Court Opinion

ID: 9418663
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:34:42.086555+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:07.532841
License: Public Domain

Holmes, J.,
dissenting.
A standing criticism of the use of corporations in búsiness is that it causes such business to be owned by people who do not know anything about it. Argument has not been supposed to be necessary.in order to show that the divorce between the power of control and knowledge is an evil. The selling of drugs and poisons calls for knowledge in a high degree, and Pennsylvania after enacting a series of other safeguards has provided that in that matter the divorce shall not be allowed. Of course, notwithstanding the requirement that in corporations hereafter formed all the stockholders shall be licensed pharmacists, it still would, be possible for a stockholder to content himself'with drawing dividends and to take no hand in the company’s affairs. But obviously he would be more likely to observe the business with an intelligent eye than a casual investor who looked only to the standing of the *115stock in the market. The Constitution does not make it a condition of preventive legislation that it should work a perfect cure. It is enough if the questioned act has a manifest tendency to cure or at least to make the evil less. It has been recognized by the professions, by statutes and by decisions that a corporation offering professional services is not placed beyond legislative control by the fact that all the services in question are rendered by qualified members of the profession. See People v. Title Guarantee & Trust Co., 227 N. Y. 366; Tucker v. New York State Board of Pharmacy, 217 N. Y. Supp. 217, 220. Matter of Co-operative Law Co., 198 N. Y. 479. People v. Merchants Protective Corporation, 189 Cal. 531. New Jersey Photo Engraving Co. v. Carl Schonert & Sons, 95 N. J. Eq. 12. Hodgen v. Commonwealth, 142 Ky. 722.
But for decisions to which I bow I should not think any conciliatory phrase necessary to justify what seems to me one of the incidents of. legislative power. I think however that the police power as that term has been defined and explained clearly extends to a law like this, whatever I may think of its wisdom, and that tfie decree should be affirmed.
Of course the appellant cannot complain of the exception in its favor that allows it to continue to own and conduct the drug stores that it now owns. The Fourteenth Amendment does not. forbid statutes and statutory changes to have a beginning and thus to discriminate between the rights of an earlier and those of a later time. Sperry & Hutchinson Co. v. Rhodes, 220 U. S. 502, 505.
Mr. Justice Brandéis joins in this opinion.