Florida has availed itself of this approach, establishing various sanctions and summary remedies designed so that liquor distributors tender tax payments before their objections are entertained and resolved.20 As a result, Florida does not purport to provide taxpayers like petitioner with a meaningful opportunity to withhold payment and to obtain a predeprivation determination of the tax assessment's validity; 21 rather, Florida requires taxpayers to raise their objections to

20 If a distributor fails to pay the tax on time, the Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco may issue a warrant which, when filed in a local circuit court, directs the county sheriff to levy upon and sell the delinquent taxpayer's goods and chattels to recover the amount of the unpaid tax plus a penalty of 50%, along with interest of 1% per month and the costs of executing the warrant. Fla. Stat. § 210.14(1) (1989). In addition, the Division may revoke, § 561.29(1)(a), or decline to renew, § 561.24(5), a distributor's license for failure to abide by Florida law, including the statutory requirement that the Liquor Tax be timely paid.

21 We have long held that, when a tax is paid in order to avoid financial sanctions or a seizure of real or personal property, the tax is paid under "duress" in the sense that the State has not provided a fair and meaningful predeprivation procedure. See, e. g., United States v. Mississippi Tax Comm'n, 412 U. S. 363, 368 (1973) (economic sanctions for nonpayment); Ward v. Love County Board of Comm'rs, 253 U. S. 17, 23 (1920) (distress sale of land); Gaar, Scott & Co. v. Shannon, 223 U. S. 468, 471 (1912) (both). Justice Holmes suggested in Atchison, T. & S. F. R. Co. v. O'Connor, 223 U. S. 280 (1912), that a taxpayer pays "under duress" when he proffers a timely payment merely to avoid a "serious disadvantage in the assertion of his legal. . . rights" should he withhold payment and await a state enforcement proceeding in which he could challenge the tax scheme's validity "by defence in the suit." Id., at 286.

In contrast, if a State chooses not to secure payments under duress and instead offers a meaningful opportunity for taxpayers to withhold contested tax assessments and to challenge their validity in a predeprivation hearing, payments tendered may be deemed "voluntary." The availability of a predeprivation hearing constitutes a procedural safeguard against unlawful deprivations sufficient by itself to satisfy the Due Process Clause, and taxpayers cannot complain if they fail to avail themselves of this procedure. See Mississippi Tax Comm'n, supra, at 368, n. 11 ("[W]here voluntary payment [of a tax] is knowingly made pursuant to an illegal demand, recovery of that payment may be denied").

the tax in a postdeprivation refund action. To satisfy the requirements of the Due Process Clause, therefore, in this refund action the State must provide taxpayers with, not only a fair opportunity to challenge the accuracy and legal validity of their tax obligation,22 but also a "clear and certain remedy," O'Connor, 223 U. S., at 285, for any erroneous or unlawful tax collection to ensure that the opportunity to contest the tax is a meaningful one.

Had the Florida courts declared the Liquor Tax invalid either because (other than its discriminatory nature) it was beyond the State's power to impose, as was the unapportioned tax in O'Connor, or because the taxpayers were absolutely immune from the tax, as were the Indian Tribes in Ward and Carpenter, no corrective action by the State could cure the invalidity of the tax during the contested tax period. The State would have had no choice but to "undo" the unlawful deprivation by refunding the tax previously paid under duress, because allowing the State to "collect these unlawful taxes by coercive means and not incur any obligation to pay them back... would be in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment." Ward, 253 U. S., at 24; see also Carpenter, 280 U. S., at 369.

Here, however, the Florida courts did not invalidate the Liquor Tax in its entirety; rather, they declared the tax scheme unconstitutional only insofar as it operated in a manner that discriminated against interstate commerce. The State may, of course, choose to erase the property deprivation itself by providing petitioner with a full refund of its tax payments. But as both Montana National Bank and Bennett illustrate, a State found to have imposed an impermissibly discriminatory tax retains flexibility in responding to this

22 See n. 17, supra; see also, e. g., Mathews, 424 U. S., at 333 (“The fundamental requirement of due process is the opportunity to be heard 'at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner'") (citation omitted). The adequacy of this aspect of Florida's postdeprivation procedure is not in dispute.

determination. Florida may reformulate and enforce the Liquor Tax during the contested tax period in any way that treats petitioner and its competitors in a manner consistent with the dictates of the Commerce Clause. Having done so, the State may retain the tax appropriately levied upon petitioner pursuant to this reformulated scheme because this retention would deprive petitioner of its property pursuant to a tax scheme that is valid under the Commerce Clause. In the end, the State's postdeprivation procedure would provide petitioner with all of the process it is due: an opportunity to contest the validity of the tax and a "clear and certain remedy" designed to render the opportunity meaningful by preventing any permanent unlawful deprivation of property.

More specifically, the State may cure the invalidity of the Liquor Tax by refunding to petitioner the difference between the tax it paid and the tax it would have been assessed were it extended the same rate reductions that its competitors actually received. Cf. Montana National Bank and Bennett (curing discrimination through such refunds). Alternatively, to the extent consistent with other constitutional restrictions, the State may assess and collect back taxes from petitioner's competitors who benefited from the rate reductions during the contested tax period, calibrating the retroactive assessment to create in hindsight a nondiscriminatory scheme. Cf. Bennett, 284 U. S., at 247 (suggesting State could erase the unconstitutional discrimination by "collecting the additional taxes from the favored competitors"). Fi

23 We previously have held that the retroactive assessment of a tax increase does not necessarily deny due process to those whose taxes are increased, though beyond some temporal point the retroactive imposition of a significant tax burden may be "so harsh and oppressive as to transgress the constitutional limitation," depending on "the nature of the tax and the circumstances in which it is laid." Welch v. Henry, 305 U. S. 134, 147 (1938). See United States v. Hemme, 476 U. S. 558 (1986); United States v. Darusmont, 449 U. S. 292 (1981); cf. United States v. Sperry Corp., 493 U. S. 52, 65 (1989) ("It is surely proper for Congress to legislate retrospectively to ensure that costs of a program are borne by the entire class of

nally, a combination of a partial refund to petitioner and a partial retroactive assessment of tax increases on favored competitors, so long as the resultant tax actually assessed during the contested tax period reflects a scheme that does not discriminate against interstate commerce, would render petitioner's resultant deprivation lawful and therefore satisfy the Due Process Clause's requirement of a fully adequate postdeprivation procedure.

Respondents suggest that, in order to redress fully petitioner's unconstitutional deprivation, the State need not actually impose a constitutional tax scheme retroactively on all distributors during the contested tax period. Rather, they claim, the State need only place petitioner in the same tax position that petitioner would have been placed by such a hypothetical scheme. Specifically, respondents contend that the State, had it known that the Liquor Tax would be declared unconstitutional, would have imposed the higher flat tax rate on all distributors. Because petitioner would have paid the same tax under this hypothetical scheme as it did under the Liquor Tax, respondents claim that petitioner is not entitled to any retrospective relief (at least in the form of a refund);

persons that Congress rationally believes should bear them"); Usery v. Turner Elkhorn Mining Co., 428 U. S. 1, 16 (1976) ("[L]egislation readjusting rights and burdens is not unlawful solely because it upsets otherwise settled expectations. This is true even though the effect of the legislation is to impose a new duty or liability based on past acts") (citations omitted).

Because we do not know whether the State will choose in this case to assess and collect back taxes from previously favored distributors, we need not decide whether this choice would violate due process by unduly interfering with settled expectations.

Should the State choose this remedial alternative, the State's effort to collect back taxes from previously favored distributors may not be perfectly successful. Some of these distributors, for example, may no longer be in business. But a good-faith effort to administer and enforce such a retroactive assessment likely would constitute adequate relief, to the same extent that a tax scheme would not violate the Commerce Clause merely because tax collectors inadvertently missed a few in-state taxpayers.

such relief would confer a "windfall" on petitioner by leaving it with a smaller tax burden than it would have borne were there no Commerce Clause violation in the first place.

We implicitly rejected this line of reasoning in Montana National Bank and Bennett, and we expressly do so today. Even aside from the contrived and self-serving nature of the baseline against which respondents propose to measure petitioner's "deprivation," respondents' approach is inconsistent with the nature of the State's due process obligation. The deprivation worked by the Liquor Tax violated the Commerce Clause because the tax scheme's purpose and effect was to impose a relative disadvantage on a category of distributors (those dealing with nonpreferred products) largely composed of out-of-state companies, not because its treatment of this category of distributors diverged from some fixed substantive norm.25 Hence, the salient feature of the position petitioner "should have occupied" absent any Commerce Clause violation is its equivalence to the position actually occupied by petitioner's favored competitors.

24 Whether the State would have taxed all distributors at the highest rate authorized by the Liquor Tax depends upon counterfactual assumptions regarding the many complex variables that affect legislative judgment, and therefore respondents' prediction is not easily proved. It is quite possible, for example, that had the legislature been unable to enact the discriminatory Liquor Tax, the legislature instead would have extended universally the lower tax rate because it would have preferred to keep to a minimum the absolute economic burden on Florida growers of the preferred products as well as on the (mostly in-state) distributors of those products-even though this particular aspect of the tax scheme would generate less total revenue.

25 The Florida Supreme Court noted that "[i]t is undisputed that manufacturers and distributors of beverages which qualify for preferential treatment under [the Liquor Tax] are in direct competition with manufacturers and distributors of alcoholic beverages which do not. . . . With these facts in mind it becomes quite apparent that . . . Florida's alcoholic beverage tax scheme clearly raises the relative cost of doing business for a manufacturer or distributor of alcoholic beverages which are not made from base crops which are 'adapted to growing in Florida.'" 524 So. 2d 1000, 1008 (1988).