Darne v. State of Wisconsin, Dep't of Revenue

In Darne v. State of Wisconsin, Dep't of Revenue, 137 F.3d 484 (7th Cir.1998), the plaintiff was challenging a state tax on an early withdrawal she had made from a retirement fund governed by ERISA. Met with an objection to federal jurisdiction under the Tax Injunction Act (TIA), she argued that there could be no adequate remedy in state court because ERISA confers exclusive jurisdiction on the federal courts for violations of its terms. She also pointed out that ERISA was enacted long after the TIA. The Court was "not willing to infer that Congress, in enacting regulatory legislation as comprehensive as the ERISA statute, 'intended impliedly to take the drastic step of carving out an exception to the Tax Injunction Act.' " Id. at 489, quoting Ashton v. Cory, 780 F.2d 816, 822 (9th Cir.1986).