carrier or mail.
The court conclusion
The decision of the court required that the previous ruling be reversed (National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue, 1967). The ruling made by the Supreme Court was that a mail order merchant was not obligated to collect Sal...