Court Opinion

ID: 9418472
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:26:43.093081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:03.432183
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
The dangers of a delusive exactness in the application of the Fourteenth Amendment have been adverted to before now. Louisville & Nashville R. R. Co. v. Barber Asphalt Paving Co., 197 U. S. 430, 434. Delusive exactness is a source of fallacy throughout the law. By calling a business “ property ” you make" it seem like land, and lead up to the conclusion that a statute cannot substantially cut down the advantages of ownership existing before the statute was passed. An established business no doubt may have pecuniary value and commonly is protected by law against various unjustified injuries. But you cannot give it definiteness of contour by calling it a thing. It js a course of conduct and like other conduct is *343subject to substantial modification according to time and circumstances both in itself and in regard to what shall justify doing it a harm. I cannot understand the notion that it would be unconstitutional to authorize boycotts and the like in aid of the employees’ or the employers’ interest by statute when the same result has been reached constitutionally without statute by Courts with whom I agree. See The Hamilton, 207 U. S. 398, 404. In this case it does not even appear that the business was not created under the laws as they now are. Denny v. Bennett, 128 U. S. 489.
I think further that the selection of the class of employers and employees for special treatmeht, dealing with both sides alike, is beyond criticism on principles often asserted by this Court. And especially I think that without legalizing the conduct complained of the extraordinary relief by injunction may be denied to the class. Legislation may begin where an evil begins. If, as many intelligent people believe, there is more danger that the injunction will be abused in labor cases than elsewhere I can feel no doubt of the power of the legislature to deny it in such cases. I refer to two decisions in which I have stated what I understand to be the law sanctioned by many other decisions. Carroll v. Greenwich Insurance Co., 199 U. S. 401, 411. Quong Wing v. Kirkendall, 223 U. S. 59.
In a matter like this I dislike to turn attention to anything but the fundamental question of the merits, but Connolly v. Union Sewer Pipe Co., 184 U. S. 540, raises at least a doubt in my mind of another sort. The exception and the rule as to granting injunctions are both part of the. same code, enacted at the same time. If the'exception fails, according to the Connolly Case the statute is bad as a whole. It is true that here the exception came, in later than the rule, but after they had been amalgamated in .a single act I cannot know that the later legis*344lature would have kept the rule if the exception could not be allowed. If labor had the ascendancy that the exception seems to indicate, I think that probably it would have declined to allow injunctions in any case if that was the only way of reaching its end. But this is a matter upon which the State Court has the last word, and if it takes this view its decision must prevail. I need not press further the difficulty of requiring a State Court to issue an injunction that it never has been empowered" to issue by the quasi-sovereign that created the Court.
I must add one general consideration. There is nothing that I more deprecate than the use of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the making of social experiments that an important part of the community desires, in the insulated chambers afforded by the several States, even though the experiments may seem futile or even noxious to me and to those whose judgment I most respect. I agree with the more elaborate expositions of my brothers Pitney and Brandéis and in their conclusion that the judgment should be affirmed.