Court Opinion

ID: 9419803
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:51:32.848234+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:20.703346
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice .Rutledge,
concurring.
I am in agreement with the result and substantially so with Mr. Justice Murphy’s opinion. I do not think that administrative regulations, given by statute the function of defining the substance of criminal conduct, should have broader or more inclusive construction than statutes performing the same function. If the regulations involved here had been enacted specifically by Congress in statutory form, I do not think they could properly be construed to forbid tie-in sales of these commodities per se.
As the opinion points out, the regulations, with reference to other commodities, expressly prohibited tie-in sales, regardless of whether the tied-in commodity had value. Persons dealing in those commodities were specifically informed by the regulations, therefore, that such sales would be in violation of the Act. There was no such specific prohibition applicable at the time of the sales in question to sales of poultry. However the general pro*629hibition against evasion contained in § 1429.5 of Revised Maximum Price Regulation No. 269 might be interpreted, if there had been no regulations specifically forbidding tie-in sales of other commodities, in view of their existence and the absence of any similar provision relating to poultry, I do not think it permissible to construe § 1429.5 as covering the same ground. Persons reading the regulations to determine what conduct had been forbidden were entitled in my opinion to conclude that the Administrator, whenever he thought tie-in sales were per se evasive or. in violation of the Act’s policy, had expressly so stated and conversely that where he had not expressly forbidden the practice, it was not to be understood as prohibited by general language applicable to many other types of situation but not specifically to this one. This view, I think, would be required if the regulations had been enacted in statutory form. As regulations they cannot be given broader content.
Accordingly I agree with the conclusion that tie-in sales were not forbidden at the time of these sales, as to poultry. I also agree that the trial court, both in its instructions and in some of its rulings upon the admissibility of evidence, went on a conception of the law inconsistent with this view. I therefore concur in the Court’s disposition of the cause.
Mr. Justice Frankfurter, although agreeing with the opinion of Mb- Justice Murphy, also joins in this opinion.