Court Opinion

ID: 9419804
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:51:32.850785+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:20.704096
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
dissenting.
We were at war in 1943. Scarcity of food had become an acute problem throughout the nation. To keep the public from being gouged the Government had set ceiling prices on food items. Congress had made it a crime to sell food above these ceiling prices. When Thanksgiving Day approached there were not enough turkeys to supply *630the demand of the many American families who wanted to celebrate in the customary style.
The information filed in the District Court charged that the petitioner “unlawfully, wilfully and knowingly evaded the provisions of . . .” Revised Maximum Price Regulation No. 269, § 1429.5, by compelling and requiring the buyer to purchase chicken feet, chicken skin, or gizzards at a specified price, as a condition of the sale of poultry to them. During peace times the petitioner had ordinarily done a gross business of seven-and-a-half million dollars a year. In 1943, presumably due to the meat shortage incident to the war, the petitioner’s gross business was not quite four million dollars. This meat shortage was felt acutely during the Thanksgiving season, when petitioner instead of his usual 100 to 150 cars of turkeys received only one car. When the retail butchers and poultry market proprietors came clamoring for their share of the small supply (which the defendant rationed among them) they found that along with the turkeys which they wanted so badly petitioner gave and charged them for large amounts of chicken feet, skins and gizzards which they, had not asked for at all and which for the most part they had never before sold as separate items. While the butchers paid in addition to the ceiling price charged for the turkeys the price charged for the chicken skins and feet, they did so only because they understood that unless they bought these unwanted items they could get no turkeys. Only one of the butchers sold all the chicken skins to his customers. He explained that he operated his store in a poor neighborhood where the food shortage had become so acute that people were willing to buy anything they could get. As to the rest of the butchers, some simply dumped the chicken skins and feet while others, after diligent efforts, sold a few pounds and then gave the rest away either to their customers, or to charitable institutions. Certainly these particular butchers forced to buy *631these unwanted items for the first time were not the regular retail outlet for disjointed chicken feet and peeled chicken skins, if there ever was such an outlet on a voluntary basis. It is clear therefore that as a result of petitioner’s forcing his customers to buy the feet and skins along with the turkeys, the retailers’ cost price of the turkeys was in effect increased beyond the ceiling.
In my opinion petitioner’s practice in forcing the butchers to buy unwanted chicken feet in order to get wanted turkeys amounted to a direct violation of the Price Control Act. It certainly was no less a violation of the Administrator’s regulation against evasion. In promulgating this regulation the Administrator could not possibly foresee every ingenious scheme or artifice the business mind might contrive to shroud violations of the Price Control Act. The regulation does not specifically describe all manner of evasive device. The term “tying agreement” nowhere appears in it. and a discussion of such agreements is irrelevant. We need not decide whether what petitioner did would have violated every possible hypothetical regulation the Administrator might have promulgated. The regulation here involved prohibits every evasion of the Price Control Act. It thus condemns all actions that are “on. the wrong side of the line indicated by the policy if not by the mere letter of the. law.” Bullen v. Wisconsin, 240. U. S. 625, 631. What petitioner did here is on the wrong side of both letter and policy. The Court does not deny that there was ample evidence to support the jury’s finding that petitioner did what the information charged it with doing. In my opinion that was a crime.
Had butchers been required to buy bags of stones as a condition to buying turkeys, I think it would have been hard to persuade them, or anybody else, that the seller who forced them to do so was not guilty of violating and evading the law. Had people who wanted and needed bacon, *632at the time when bacon was almost impossible to purchase, been required to buy hog hoofs and hog skins with each purchase of a pound of bacon, I think the sellers would have violated the law. If the wholesaler can require the retailer to purchase unwanted items the retailer can force the ordinary consumer to do the same thing. A restaurant could then force its customers to purchase used kitchen fats along with their meals. It would be little consolation to a customer forced to do so to learn that soap factories can use these fats and would be willing to purchase them. He would pay the price, and either dump the fat into the nearest ash can or tell the waiter to take the smelly substance away. The result would be increased cost of meals in that restaurant. Thinly disguised subterfuges like the one here adopted should not be sanctioned by courts. Once they are sanctioned, laws enacted by Congress for the public welfare are no longer respected.
When food is scarce and people are hungry it is a violation, both of the letter and spirit of the Price Control laws, to require consumers or retail stores where they make their purchases, to buy things that they neither need nor want as a condition to obtaining articles which they must have. I dissent from the Court’s disposition of this case.
Mr. Justice Reed and Mr. Justice Burton join in this opinion.