Court Opinion

ID: 9418553
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:31:44.235171+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:05.817520
License: Public Domain

Mr., Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
If the Legislature of Pennsylvania was of opinion that disease is likely to be spread by the use of unsterilized shoddy in comfortables I do not suppose that this Court would pronounce the opinion so manifestly absurd that it could not be acted upon. If we should not, then I think that we ought to assume the opinion to be right for the purpose of testing the law. The Legislature may have been of opinion further that the actual practice of filling comfortables with unsterilized shoddy gathered from filthy floors was wide spread; and this again we must assume to be- true. It is admitted to be impossible to distinguish the innocent from the infected product in any practicable way, when it is made up into the comfortables. On these premises, if the Legislature regarded the danger as very great and inspection and tagging as inadequate remedies, it seems to me that in order to prevent the spread of disease it constitutionally could forbid any use of shoddy for bedding and upholstery. Notwithstanding the broad statement in Schlesinger v. Wisconsin the other day, I do not suppose that it was intended to overrule Purity Extract & Tonic Co. v. Lynch, 226 U. S. 192, and the other cases to which I referred there.
*416It is said that there was unjustifiable discrimination. A classification is not .to be pronounced arbitrary because it goes on practical grounds'and attacks only those objects that exhibit or foster an evil on a large scale. It is not required to be mathematically precise and to embrace every case that theoretically is capable of doing the same harm. “ If the law presumably hits the evil where it is most felt, it is not to be overthrown because there are other instances to which it might have been applied.” Miller v. Wilson, 236 U. S. 373, 384. In this cáse, as in Schlesinger v. Wisconsin, I think that we are pressing the Fourteenth Amendment too far.
r Mr. Justice Brandéis and Mr. Justice Stone concur in this opinion.