Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/424/507
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Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 7', '§ 8', '§ 158', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 157', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 8', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7']

Hudgens v. National Labor Relations Board | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute
Supreme Court aboutsearch liibulletin subscribe previews Hudgens v. National Labor Relations Board
Argued: October 14, 1975
Decided: March 3, 1976
STEWART, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BURGER, C.J., and BLACKMUN, POWELL, and REHNQUIST, JJ., joined. [p508]
POWELL, filed a concurring opinion, in which BURGER, C.J., joined, post, p. 523. WHITE, J., filed an opinion concurring in the result, post, p. 524. MARSHALL, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BRENNAN, J., joined, post, p. 525. STEVENS, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
et seq. The National Labor Relations Board concluded that it did, 205 N.L.R.B. 628, and the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed. 501 F.2d 161. We granted certiorari because of the seemingly important questions of federal law presented. 420 U.S. 971. [p509]
In January, 1971, warehouse employees of the Butler Shoe Co. went on strike to protest the company's failure to agree to demands made by their union in contract negotiations.
The strikers decided to picket not only Butler's warehouse, but its nine retail stores in the Atlanta area as well, including the store in the North DeKalb Shopping Center. On January 22, 1971, four of the striking warehouse employees entered the center's enclosed mall carrying placards which read: "Butler Shoe Warehouse on Strike, AFL-CIO, Local 315." The general manager of the shopping center informed the employees that they could not picket within the mall or on the parking lot and threatened them with arrest if they did not leave. The employees departed, but returned a short time later and began picketing in an area of the mall immediately adjacent to the entrances of the Butler store. After the picketing had continued for approximately 30 minutes, the shopping center manager again informed the pickets that, if they did not leave, they would be arrested for trespassing. The pickets departed.
The union subsequently filed with the Board an unfair labor practice charge against Hudgens, alleging interference with rights protected by § 7 of the Act, 29 [p510]
Relying on this Court's decision in Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308, the Board entered a cease and desist order against Hudgens, reasoning that, because the warehouse employees enjoyed a First Amendment right to picket on the shopping center property, the owner's threat of arrest violated § 8(a)(1) of the Act, 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(1).
Hudgens filed a petition for review in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Soon thereafter this Court decided Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, and Central Hardware Co. v. NLRB, 407 U.S. 539, and the Court of Appeals remanded the case to the Board for reconsideration in light of those two decisions.
The Board, in turn, remanded to an Administrative Law Judge, who made findings of fact, recommendations, and conclusions to the effect that Hudgens had committed an unfair labor practice by excluding the pickets. [p511]
This result was ostensibly reached under the statutory criteria set forth in NLRB v. Babcock & Wilcox Co., 351 U.S. 105, a case which held that union organizers who seek to solicit for union membership may intrude on an employer's private property if no alternative means exist for communicating with the employees. But the Administrative Law Judge's opinion also relied on this Court's constitutional decision in Logan Valley for a "realistic view of the facts." The Board agreed with the findings and recommendations of the Administrative Law Judge, but departed somewhat from his reasoning. It concluded that the pickets were within the scope of Hudgens' invitation to members of the public to do business at the shopping center, and that it was, therefore, immaterial whether or not there existed an alternative means of communicating with the customers and employees of the Butler store.
Hudgens again petitioned for review in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and there the Board changed its tack and urged that the case was controlled not by Babcock & Wilcox, but by Republic Aviation Corp. v. NLRB, 324 U.S. 793 a case which held that an employer commits an unfair labor practice if he enforces a no-solicitation rule against employees on his premises who are also union organizers, unless he can prove that the rule is necessitated by special circumstances. The Court of Appeals enforced the Board's cease and desist order, but on the basis of yet another theory. While acknowledging that the source of the pickets' rights was § 7 of the Act, the Court of Appeals held that the competing constitutional and property right considerations discussed in Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, supra, "burde[n] the General Counsel with the duty to [p512]
Except for [ownership by a private corporation] it has all the characteristics of any other American town. The property consists of residential buildings, streets, a system of sewers, a sewage disposal plant and a "business block" on which business places are situated. A deputy of the Mobile County Sheriff, paid by the company, serves as the town's policeman. Merchants and service establishments have rented the stores and business places on the business block and the United States uses one of the places as a post office from which six carriers deliver mail to the people of Chickasaw and the adjacent area. The town and the surrounding neighborhood, which can not be distinguished from the Gulf property by anyone not familiar with the property lines, are thickly [p514]
settled, and according to all indications the residents use the business block as their regular shopping center. To do so, they now, as they have for many years, make use of a company-owned paved street and sidewalk located alongside the store fronts in order to enter and leave the stores and the post office. Intersecting company-owned roads at each end of the business block lead into a four-lane public highway which runs parallel to the business block at a distance of thirty feet. There is nothing to stop highway traffic from coming onto the business block and upon arrival a traveler may make free use of the facilities available there. In short, the town and its shopping district are accessible to and freely used by the public in general and there is nothing to distinguish them from any other town and shopping center except the fact that the title to the property belongs to a private corporation.
It was the Marsh case that, in 1968 provided the foundation for the Court's decision in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308. That case involved peaceful picketing within a large [p515]
The Court's opinion then reviewed the Marsh case in detail, emphasized the similarities between the business [p516]
326 U.S. at 502. I [p517]
The Court in its Lloyd opinion did not say that it was overruling the Logan Valley decision. Indeed, a substantial portion of the Court's opinion in Lloyd was devoted to pointing out the differences between the two cases, noting particularly that, in contrast to the handbilling in Lloyd, the picketing in Logan Valley had been [p518]
specifically directed to a store in the shopping center, and the pickets had had no other reasonable opportunity to reach their intended audience. 407 U.S. at 561-567.
Our institutional duty is to follow until changed the law as it now is, not as some Members of the Court might wish it to be. And, in the performance of that duty, we make clear now, if it was not clear before, that the rationale of Logan Valley did not survive the Court's decision in the Lloyd case.
Not only did the Lloyd opinion incorporate lengthy excerpts from two of the dissenting opinions in Logan Valley, 407 U.S. at 562-563, 565; the ultimate holding in Lloyd amounted to a total rejection of the holding in Logan Valley:
The basic issue in this case is whether respondents, in the exercise of asserted First Amendment
rights, may distribute handbills on Lloyd's private property contrary to its wishes and contrary to a policy enforced against all handbilling. In addressing this issue, it must be remembered that the First and Fourteenth Amendments safeguard the rights of free speech and assembly by limitations on state action, not on action by the owner of private property used nondiscriminatorily for private purposes only. . . .
For while a municipality may constitutionally impose reasonable time, place, and manner regulations on the use of its streets and sidewalks for First Amendment purposes, see Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 345 U.S. 395, and may even forbid altogether such use of some of its facilities, see Adderley v. Florida, 385 U.S. 39, what a municipality may not do under the First and Fourteenth Amendments is to discriminate in the regulation of expression on the basis of the content of that expression, Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205.
Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U.S. 92, 95.
It conversely follows, therefore, that, if the respondents in the Lloyd case did not have a First Amendment right to enter that shopping center to distribute handbills concerning Vietnam, then the pickets in the present case did not have a First Amendment
The context of the § 7 [p522]
activity in the present case was different in several respects which may or may not be relevant in striking the proper balance. First, it involved lawful economic strike activity, rather than organizational activity. See Steelworkers v. NLRB, 376 U.S. 492, 499; Bus Employees v. Missouri, 374 U.S. 74, 82; NLRB v. Erie Resistor Corp., 373 U.S. 221, 234. Cf. Houston Insulation Contractors Assn. v. NLRB, 386 U.S. 664, 668-669. Second, the § 7 activity here was carried on by Butler's employees (albeit not employees of its shopping center store), not by outsiders. See NLRB v. Babcock & Wilcox Co., supra at 111-113. Third, the property interests impinged upon in this case were not those of the employer against whom the § 7 activity was directed, but of another.
The Babcock & Wilcox opinion established the basic objective under the Act: accommodation of § 7 rights and private property rights "with as little destruction of one as is consistent with the maintenance of the other."
The locus of that accommodation, however, may fall at differing points along the spectrum depending on the nature and strength of the respective § 7 rights and private property rights asserted in any given context. In each generic situation, the primary responsibility for making this accommodation must rest with the Board in the first instance. See NLRB v. Babcock & Wilcox, supra at 112; cf. NLRB v. Erie Resistor Corp., supra at 235-236; [p523]
NLRB v. Truckdrivers Union, 353 U.S. 87, 97. "The responsibility to adapt the Act to changing patterns of industrial life is entrusted to the Board." NLRB v. Weingarten, Inc., 420 U.S. 251, 266.
See id. at 570 (MARSHALL, J., dissenting).
This was the entire thrust of MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL's dissenting opinion in the Lloyd case. See id. at 584.
MR. JUSTICE WHITE clearly recognized this principle in his Logan Valley dissenting opinion. 391 U.S. at 339.
The Court has in the past held that some expression is not protected "speech" within the meaning of the First Amendment. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476"] 354 U.S. 476; 354 U.S. 476; Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568.
A wholly different balance was struck when the organizational activity was carried on by employees already rightfully on the employer's property, since the employer's management interests, rather than his property interests, were there involved. Republic Aviation Corp. v. NLRB, 324 U.S. 793. This difference is "one of substance." NLRB v. Babcock & Wilcox Co., 351 U.S. at 113.
351 U.S. at 112. This language was explicitly reaffirmed as stating "the guiding principle" in Central Hardware Co. v. NLRB, 407 U.S. 539, 544.
Although I agree with MR. JUSTICE WHITE's view concurring in the result that Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551"] 407 U.S. 551 (1972), did not overrule 407 U.S. 551 (1972), did not overrule Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308 (1968), and that the present case can be distinguished narrowly from Logan Valley, I nevertheless have joined the opinion of the Court today.
The law in this area, particularly with respect to whether First Amendment or labor law principles are applicable, has been less than clear since Logan Valley analogized a shopping center to the "company town" in Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946). Mr. Justice Black, the author of the Court's opinion in Marsh, thought the decisions were irreconcilable.
I now agree [p524]
with Mr. Justice Black that the opinions in these cases cannot be harmonized in a principled way. Upon more mature thought, I have concluded that we would have been wiser in Lloyd Corp. to have confronted this disharmony, rather than draw distinctions based upon rather attenuated factual differences.
While I concur in the result reached by the Court, I find it unnecessary to inter Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308"] 391 U.S. 308 (1968), and therefore do not join the Court's opinion. I agree that "the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play in a case such as this," ante at 521; but 391 U.S. 308 (1968), and therefore do not join the Court's opinion. I agree that "the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play in a case such as this," ante at 521; but Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972), did not overrule Logan Valley, either expressly or implicitly, and I would not, somewhat after the fact, say that it did.
The picketing carried on by petitioners was [p525]
directed specifically at patrons of the Weis Market located within the shopping center, and the message sought to be conveyed to the public concerned the manner in which that particular market was being operated. We are, therefore, not called upon to consider whether respondents' property rights could, consistently with the First Amendment, justify a bar on picketing which was not thus directly related in its purpose to the use to which the shopping center property was being put.
Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308 (1968), in the process, the Court proceeds to remand for consideration of the statutory question whether the shopping center owner in this case unlawfully interfered with the Butler Shoe Co. employees' rights under § 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 157.
The Court views the history of this litigation as one of "shifting positions" and "considerable confusion." To be sure, the Board's position has not been constant. But the ultimate decisions by the Administrative Law Judge [p527]
Even more clearly, the Board's rationale in agreeing with the Administrative Law Judge's recommendation was exclusively a statutory one. Nowhere in the Board's decision, Hudgens v. Local 1, Retail, Wholesale & Dept. Store Union, 205 N.L.R.B. 628 (1973), is there any reference to the First Amendment or any constitutionally based decision. The Board reached its result "for the reasons specifically set forth in Frank Visceglia and Vincent Visceglia, t/a Peddie Buildings,"
ibid., a case decided solely on § 7 grounds. In Visceglia, the Board had specifically declined to treat the picketing area in question as the functional equivalent of a business block, and rejected the applicability of Logan Valley'sFirst Amendment analysis, finding an interference with § 7 rights under a "modified" Babcock & Wilcox test.
When the Board in this case relied upon the rationale of Visceglia, it was evidently proceeding under the assumption that the First Amendment had no application. Its ultimate conclusion that petitioner violated § 8(a)(1) of the Act was purely the result of an "accommodation between [his] property rights and the employees' Section 7 rights." 205 N.L.R.B. 628.
The Court acknowledges that the Court of Appeals' enforcement of the Board's order was based on its view of the employees' § 7 rights. But the Court suggests that the following reference to Lloyd, a constitutional [p529]
501 F.2d 161, 169. A reading of the entire Court of Appeals' opinion, however, demonstrates that this language was not intended to inject any constitutional considerations into the case. The Court of Appeals' analysis began with an evaluation of the statutory criteria urged by the parties.
Section 7 rights are not necessarily coextensive [p530]
with constitutional rights, see Central Hardware v. NLRB, supra ([MARSHALL], J., dissenting). Nevertheless, we agree that the rule suggested by amicus, although having its genesis in the constitutional issues raised in Lloyd, isolates the factors relevant to determining when private property rights of a shopping center owner should be required to yield to the section 7 rights of labor picketers.
501 F.2d at 167. With that explanation of the Court of Appeals' view of the relevance of Lloyd, it is evident that the subsequent reference to Lloyd, quoted out of context by the Court, was not intended to alter the purely statutory basis of the Court of Appeals' decision.
In short, the Board's decision was clearly unaffected by constitutional considerations, and I do not read the Court of Appeals' opinion as intimating that its statutory result was constitutionally mandated. In its present posture, the case presents no constitutional question to the Court. Surely it is of no moment that the Board, through its counsel, now urges this Court to decide, as part of its statutory analysis, what result is compelled by the First Amendment. The posture of the case is determined by the decisions of the Board and the Court of Appeals, not by the arguments advanced in the Board's brief. Since I read those decisions as purely statutory ones, I would proceed to consider the purely statutory question whether, assuming that petitioner is not restricted by the First Amendment, his actions nevertheless [p531]
As already indicated, the Board, through its counsel, urges the Court to apply First Amendment considerations in defining the scope of § 7 of the Act. The Board takes this position because it is concerned that the scope of § 7 not fall short of the scope of the First Amendment, the result of which would be that picketing employees could obtain greater protection by court suits than by invoking the procedures of the NLRA. While that general concern is a legitimate one, it does not justify the constitutional adjudication undertaken by the Court. If it were undisputed that the pickets in this case enjoyed some degree of First Amendment protection against interference by petitioner, it might be difficult to separate a consideration of the scope of that First Amendment protection from an analysis of the scope of [p532]
On the merits of the purely statutory question that I believe is presented to the Court, I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals. To do so, one need not consider whether consumer picketing by employees is subject to a more permissive test under § 7 than the test articulated in Babcock & Wilcox for organizational activity by nonemployees. In Babcock & Wilcox we stated that an employer "must allow the union to approach his employees on his property"
if the employees are "beyond the reach of reasonable efforts to communicate with them," 351 U.S. at 113 -- that is, if "other means" of communication are not "readily available." Id. at 114. Thus, the general standard that emerges [p533]
Hughes v. Superior Court, 339 U.S. 460, 465 (1950). [p534]
Turning to the constitutional issue resolved by the Court, I cannot escape the feeling that Logan Valley has been laid to rest without ever having been accorded a proper burial. The Court today announces that "the ultimate holding in Lloyd amounted to a total rejection [p535]
of the holding in Logan Valley." Ante at 518. To be sure, some Members of the Court, myself included, believed that Logan Valley called for a different result in Lloyd and alluded in dissent to the possibility that "it is Logan Valley itself that the Court finds bothersome." 407 U.S. at 570, 584 (MARSHALL, J., dissenting). But the fact remains that Logan Valley explicitly reserved the question later decided in Lloyd, and Lloyd carefully preserved the holding of Logan Valley. And upon reflection, I am of the view that the two decisions are reconcilable.
Lloyd involved the distribution of anti-war handbills in a large shopping center, and while some of us viewed [p536]
the case differently, 407 U.S. at 570, 577-579 (MARSHALL, J., dissenting), the Court treated it as presenting the question left open in Logan Valley. But the Court did no more than decide that question. It preserved the holding of Logan Valley, as limited to cases in which (1) the picketing is directly related in its purpose to the use to which the shopping center property is put, and (2) "no other reasonable opportunities for the pickets to convey their message to their intended audience [are] available." 407 U.S. at 563.
Any doubt about the limited scope of Lloyd is removed completely by a consideration of Central Hardware Co. v. NLRB, 407 U.S. 539 (1972), decided the same day as Lloyd. In Central Hardware, the Court was faced with solicitation by nonemployee union organizers on a parking lot of a retail store that was not part of a shopping center complex -- activity clearly related to the use to which the private property had been put. The Court found the activity unprotected by the First Amendment, but in a way that explicitly preserved the holding in Logan Valley. The Court could have held that the First Amendment has no application to use-related activity on privately owned business property, thereby rejecting Logan Valley, but, instead, the Court chose to [p537]
Logan Valley involved a large commercial shopping center which the Court found had displaced, in certain relevant respects, the functions of the normal municipal "business block." First and Fourteenth Amendment free speech rights were deemed infringed under the facts of that case when the property owner invoked the trespass laws of the State against the pickets.
the town and its shopping district are accessible to and freely used by the public in general, and there is nothing to distinguish them from any other town and shopping center except the fact that the title to the [p539]
property belongs to a private corporation.
In Logan Valley we recognized what the Court today refuses to recognize -- that the owner of the modern shopping center complex, by dedicating his property to public use as a business district, to some extent displaces the "State" from control of historical First Amendment forums, and may acquire a virtual monopoly of places suitable for effective communication. The roadways, parking lots, and walkways of the modern shopping center [p540]
My reading of Marsh admittedly carried me farther than the Court in Lloyd, but the Lloyd Court remained responsive in its own way to the concerns underlying Marsh.
Lloyd retained the availability of First Amendment protection when the picketing is related to the function of the shopping center, and when there is no other reasonable opportunity to convey the message to the intended audience. Preserving Logan Valley subject to Lloyd's two related criteria guaranteed that the First Amendment would have application in those situations in which the shopping center owner had most clearly monopolized the forums essential for effective communication. This result, although not the optimal one in my view, Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. at 579-583 (MARSHALL, J., dissenting), is nonetheless defensible.
In Marsh, the private entity had displaced the "state" from control of all the places to which the public had historically enjoyed access for First Amendment purposes, and the First Amendment was accordingly held fully applicable to the private entity's conduct. The shopping center owner, on the other hand, controls only [p541]
The Court's only apparent objection to this analysis is that it makes the applicability of the First Amendment turn to some degree on the subject matter of the speech. But that, in itself is no objection, and the cases cited by the Court to the effect that government may not "restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content," Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U.S. 92, 95 (1972), are simply inapposite. In those cases, it was clearly the government that was acting, and the First Amendment's bar against infringing speech was unquestionably applicable; the Court simply held that the government, faced with a general command to permit speech, cannot choose to forbid some speech because of its message. The shopping center cases are quite different; in these cases, the primary regulator is a private entity whose property has "assume[d] to some significant degree the functional attributes of public property devoted to public use." Central Hardware Co. v. NLRB, 407 U.S. at 547. The very question in these cases is whether, and under what circumstances, the First Amendment has any application at all. The answer to that question, under the view of Marsh described above, depends to some extent on the subject of the speech the private entity seeks to regulate, because the degree to which the private entity monopolizes the effective channels of communication [p542]
This limited reference to the subject matter of the speech poses none of the dangers of government suppression or censorship that lay at the heart of the cases cited by the Court. See, e.g., Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, supra at 95-96. It is indeed ironic that those cases, whose obvious concern was the promotion of free speech, are cited today to require its surrender.
In the final analysis, the Court's rejection of any role for the First Amendment in the privately owned shopping center complex stems, I believe, from an overly formalistic view of the relationship between the institution of private ownership of property and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. No one would seriously question the legitimacy of the values of privacy and individual autonomy traditionally associated with privately owned property. But property that is privately owned is not always held for private use, and when a property owner opens his property to public use, the force of those values diminishes. A degree of privacy is necessarily surrendered; thus, the privacy interest that petitioner retains when he leases space to 60 retail businesses and invites the public onto his land for the transaction of business with other members of the public is small indeed. Cf. Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 67 (1973). And while the owner of property open to public use may not automatically surrender any of his autonomy interest in managing the property as he sees fit, there is nothing new about the notion that that autonomy interest must be accommodated with the interests of the public. As [p543]
The Board's General Counsel urged a rule, based upon Republic Aviation Corp. v. NLRB, 324 U.S. 793 (1945), that the employee pickets could not be excluded from the shopping center unless it could be shown that the picketing interfered with the center's normal functioning. While the Board's General Counsel thus did not rely on Babcock & Wilcox, the basis for the Board's decision, he still relied on a statutory case, not a constitutional one.
The only alternative means of communication referred to in Babcock & Wilcox were "personal contacts on streets or at home, telephones, letters or advertised meetings to get in touch with the employees." 351 U.S. at 111.
No point would be served by adding to the observations in Logan Valley and my dissent in Lloyd with respect to the growth of suburban shopping centers and the proliferation of activities taking place in such centers. See Logan Valley, 391 U.S. at 324; Lloyd, 407 U.S. at 580, 585-586. See also Note, Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner: The Demise of Logan Valley and the Disguise of Marsh, 61 Geo.L.J. 1187, 1216-1219 (1973).