April 15, 2008 1:31PM # Supreme Court to Nation: Happy Tax Day! By [Ilya Shapiro](https://www.cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro) --- SHARE In a fit of either highly coincidental timing or good humor, the Supreme Court today released opinions in two tax cases. In *MeadWestvaco Corp. v. Illinois Department of Revenue*, the Court limited the power of states to tax the money that a company based in another state earns when it sells off an investment in a division involved in a separate line of business. In *U.S. v. Clintwood Elkhorn Mining Co.*, the Court decided that a taxpayer seeking a refund for an invalid tax under the Constitution’s Export Clause must seek a refund from the government before bringing a lawsuit. So the taxpayers went 1–1 today, but the cases were both technical and not worth getting into. Perhaps the only interesting thing about them — aside from this whole Tax Day thing — is that they were both unanimous. This technicality and unanimity could be further evidence of Chief Justice Roberts trying to steer the Court to take on less high-profile (typically business) cases, with narrow issues that prevent the fractured 5–4 decision-making that make the Court seem more political than it really is (or should be). ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).