Court Opinion

ID: 9742844
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:21:34.702309+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:37.189878
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Goldenhersh, dissenting: I respectfully dissent from the majority opinion and would reverse the judgment. The basis for my objection to the court’s holding is well stated in the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Douglas in Thorpe v. Housing Authority of the City of Durham, 386 U.S. 670, 678-9, 18 L. Ed. 2d 394, 87 S. Ct. 1244: “The recipient of a government benefit, be it a tax exemption (Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513), unemployment compensation (Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398), public employment (Slochower v. Board of Education, 350 U.S. 551), a license to practice law (Spevack v. Klein, 385 U.S. 511), or a home in a public housing project cannot be made to forfeit the benefit because he exercises a constitutional right. In United States v. Chicago, M., St. P. & P. R. Co., 282 U.S. 311, 328-329, the Court said that ‘the right to continue the exercise of a privilege granted by the state cannot be made to depend upon the grantee’s submission to a condition prescribed by the state which is hostile to the provisions of the federal Constitution.’ This was in the tradition of Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Comm’n, 271 U.S. 583, 594, where the Court emphasized that ‘if the state may compel the surrender of one constitutional right as a condition of its favor, it may, in like manner, compel a surrender of all. It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.’ ”