Court Opinion

ID: 9421721
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:59:32.059826+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:31.841067
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
Here we have not the application of some broad, generalized legal conception, either of a statutory nature, like “restraint of trade” in the Sherman Law, or a constitutional provision, like “due process of law” or “the equal protection of the laws.” Such conceptions do not carry contemporaneous fixity. By their very nature they imply a process of unfolding content.
Our immediate problem is quite different. The pre-1954 Housing Act does not leave us at large for judicial application of a generalized legislative policy in light of developing circumstances. The pre-1954 statute deals with a particularized problem in a particularized way. It presents the usual question of statutory construction where language is not clear enough to preclude human ingenuity from creating ambiguity. It is outside the judicial function to add to the scope of legislation. The task is imaginatively to extrapolate the contemporaneous answer that the Legislature would have given to an unconsidered question; here, whether rentals to transients were totally prohibited. It was not until 1954 that the Congress did deal with the question of the right of apartment-house owners to rent even a small number of apartments to transients without even remotely seeking to evade or to disadvantage the interests of veterans in whose behalf the Government, through the Federal Housing Administration, insured the mortgages of private owners. The opinions of the District Court and my *93brother Harlan seem to me compelling on the construction of the pre-1954 legislation.
This brings me to the validity of the 1954 enactment which presents for me a much more difficult question than that of the problem of statutory construction just considered. This is so because of the very weighty presumption of constitutionality that I deem it essential to attribute to any Act of Congress. This case falls between such cases sustaining the retroactive validity of legislation adversely affecting an existing interest as Paramino Co. v. Marshall, 309 U. S. 370, and Fleming v. Rhodes, 331 U. S. 100, on the one hand, and Lynch v. United States, 292 U. S. 571, on the other. While, to be sure, differentiation between “remedy” and “right” takes us into treacherous territory, the difference is not meaningless. The two earlier cases cited may fairly be deemed to sustain retroactive remedial modifications even though they affect existing “rights,” while the Lynch case is a clear instance of the complete wiping out of what Mr. Justice Brandéis, in his opinion for the Court, called “vested rights.” 292 U. S., at 577. Insofar as the 1954 Act applied to the earlier Darlington mortgage, it did not completely wipe out “vested rights.” But on the proper construction of § 608, in the circumstances found by the District Court and not here challenged, the unavoidable application of the 1954 Act to the Darlington mortgage did substantially impair the “vested rights” of respondent. I would be less than respecting the full import of the Lynch case did I not apply it to the present situation.
Accordingly, I join Mr. Justice Harlan's opinion.