Court Opinion

ID: 9644075
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:47:49.438477+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:08.395274
License: Public Domain

*102HICKS
(dissenting).
I cannot concur. Appellant’s complaint is that the Michigan Liquor Control Commission arbitrarily denied her a license to sell intoxicating liquor and upon this averment she sought an order from the District Court directing the Commission to renew her license. The District Court dismissed the complaint for lack of jurisdiction to entertain it and this court reverses that decree.
As I understand the opinion, the court believes that the averments of the complaint that appellee deliberately and intentionally discriminated against appellant in denying her a license, are sufficient to state a cause of action under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. The equal protection ’ clause is simply a guaranty against encroachment by the state upon the fundamental rights belonging to a citizen of the United States as such and the Civil Rights Act was designed to protect those rights.
I concur in the following statement in the opinion, to wit: “The right to a license to sell intoxicating liquor is not a natural or fundamental right, nor a privilege incident to national citizenship. The regulation of the liquor traffic in any state is exclusively under the. police power of ’ that particular state.” My difficulty is: that I cannot see how the equal protection clause and the Civil Rights Act can1 be called upon by appellant to enforce a right or privilege which she never had under the Constitution. It seems illogical to say that the District Court should inquire whether the Commission acted arbitrarily in granting to one and denying to another a privilege which neither of them fundamentally possessed. If every citizen of the United States had a natural right to sell intoxicating liquor and the state should undertake to withhold that right from one and grant it to another, it would then be time to consider the equal protection clause, but we have no such case.
I think that those and only “those who are entitled to be treated alike”, Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. at page 8, 64 S.Ct. 401, 88 L.Ed. 497, in their fundamental rights may invoke the guaranty of the equal protection clause and the Civil Rights Act, otherwise we may anticipate that the dockets of the district courts will be filled with cases where nothing more is involved than whether the state has acted arbitrarily in any controversy that might exist between it and one of its citizens.
I do not think it necessary to determine the difficult question whether appellee was an instrumentality of the state, but I should think that the State of Michigan had, through its laws and judicial procedure, sufficiently protected itself against 'any untoward result of arbitrary action by its Liquor Commission.