Court Opinion

ID: 9418897
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:42:22.063008+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:03:08.905416
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Stone,
dissenting.
While I agree with all that the Chief Justice has said, I would not make the differences between the present statute and that involved in the. Adkins case the sole basis of decision. I attach little importance to the fact that the earlier statute was aimed only at a starvation wage and that the present one does not prohibit such a wage unless it is also less than the reasonable value of the service. Since neither statute compels employment at any wage,-1 do not assume that employers in one case, more than in the other, would pay the minimum wage if the service were worth less.
The vague and general pronouncement of the Fourteenth Amendment against déprivation of liberty without due process of law is a limitation of legislative power, not a formula for its exercise. It does not purport to say in what particular maimer that power shall be exerted. *632It makes no fine-spun distinctions between methods which the legislature may and which it may not choose to solve a pressing problem of government. It is plain too, that, unless the language of the amendment and the decisions of this Court are to be ignored, the liberty which the amendment protects is not freedom from restraint of all law or of any law which reasonable men may think an appropriate means for dealing with any of those matters of public concern with which it is the business of government to deal. There is grim irony in . speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their services for less than is needful to keep body and soul together. But if this is freedom of contract no one has ever denied that it is freedom which may be restrained, notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment, by a statute passed in the public interest.
In many cases this Court has sustained the power of legislatures to prohibit or restrict the terms of a contract, including the price term, in order to accomplish what the legislative body may reasonably consider a public purpose. They include cases, which have neither been overruled nor discredited, in which the sole basis of regulation was the fact that circumstances, beyond the control of the parties, had so seriously curtailed the regulative power' of competition as to place buyers or sellers at a disadvantage in the bargaining struggle, such that a legislature might reasonably have contemplated serious consequences to the community as a whole and have sought to avoid them by regulation of the terms of the contract. Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113; Brass v. Stoeser, 153 U. S. 391; German Alliance Insurance Co. v. Lewis, 233 U. S. 389, 409; Terminal Taxicab Co. v. District of Columbia, 241 U. S. 252; Block v. Hirsh, 256 U. S. 135; Marcus Brown Co. v. Feldman, 256 U. S. 170; Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, 258 U. S. 242; Nebbia v. New *633York, 291 U. S. 502; see also, Frisbie v. United States, 157 U. S. 160; Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, 183 U. S. 13; McLean v. Arkansas, 211 U. S. 539; Mutual Loan Co. v. Martell, 222 U. S. 225.
No one doubts that the presence in the community of a large number of those compelled by economic necessity to accept a wage less than is needful for subsistence is a matter of grave public concern, the more so when, as has been demonstrated here, it tends to produce ill health, immorality and deterioration of the race. The fact that .at one time or another Congress and the legislatures of seventeen states, and the legislative bodies of twenty-one foreign countries, including Great Britain and its four commonwealths, have found that wage regulation, is an appropriate corrective for serious social and economic maladjustments growing out of inequality in bargaining power, precludes, for me, any assumption that it is a remedy beyond the bounds of reason. It is difficult to imagine any grounds, other than our own personal economic predilections, for saying that the contract of employment is any the less an appropriate subject of legislation than are scores of others, in dealing with which this Court has held that legislatures may curtail individual freedom in the public interest.
If it is a subject upon which there is power to legislate at all, the Fourteenth Amendment makes no distinction between the methods by which legislatures may deal with it, any more than it proscribes the regulation of one term of a bargain more than another if it is properly the subject of regulation. No one has yet attempted to say upon what basis of history, principles of government, law or logic, it is within due process to regulate the hours and conditions of labor of women, see Muller v. Oregon, 208 U. S. 412; Riley v. Massachusetts, 232 U. S. 671, 679; Hawley v. Walker, 232 U. S. 718; Miller v. Wilson, 236 U. S. 373; Bosley v. McLaughlin, 236 U. S. *634385, and of men, Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U. S. 426, and the time and manner of payment of the wage, McLean v. Arkansas, supra; Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison, supra; Patterson v. Bark Eudora, 190 U. S. 169; compare New York Central R. Co. v. White, 243 U. S. 188; Arizona Employers’ Liability Cases, 250 U. S. 400, but that regulation of the amount of the wage passes beyond the constitutional limitation; or to say upon what theory the amount of a wage is any the less the subject of regulation in the public interest than that of insurance premiums, German Alliance Insurance Co. v. Lewis, supra, or of the commissions of insurance brokers, O’Gorman & Young, Inc. v. Hartford Fire Ins. Co., 282 U. S. 251, or of the charges of grain elevators, Munn v. Illinois, supra; Brass v. Stoeser, supra, or of the price which the farmer receives for his milk, or which the wage earner pays for it, Nebbia v. New York, supra.
These considerations were developed at length in Tyson & Bros. v. Banton, 273 U. S. 418, 447 et seq., and in Ribnik v. McBride, 277 U. S. 350, 359, et seq., and need not be further elaborated now. It is true that the Court rejected them there, but it later accepted and applied them as the basis of decision in O’Gorman & Young, Inc. v. Hartford Fire Ins. Co., supra; Nebbia v. New York, supra; Hegeman Farms Corp. v. Baldwin, 293 U. S. 163; Borden’s Farm Products Co. v. Ten Eyck, 297 U. S. 251. Both precedent, and, what is more important, reason, require their acceptance now. See Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U. S. 393, 405. In upholding state minimum price regulation in the milk industry, in Nebbia v. New York, supra, the Court declared, p. 537:
“So far as the requirement of due process is concerned, and in the absence of other constitutional restriction, a state is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to its purpose. *635The courts are without authority either to declare such policy, or, when it is declared by the legislature, to override it. If the laws passed are seen to have a reasonable relation to a proper legislative purpose, and are neither arbitrary nor discriminatory, the requirements of due process are satisfied, and judicial determination to that effect renders a court functus officio.”
That declaration and decision should control the present case. They are irreconcilable with the decision and most that was said in the Adkins case. They have left the Court free of its restriction as a precedent, and free to declare that the choice of the particular form of regulation by which grave economic maladjustments are to be remedied is for legislatures and not the courts.
In the years which have intervened since the Adkins case we have had opportunity to learn that a wage is not always the resultant of free bargaining between employers and employees; that it may be one forced upon employees by their economic necessities and upon employers by the most ruthless of their competitors. We have had opportunity to perceive more clearly that a wage insufficient to support the worker does not visit its consequences upon him alone; that it may affect profoundly the entire .economic structure of society and, in any case, that it casts on every taxpayer, and on government itself, the burden of solving the problems of poverty, subsistence, health and morals of large numbers in the community. Because of their nature and extent these are public problems. A generation ago they were for the individual to solve; today they are the burden of the naff on. I can perceive no more objection, on constitutional grounds, to their solution by requiring an industry to bear the subsistence cost of the labor which it employs, than to the imposition upon it of the cost of its industrial accidents. See New York Central R. Co. v. White, supra; Mountain Timber Co. v. Washington, 243 U. S. 219.
*636It is not for the courts to resolve doubts whether the remedy by wage regulation is as efficacious as many believe, or is better than some other, or is better even than the blind operation of uncontrolled economic forces. The legislature must be free to choose unless government is to be rendered impotent. The Fourteenth Amendment has no more embedded in the Constitution our preference for some particular set of economic beliefs than it has adopted, in the name of liberty, the system .of theology which we may happen to approve.
I know of no rule or practice by which the arguments advanced in support of an application for certiorari restrict our choice between conflicting precedents in deciding a question of constitutional law which the petition, if granted, requires us to answer. Here the question which the petition specifically presents is whether the New York statute contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment.In addition, the petition assigns as a reason for granting it that “the construction and application of the Constitution of the United States and a prior decision” of this Court “are necessarily involved,” and again, that “the circumstances prevailing under which the New York law was enacted call for a reconsideration of the Adkins case in the light of the New York act and conditions aimed to be remedied thereby.” Unless we are now to construe and apply the Fourteenth Amendment without regard to our decisions since the Adkins case, we could not rightly avoidits reconsideration even if it were not asked. We should follow our decision in the Nebbia case and leave the selection and the method of the solution of the problems to which the statute is addressed where it seems to me the Constitution has left them, to the legislative branch of the government. The judgment should be reversed.
Mr. Justice Brandéis and Mr. Justice Cardozo join in this opinion.