Legal Aspect of Fees . 
201 
pies in regard to licenses and license fees. Judge Cooley de¬ 
fines a license as “a privilege granted by the state, usually on 
payment of a valuable consideration. To constitute a privilege 
the grant must confer something which, without it, would be 
illegal. A fee is in the nature of a sale of a benefit, or privi¬ 
lege, to a party which would not otherwise be entitled to the 
same.” 1 Mr. Desty says that “a license is not a tax, but a 
privilege granted to carry on some occupation or exercise some 
right which could not be legally exercised without the grant of 
such license. 2 . . . The license fee is not limited to the 
mere cost of issuance; it may be sufficiently high to produce a 
fund to enforce regulations adopted to restrain the improper 
exercise of the pursuit. ” 
Neither of the above mentioned writers lay any stress on the 
distinction between license fees and license taxes, but regard 
both as essentially in the nature of a tax. This is shown by 
Judge Cooley’s statement, that license fees may be imposed for 
four different purposes: (1) for regulation, (2) for revenue, (3) 
to give monopolies, and (4) for prohibition. But he affirms 
that the only legitimate purpose for which fees should be levied, 
are for regulation and revenue. This distinction from a legal 
point of view, between license fees levied for regulation, and 
the so-called fees for revenue, was recognized very early in the 
history of the country. The idea has been further elaborated 
by many courts that license fees whose purpose was regulation, 
were levied by the police power, while fees for revenue were im¬ 
posed by the taxing power. But the term regulation is a very 
broad one, and can be made to include almost every exercise of 
sovereignty; or it may be interpreted so as to embrace only a 
few subjects, according as the interpreting body takes the lib¬ 
eral or conservative standpoint. As a result, we find that the 
decisions vary and conflict with each other, not only in the 
courts of different states, but even within the same state in dif¬ 
ferent periods of time. 
Courts are, from the standpoint of history and political science, 
not only interpreters of constitutions and laws, but of economic 
1 Cooley, Law of Taxation , p. 512. 
2 Desty, Taxation, pp. 1385 and 1380. 
