Montgomery County Board of Realtors, Inc. v. Montgomery County

Apparently piqued at what it regarded as inadequate real property assessments, Montgomery County enacted a tax statute intended, as put in its brief, to be applicable to a seller who “is revealed to have derived real income from his property in that he enjoyed the use of the property at a lesser tax burden than the sale reveals he should have borne” and to thus impose “an excise on that income, taken, not retroactively, but at the time he is both revealed to have enjoyed the income and at the time he realizes it.” It was characterized by the trial judge as “an excise ... on ‘windfall’…