Court Opinion

ID: 9422872
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:04:55.172141+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:40.202410
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
concurring.
Section 6 of the Subversive Activities Control Act makes it a felony for a member of a “Communist,” “Communist-action,” or “Communist-front” organization to apply for, use, or attempt to use a passport for travel *518abroad. I concur in the Court’s holding that this section of the Act is unconstitutional, but not on the ground that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, standing alone, confers on all our people a constitutional liberty to travel abroad at will. Without reference to other constitutional provisions, Congress has, in my judgment, broad powers to regulate the issuance of passports under its specific power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments do mean to me, however, that neither the Secretary of State nor any other government agent can deny people in this country their liberty to travel or their liberty to do anything else except in accordance with the “law of the land” as declared by the Constitution or by valid laws made pursuant to it. For reasons stated in my dissenting opinion in Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 367 U. S. 1, 137, I think the whole Act, including § 6, is not a valid law, that it sets up a comprehensive statutory plan which violates the Federal Constitution because (1) it constitutes a “Bill of Attainder,” which Art. I, § 9, of the Constitution forbids Congress to pass; (2) it penalizes and punishes appellants and restricts their liberty on legislative and administrative fact-findings that they are subversives, and in effect traitors to their country, without giving them the benefit of a trial according to due process, which requires a trial by jury before an independent judge, after an indictment, and in accordance with all the other procedural protections of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments; and (3) it denies appellants the freedom of speech, press, and association which the First Amendment guarantees.
The Subversive Activities Control Act is supposed to be designed to protect this Nation’s “internal security.” This case offers another appropriate occasion to point out that the Framers thought (and I agree) that the best way *519to promote the internal security of our people is to protect their First Amendment freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly, and that we cannot take away the liberty of groups whose views most people detest without jeopardizing the liberty of all others whose views, though popular today, may themselves be detested tomorrow.
Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring.
While I join the opinion of the Court, I add only a few words to indicate what I think is the basic reach of the problem before us.
We noted in Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116, 126, that “freedom of movement,” both internally and abroad, is “deeply engrained” in our history. I would not suppose that a Communist, any more than an indigent, could be barred from traveling interstate. I think that a Communist, the same as anyone else, has this right. Being a Communist certainly is not a crime; and while traveling may increase the likelihood of illegal events happening, so does being alive. If, as I think, the right to move freely from State to State is a privilege and immunity of national citizenship (see Edwards v. California, 314 U. S. 160, 178), none can be barred from exercising it, though anyone who uses it as an occasion to commit a crime can of course be punished. But the right remains sacrosanct, only illegal conduct being punishable.
Free movement by the citizen is of course as dangerous to a tyrant as free expression of ideas or the right of assembly and it is therefore controlled in most countries in the interests of security. That is why riding boxcars carries extreme penalties in Communist lands. That is why the ticketing of people and the use of identification papers are routine matters under totalitarian regimes, yet abhorrent in the United States.
Freedom of movement, at home and abroad, is important for job and business opportunities — for cultural, *520political, and social activities — for all the commingling which gregarious man enjoys. Those with the right of free movement use it at times for mischievous purposes. But that is true of many liberties we enjoy. We nevertheless place our faith in them, and against restraint, knowing that the risk of abusing liberty so as to give rise to punishable conduct is part of the price we pay for this free society.
Freedom of movement is kin to the right of assembly and to the right of association. These rights may not be abridged, De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U. S. 353; NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449, 460-462, only illegal conduct being within the purview of crime in the constitutional sense.
War may be the occasion for serious curtailment of liberty. Absent war, I see no way to keep a citizen from traveling within or without the country, unless there is power to detain him. Ex parte Endo, 323 U. S. 283. And no authority to detain exists except under extreme conditions, e. g., unless he has been convicted of a crime or unless there is probable cause for issuing a warrant of arrest by standards of the Fourth Amendment. This freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society, setting us apart. Like the right of assembly and the right of association, it often makes all other rights meaningful— knowing, studying, arguing, exploring, conversing, observing and even thinking. Once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer, just as when curfew or home detention is placed on a person.
America is of course sovereign; but her sovereignty is woven in an international web that makes her one of the family of nations. The ties with all the continents are close — commercially as well as culturally. Our concerns are planetary, beyond sunrises and sunsets. Citizenship implicates us in those problems and perplexities, as *521well' as in domestic ones. We cannot exercise and enjoy citizenship in world perspective without the right to travel abroad; and I see no constitutional way to curb it unless, as I said, there is the power to detain.