Court Opinion

ID: 9421576
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:58:59.182071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:30.958970
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
In joining the Court’s opinion I deem it appropriate to add a few observations. Law is a social organism, and evolution operates in the sociological domain no less than in the biological. The vitality and therefore validity of law is not arrested by the circumstances of its origin. What Magna Carta has become is very different indeed from the immediate objects of the barons at Runnymede. The fact that scholarship has shown that historical assumptions regarding the procedure for punishment of contempt of court were ill-founded, hardly wipes out a century and a half of the legislative and judicial history of federal law based on such assumptions. Moreover, the most authoritative student of the history of contempt of court has impressively shown that “from the reign of Edward I it was established that the Court had power to punish summarily contempt committed ... in the actual view of the Court.” Fox, History of Contempt of Court, 49-52.
*190Whatever the conflicting views of scholars in construing more or less dubious manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century, what is indisputable is that from the foundation of the United States the constitutionality of the power to punish for contempt without the intervention of a jury has not been doubted. The First Judiciary Act conferred such a power on the federal courts in the very act of their establishment, 1 Stat. 73, 83, and of the Judiciary Committee of eight that reported the bill to the Senate, five members including the chairman, Senator, later to be Chief Justice, Ellsworth, had been delegates to the Constitutional Convention.1 In the First Congress itself no less than nineteen members, including Madison who contemporaneously introduced the Bill of Rights, had been delegates to the Convention. And when an abuse under this power manifested itself, and led Congress to define more explicitly the summary power vested in the courts, it did not remotely deny the existence of the power but merely defined the conditions for its exercise more clearly, in an Act “declaratory of the law concerning contempts of court.” Act of Mar. 2, 1831, 4 Stat. 487. Although the judge who had misused the power was impeached, and Congress defined the power more clearly, neither the proponents of the reform nor Congress in its corrective legislation suggested that the established law be changed by making the jury part of the procedure for the punishment of criminal contempt. This is more significant in that such a proposal had only recently been put before Congress as part of the draft penal code of Edward Livingston of Louisiana.
Nor has the constitutionality of the power been doubted by this Court throughout its existence. In at least two score cases in this Court, not to mention the vast mass of *191decisions in the lower federal courts, the power to punish summarily has been accepted without question.2 It is *192relevant to call the roll of the Justices, not including those now sitting, who thus sustained the exercise of this power:
Washington Gray Pitney
Marshall Blatchford McReynolds
Johnson L. Q. C. Lamar Brandéis
Livingston Fuller Clarke
Todd Brewer Taft
Story Brown ' Sutherland
Duval Shiras Butler
Clifford H. E. Jackson Sanford
Swayne White Stone
Miller Peckham Roberts
Davis McKenna Cardozo
Field Holmes Reed
Strong Day Murphy
Bradley Moody R. H. Jackson
Hunt Lurton Rutledge
Waite Hughes Vinson
Harlan Van Devanter Minton 3
Matthews J. R. Lamar
To be sure, it is never too late for this Court to correct a misconception in an occasional decision, even on a rare occasion to change a rule of law that may have long persisted but also have long been questioned and only fluc-tuatingly applied. To say that everybody on the Court *193has been wrong for 150 years and that that which has been deemed part of the bone and sinew of the law should now be extirpated is quite another thing. Decision-making is not a mechanical process, but neither is this Court an originating lawmaker. The admonition of Mr. Justice Brandéis that we are not a third branch of the Legislature should never be disregarded. Congress has seen fit from time to time to qualify the power of summary punishment for contempt that it gave the federal courts in 1789 by requiring in explicitly defined situations that a jury be associated, with the court in determining whether there has been a contempt. See, e. g., 18 U. S. C. § 3691; Civil Rights Act of 1957, 71 Stat. 634, 638, 42 U. S. C. A. § 1995. It is for Congress to extend this participation of the jury, whenever it sees fit to do so, to other instances of the exercise of the power to punish for contempt. It is not for this Court to fashion a wholly novel constitutional doctrine that would require such participation whatever Congress may think on the matter, and in the teeth of an unbroken legislative and judicial history from the foundation of the Nation.4

 Oliver Ellsworth, Chairman, William Paterson, Caleb Strong, Richard Bassett, William Few. 1 Annals of Cong. 17.

 Ex parte Kearney, 7 Wheat. 38; In re Chiles, 22 Wall. 157; Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289; In re Savin, 131 U. S. 267; In re Cuddy, 131 U. S. 280; In re Swan, 150 U. S. 637; In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564; Brown v. Walker, 161 U. S. 591; In re Lennon, 166 U. S. 548; Bessette v. W. B. Conkey Co., 194 U. S. 324; Nelson v. United States, 201 U. S. 92; United States v. Shipp, 203 U. S. 563, 214 U. S. 386; Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123; Toledo Newspaper Co. v. United States, 247 U. S. 402; Blair v. United States, 250 U. S. 273; Craig v. Hecht, 263 U. S. 255; Brown v. United States, 276 U. S. 134; Sinclair v. United States, 279 U. S. 749; Blackmer v. United States, 284 U. S. 421; Clark v. United States, 289 U. S. 1; United States v. United Mine Workers, 330 U. S. 258; Rogers v. United States, 340 U. S. 367; Sacher v. United States, 343 U. S. 1; Nilva v. United States, 352 U. S. 385; Yates v. United States, 355 U. S. 66.
In the following cases the Court, although refusing to sustain contempt convictions for other reasons, took for granted trial by the court without a jury: Ex parte Robinson, 19 Wall. 505; In re Burrus, 136 U. S. 586; Wilson v. North Carolina, 169 U. S. 586; In re Watts, 190 U. S. 1; Baglin v. Cusenier Co., 221 U. S. 580; Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418; Ex parte Hudgings, 249 U. S. 378; Cooke v. United States, 267 U. S. 517; Nye v. United States, 313 U. S. 33; Pendergast v. United States, 317 U. S. 412; United States v. White, 322 U. S. 694; In re Michael, 326 U. S. 224; Blau v. United States, 340 U. S. 332; Hoffman v. United States, 341 U. S. 479; Cammer v. United States, 350 U. S. 399.
The materials on the basis of which this unbroken course of adjudication is proposed to be reversed have in fact been known in this country for almost half a century and were available to the Justices who participated in many of these decisions. The first of the studies of criminal contempt by Sir John Charles Fox, The King v. Almon, 24 Law Q. Rev. 184, appeared in 1908, and the results of the research of Solly-Flood were published as early as 1886. The Story of Prince Henry of Monmouth and Chief-Justice Gascoign, 3 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (N. S.) 47. Mr. Justice Holmes, writing for the Court in Gompers v. United States, 233 U. S. 604 (1914), noted the work of Solly-Flood. He observed that: “It does not follow that contempts of the class under consideration are not crimes, or rather, in the language of the statute, offenses, because trial by jury as it has been gradually worked out and fought out has been thought not to extend to them as a matter of constitutional right. These *192contempts are infractions of the law, visited with punishment as such. If such acts are not criminal, we are in error as to the most fundamental characteristic of crimes as that word has been understood in English speech. So truly are they crimes that it seems to be proved that in the early law they were punished only by the usual criminal procedure, 3 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, N. S. p. 147 (1885), and that at least in England it seems that they still may be and preferably are tried in that way.” 233 U. S., at 610-611.

 Beginning with Ex parte Robinson, 19 Wall. 505, and In re Chiles, 22 Wall. 157, this list includes every Justice who sat on the Court since 1874, with the exception of Mr. Justice Woods (1881-1887), and Mr. Justice Byrnes (1941-1942).

 “We do not write on a blank sheet. The Court has its jurisprudence, the helpful repository of the deliberate and expressed convictions of generations of sincere minds addressing themselves to exposition and decision, not with the freedom of casual critics or even of studious commentators, but under the pressure and within the limits of a definite official responsibility.” Chief Justice Hughes speaking on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Court. 309 U. S. xiv.