“In Texas, as elsewhere, an equitable title is a right, enforceable in equity, to have the legal title to real estate, or the fruits thereof, transferred to the owner of the right.”
How later courts described this case
- “In Texas, as elsewhere, an equitable title is a right, enforceable in equity, to have the legal title to real estate, or the fruits thereof, transferred to the owner of the right.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
SIBLEY, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
The owner of the elevator, a private corporation, is, by a series of irregular instruments, continued in possession as a lessee, using the elevator as before. The State is protecting the property and its commercial use as before, but is to be denied its usual recompense in taxes. It is a startling proposition to me that an agency of the United States, without Congressional authority to do that very thing, can acquire a series of commercial properties and continue them in commercial use by commercial users and extinguish State taxation of them by means of the governmental immunity of the United States.
Certain it is that taxation is the rule and immunity the exception, and that immunity must be positively and clearly shown. I do not think, for the reasons stated in the opinion, that an immunity is positively and clearly shown on Jan. 1, 1937, by the confused and uncertain evidence offered. For this additional reason, I think the judgment denying the immunity ought to be affirmed.