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Page Number: 40

8 

303 CREATIVE LLC v. ELENIS 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

1701) (Holt, C. J.)).  “Public employment” meant a business 
“in which the owner has held himself out as ready to serve
the public by exercising his trade.”  Singer 1307; see, e.g., 
Gisbourn  v.  Hurst,  1  Salk.  249,  91  Eng.  Rep.  220  (K. B. 
1710).  Take,  for  example,  Lane  v.  Cotton,  “[t]he  leading
English case” on the subject “cited over and over again in 
the nineteenth century in the United States.”  Singer 1304.
There, Lord Chief Justice Holt explained: 

“[W]here-ever any subject takes upon himself a pub-
lic trust for the benefit of the rest of his fellow-subjects,
he is eo ipso bound to serve the subject in all the things
that are  within the reach and comprehension of such
an office, under pain of an action against him. . . . If on 
the road a shoe fall off my horse, and I come to a smith
to  have  one  put  on,  and  the  smith  refuse  to  do  it,  an
action will lie against him, because he has made pro-
fession of a trade which is for the public good, and has 
thereby exposed and vested an interest of himself in all
the King’s subjects that will employ him in the way of 
his  trade.”  Lane  v.  Cotton,  12  Mod.,  at  484,  88  Eng. 
Rep., at 1464. 

That is to say, a business’s duty to serve all comers derived
from its choice to hold itself out as ready to serve the public. 
This  holding-out  rationale  became  firmly  established  in
early American law.  See 2 J. Kent, Commentaries on Amer-
ican  Law  464–465  (1827);  J.  Story,  Commentaries  on  the
Law  of  Bailments  §§495,  591  (1832);  see  also,  e.g.,  Mark-
ham v. Brown, 8 N. H. 523, 528 (1837); Jencks v. Coleman, 
13  F. Cas.  442,  443  (No.  7,258)  (CC  RI  1835)  (Story,  J.); 
Dwight v. Brewster, 18 Mass. 50, 53 (1822). 

The majority is therefore mistaken to suggest that public 
accommodations  or  common  carriers  historically  assumed
duties to serve all comers because they enjoyed monopolies
or otherwise had market power.  Ante, at 13.  Tellingly, the
majority cites no common-law case espousing the monopoly