Page:Delaware v. Pennsylvania (2023).pdf/8

4 escheats equitably. We selected escheatment to the State of the creditor’s last known address as the default principle because it “tend[ed] to distribute escheats among the States in the proportion of the commercial activities of their residents.” Id., at 681. By contrast, escheatment to the State of incorporation of the debtor (our secondary rule) “would too greatly exhalt a minor factor”—i.e., where the debtor chose to incorporate—when the underlying “obligations [were] incurred all over the country.” Id., at 680. However, we believed the secondary rule was likely to apply “with comparative infrequency.” Id., at 682.

It soon became clear that our primary and secondary escheatment rules were resulting in inequitable distributions, at least with respect to particular instruments, because Western Union largely did not keep records of the addresses of the purchasers or payees of the money orders that the company sold, as a matter of business practice. Pennsylvania, 407 U. S., at 211–212, 214. The default rule thus rarely applied in practice, such that proceeds from abandoned Western Union money orders largely escheated to New York, Western Union’s State of incorporation, pursuant to the secondary rule. Id., at 212, 214.

Characterizing this “windfall” as unfair, Pennsylvania filed an action that asked us to reconsider Texas’s escheatment rules. 407 U. S., at 213–215. Pennsylvania argued that the proceeds from an abandoned money order should escheat to the State where the money order was purchased rather than the State of the creditor’s last known address. Id., at 212, 214. This proposal approximated our primary rule under the commonsense assumption that a money order is usually purchased in the State where the creditor lives, but it obviated the need to require additional recordkeeping by the debtor. See id., at 214. While we recognized that Pennsylvania’s proposed escheatment rule had “some surface appeal,” we declined to modify the primary and secondary rules established in Texas, noting that States could