delivered the opinion of the Court.
Undеr Kentucky Revised Statutes of 1942, ch. 393, §§ 393.060 et seq., every bank or trust company in the state is required to turn over to the state, deposits which have remained inactive and unclaimed for specified periods. The questions for decision are: (1) whether the statute under which the state purports to acquire the right to demand custody of the deposits, affords due process of law, even though the depositors may not receive personal notice of the pending transfer and there may be no prior judicial proceedings, and (2) whether the statute, as applied to deposits in a national bank, conflicts with the nationаl banking laws or is an unconstitutional interference by the state with appellant’s operations as a banking instrumentality of the United States.
So far as here relevant, the provisions of the statute may be summarily stated as follows. Demand deposits held by a bank, with accrued interest, are presumed abandoned unless the owner has, within ten years preceding the date for making the report required by § 393.110, negotiated in writing with the bank, or been credited with interest on his passbook at his request, or had a transaction noted upon the books of the bank, or increased or decreased the amount of his deposit (§393.060). Non-demand deposits, with accrued interest, are likewise presumed abandoned, unless the owner, within the twenty-five years preceding the report, has taken one or more of such enumerated actions ( § 393.070).
A person refusing to turn over property under this statute is subject to a penalty of 10% of its amount, but not to exceed $500; he is subject to no penalty, however, if he posts a compliance bond (§393.290). Any person who transfers property to the state under this statute is relieved of liability to the owner, and the state is required to reimburse the holder for any such liability (§ 393.130).
The Commissioner may institute judicial proceedings to establish conclusively that property, in his hands be
A claim to property surrendered to the state may be made at any time, unless the property has been judicially determined, under § 393.230, to have been actually abandoned, in which case any claim to the property by а person not actually served with notice and who did not appear and whose claim was not considered during the proceeding, must be made within five years of the judicial determination (§393.140 (1) and (2); and see
Anderson National Bank
v.
Reeves,
The statute thus sets up a comprehensive scheme for the administration of abandoned bank deposits. Upon a report by the bank and notice to the depositors and with an opportunity to be heard, if either wish it, the state takes into its protective custody bank accounts which, having been inactive for at least ten years if demand accounts, or at least twenty-five years if non-demand, the statute declares to be presumptively abandoned. The bank is relieved of its liability to the depositors, who receive instead a claim against the state, enforcible at any time until the deposits are judicially found to be abandoned in fact and
Appellant, a national banking association organized under the laws of the United States, brought the present suit in the Circuit Court of Kentucky for Eranklin County. The bill of complaint, filed by appellant on behalf of itself and all others similarly situated, sought to enjoin appellees, the state Commissioner of Revenue and other state officers, from enforcing the statute here in question. The Circuit Court held invalid so much of the challenged statute as requires the payment of deposits to the state merely on the prescribed notice, and without the order or judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction. It gave judgment perpetually enjoining appellees from enforcing such parts of the statute. The Kentucky Court of Appeals sustained the Act in its entirety, holding that it affords due process, and that it neither infringes the national banking laws nor is a prohibited interference with a banking instrumentality of the United States. It accordingly reversed the judgment of the Circuit Court, and instructеd it to deny an injunction.
Appellant contends here: (1) that the statute, in requiring payment of the deposit accounts to the state on the prescribed notice, without recourse to judicial proceedings or any court order or judgment, deprives the depositors and appellant of property without due process of law, and (2) that such withdrawal of accounts from a national bank infringes the national banking laws, particularly R. S. § 5136,12 U. S. C. § 24, which authorize national banks to accept deposits and to do a banking business, and is an unconstitutional interference with the
I.
Appellant argues that the statute deprives both the bank and the depositors of their property rights in the bank accounts, and contends that the procedure by which the state acquires its asserted right to demand payment of the accounts is so lacking in notice to depositors and in an opportunity for them to be heard as to deny the state the right to assert the depositors’ claims and afford to thе bank no protection if it responds to the state’s demand for payment of the accounts.
While the Kentucky statute is entitled “Escheats,” its provisions, so far as applicable to bank deposits, are concerned only with personal property deemed abandoned. At common law, abandoned personal property was not the subject of escheat, but was subject only to the right of appropriation by the sovereign as
bona vacantia.
See 7 Holdsworth, A History of English Law (2d ed.) 495-496. Like rights of appropriation, except so far as limited by state law and the Fourteenth Amendment, exist in the several states of the Unitеd States.
Hamilton
v.
Brown,
Apart from questions which may arise under the national banking laws in the case of national banks, it is no longer open to doubt that a state, by a procedure satisfying constitutional requirements, may compel surrender to it of deposit balances, when there is substantial ground for belief that they have been abandoned or forgotten,
Security Bank
v.
California, supra,
certainly when the state acquires them subject to all lawful demands of the depositors.
Provident Savings Institution
v.
Malone,
With respect to the statutory rebuttable presumption of abandonment of demand deposits after inactivity of ten years and of non-demand deposits after inactivity of twenty-five years, we are unable to say that the legislative determination is without support in experience. We have sustained like statutory presumptions that shorter periods of inactivity furnish the basis for state administration of unasserted claims or demands. See Security Bank v. California, supra; Cunnius v. Reading School District, supra; Blinn v. Nelson, supra; cf. Provident Savings Institution v. Malone, supra.
In the present posture of the case we conclude, subject to the requirements of procedural due process, that prior to a judicial decree of actual abandonment, the depositors will not be deprived of their property by the surrender of their bank accounts to the state. We need not decide whether the procedure for determining abandonment in fact conforms to due process, for appellant has not attackеd this procedure here and no such proceeding is before us. Prior to such a decree the present statute merely compels the summary substitution of the state for the bank, as the debtor of the depositors. It deprives
Appellant and the Comptroller of the Currency, as
amicus curiae,
point to the formalities with which the depositors must comply before they will be able to recover their deposits, and argue that the state
may
be less solvent or less willing to pay than the bank. In the absence of some persuasive showing, which is lacking here, that these formalities will be more onerous than those which would or could be properly required by the bank, or that the state
will
in fact be less able or less willing to pay, it cannot be assumed that the mere substitution of the state as the debtor will deprive the depositors of their property, or impose on them an unconstitutional burden. See
Dohany
v.
Rogers,
Since the bank is a debtor to its depositors, it can interpose no due process or contract clause objection to payment of the claimed deposits to the state, if the state is lawfully entitled to demand payment, for in that case payment of the debt to the state, under the statute, relieves the bank of its liability to the depositors.
Security Bank
v.
California, supra,
285, 286. But if the statute
As we have said, the statute provides for notice to the depositors by requiring the sheriff to post on the court house door or bulletin board a copy of the bank’s report of deposits presumed abandoned. We think that this, in conjunction with the notice provided by the statute itself and by the taking of possession of the bank balances by the state, is sufficient notice to the depositors to satisfy all requirements of due process.
The statute itself is notice to all depositors of banks within the state, of the conditions on which the balances of inactive accounts will be deemed presumptively abandoned, and their surrender to the state compelled. All persons having property located within a state and subject to its dominion must take note of its statutes affecting the control or disposition of such property and of the procedure which they set up for those purposes.
Reetz
v.
Michigan,
The report of the bank, required to be posted on the court house door or bulletin board, lists the abandoned accounts as defined by the statute and thus gives notice
Posting on the court house door as a method of giving notice of proceedings affecting property within the county, is an ancient one and is time-honored in Kentucky. The Act of the Kentucky legislature of December 19, 1796, provided in § 2 for the use of this method of warning absent defendants in equity proceedings that a decree would be entered against them, if they did not appear. This means of giving notice was employed in the escheat statutes of Kentucky at least as early as 1852. Kentucky Revised Statutes of 1852, p. 308, c. 34, Art. IV, § 3 (1). The fact that a procedure is so old as to have become customary and well known in the community is of great weight in determining whether it conforms to due process, for "Not lightly vacated is the verdict of quiescent years.”
Coler
v.
Corn Exchange Bank,
We cannot say that the posting of a notice on the door of the court house in a Kentucky county is a less efficacious method of giving notice to depositors in banks of the
Security Bank
v.
California, supra,
was a proceeding to compel the bank to pay over to the state inactive bank accounts as the first step in their sequestration and, if unclaimed, their possible ultimate escheat. The Court held,
We cannot say, nor does appellant seriously urge, that the length of notice by posting, six weeks, is inadequate. Three weeks notice by publication of the condemnation of the land for a public highway was held sufficient by this Court in North Laramie Land Co. v. Hoffman, supra; and thirty days was deemed sufficient in a like proceeding in Huling v. Kaw Valley Co., supra.
What is due process in a procedure affecting property interests must be determined by taking into account the purposes of the procedure and its effect upon the rights asserted and all other circumstances which may render the proceeding appropriate to the nature of the case.
Davidsons. New Orleans,
For this reason also it is not an indispensable requirement of due process that every procedure affecting the ownership or disposition of property be exclusively by judicial proceeding. Statutory proceedings affecting
The mere fact that the state or its authorities acquire possession or control of property as a preliminary step to the judicial determination of asserted rights in the property is not a denial of due process.
Samuels
v.
McCurdy,
We conclude that the procedural provisions of the Kentucky statute are adequate to mеet all constitutional requirements, and that it does not deprive appellant or its depositors of property without due process of law.
II.
We come now to appellant’s second contention, that the Kentucky statute infringes the national banking laws and unconstitutionally interferes with appellant as an instrumentality of the federal government. But the statute does not discriminate against national banks, cf.
McCulloch
v.
Maryland,
This Court has often pointed out that national banks are subject to state laws, unless those laws infringe the national banking laws or impose an undue burden on the performance of the banks’ functions.
Waite
v.
Dowley,
As we have seen, a bank account is a chose in action of the depositor against the bank, which the latter is obligated to pay in accordance with the terms of the deposit. It is a part of,the mass of property within the state whose transfer aiid devolution is subject to' state control Security Bank v. California, supra, 285, 286, and casescited; Irving Trust Co. v. Day, supra, 562. It has never been suggested that non-discriminatory laws of this type are so burdensome as to be inapplicable to the accounts of depositors in national banks.
The statute here attacked does not purport to do more than does any other regulation of the devolution of bank accounts of missing persons, a function which is, as we have seen, within the competence of the state. Under the statute the state merely acquires the right to demand payment of the accounts in the place of the depositors. Upon payment of the deposits to the state, the bank’s obligation is discharged. Something more than this is required to render the statute obnoxious to the federal banking laws. Eor an inseparable incident of a national bank’s privilege of receiving deposits is its obligation to pay them to the persons entitled to demand payment ac
Appellant argues that if the present act is sustained, it will open the door to the exertion of unlimited state discretionary power over the deposits in national banks, and that the act imposes a burden on appellants such as was held to be inadmissible in
First National Bank
v.
California,
After pointing out that the state Supreme Court, in sustaining the judgment in the state’s favor, had declined, as unnecessary to its decision, to express an opinion whether the absent depositors could reclaim their forfeited deposits from the state, this Court declared that the statute “attempts to qualify in an unusual way agreements between national banks and their customers long understood to arise when the former receive deposits under their plainly granted powers.”
The unusual alteration of depositors’ accounts to which the Court referred was рlainly the statutory declaration of escheat of depositors’ accounts merely because of their dormancy for the specified period, without any determination of abandonment in fact. This it treated as in effect “confiscation” of depositors’ accounts, operating as an effective deterrent to depositors’ placing their funds in national banks doing business within the state.
We have no occasion to reconsider this decision, as appellees urge, for the grounds assigned for it are wholly wanting here. While the seizure and escheat or forfeiture for mere dormancy of a nаtional bank account are unusual, the escheat or appropriation by the state of property in fact abandoned or without an owner is, as we have seen, as old as the common law itself. Here there is no escheat or forfeiture by reason of dormancy. Dormancy without more is made the statutory ground for the state’s taking inactive bank accounts into its custody, the state assuming the bank’s obligation to the depositors. And the deposits
Nor are we able to discern any greater or different effect so far as prospective depositors in national banks are concerned, from the application of the ancient law of escheat or forfeiture of goods as bona vacantia, to bank accounts found to be without an owner, or to have been in fact abandoned by their owners. Compare United States v. Klein, supra. True, under the Kentucky statute, as in the case of an attachment or the administration of the estate of a deceased depositor, a change in the dominiоn over the accounts will ensue, to which the bank must respond by payment of them on lawful demand. But this, as we have said, is nothing more than performance of a duty by the bank imposed by the federal banking laws, and not a denial of its privileges as a federal instrumentality. In all this we can perceive no denial of constitutional right and no unlawful encroachment on the rights and privileges of national banks.
Since Kentucky may enforce its statute requiring the surrender to it of presumptively abandoned accounts in national as well as state banks, it may, as an appropriate
Affirmed.