Court Opinion

ID: 9841928
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:11:33.355507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:06:23.111442
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Caedozo,
dissenting.
The judgment just announced is irreconcilable in principle with the judgment in Borden’s case,' ante, p. 251, announced a minute or so earlier.
*275A minimum price for fluid milk was fixed by law in April, 1933. At-that time, “independents” were underselling their competitors, the dealers in well-advertised brands, by approximately a cent a quart. There was reason to believe that unless that' differential was preserved, they would be driven out of business. To give them an opportunity to survive, the lawmakers maintained the differential in the City of New York, the field of keenest competition.. We have learned from the opinion in Borden’s case that this might lawfully be done.
• The problem was then forced upon the lawmakers, what were to be the privileges of independents who came upon the scene thereafter? Were they to have the benefit of a differential though they had not invested a dollar in the milk business at the passage of the act, or were they to take the chances of defeat by rivals .'stronger than themselves, as they would have to do in other callings? “The Foúrtéenth Amendment does not protect a business against the hazards of competition.” Hegeman Farms Corp. v. Baldwin, 293 U. S. 163, 170; Public Service Comm’n v. Great Northern Utilities Co., 289 U. S. 130, 135. To concede the differential to newcomers might mean an indefinite extension of an artificial preference, thereby aggravating the handicap, the factitious barrier to expansion, for owners of established brands. There was danger, that the preference would become so general as to occupy an unfair proportion of the field, the statutory norm being thus, disrupted altogether. On the other hand, to refuse the differential might mean that newcomers would be deterred from putting capital and labor at the risk of such a business, and, even if they chose to do so, would wage a losing, fight.
Hardships, great or little, were inevitable, whether the field of the differential was .narrowed or enlarged. The legislature, and not the court, has been charged with the duty of determining their comparative extent. ■ To some minds an expansion of the field might seem the course of. *276wisdom and even that of duty; to others wisdom and duty might seem to point the other way. The judicial function is discharged when it appears from a survey of the scene that the lawmakers did not play the part of arbitrary despots in choosing as they did. Standard Oil Co. v. Marysville, 279 U. S. 582, 586, 587. When a line or point has to be fixed, and “there is no mathematical or logical way of fixing it precisely, the decision of the legislature must be accepted unless we can say that it is very wide of any reasonable mark.” Holmes, J., in Louisville Gas & Electric Co. v. Coleman, 277 U. S. 32, 41. Cf. Dominion Hotel v. Arizona, 249 U. S. 265, 268, 269. The judgment of the court commits us to a larger role. In declaring the equities of newcomers to be not inferior to those of others, the judgment makes a choice between competing considerations of policy and fairness, however emphatic its professions that it applies a rule of law.
For the situation was one to tax .the wisdom of the wisest. At the very least it was a situation where thoughtful and honest men might see their duty differently. The statute upheld by this court in Nebbia v. New York, 291 U. S. 502, was an experiment, and a novel one, in that form of business enterprise. Relations between groups had grown up and crystallized under cover of the regime of unrestricted competition. They were threatened with disruption by a system of regulated prices which might crowd the little dealers out and leave the strong and the rich in possession of the field. If there was to be dislocation of the price structure by the action of the state, there was a duty, or so the lawmakers might believe, to spread the consequences among the groups with a minimum of change and hence a minimum of hardship. But the position of men in business at the beginning of the change was very different from those who might go into the business afterwards. Those already there would lose something more than an opportunity for a choice between one business and another. They would lose cap*277ital already ventured; they would lose experience already ■bought; they would suffer the pains incidental to the sudden and enforced, abandonment of'an accustomed way of life. A newcomer could not pretend that he was exposed to those afflictions. Then, too, the ephemeral character of the project counted heavily in favor of the older dealers, and little in favor of a newcomer, or rather, indeed, against him. The system of regulation had been set up as a temporary one, to tide producers' over the rigors of the great depression. If independents already in the field could have their business saved from ruin, it might come back to them intact when the statute was no longer needed. Those who went into the system later would have to count the cost.
Considerations akin' to these have seemed sufficient to other legislatures for drawing a distinction between an old business and a new one. They have seemed sufficient to this court in determining the validity of other acts of legislation not different in principle. Stanley v. Public Utilities Comm’n, 295 U. S. 76, 78; Continental Baking Co, v. Woodring, 286 U. S. 352, 370, 371; Sperry & Hutchinson Co. v. Rhodes, 220 U. S. 502, 505; Watson v. Maryland, 218 U. S. 173, 177, 178; cf. Spector v. Building Inspector, 250 Mass. 63, 70, 71,; 145 N. E. 265. Independents who were in business when the statute was adopted would not have suffered a denial of a constitutional right or privilege if they had been refused a differential, though the refusal might have condemned them to ,a foreordained and hopeless struggle with advertised competitors stronger than-themselves. For the same reason, independents starting afterwards must submit to the same chances unless their equities are as commanding as those of dealers on the scene before. It is juggling with words to say that,all the independents make up, a single “class,” and by reason of that fact must be subjected tó a single rule. Whether the class is divisible into subclasses is the very question to be answered. There mav *278be division and subdivision unless separation can be found to be so void of rationality as to be the expression of a whim rather than an exercise of judgment. “We have no right,” it is now said, “to conjure up possible situations which might justify the discrimination.” The court has taught a different doctrine in its earlier decisions. “A statutory discrimination will not be set aside as the denial of equal protection of the laws if any state of facts reasonably may be conceived to justify it.” Metropolitan Casualty Insurance Co. v. Brownell, 294 U. S. 580, 584; Rast v. Van Deman, & Lewis Co., 240 U. S. 342, 357; O’Gorman & Young v. Hartford, Fire Insurance Co., 282 U. S. 251, 257; Williams v. Mayor, 289 U. S. 36, 42. On this occasion, happily, the facts are not obscure. Big dealers and little ones, newcomers in the trade and veterans, were clamorously asserting to the legislature their title to its favor. I have not seen the judicial scales so delicately poised, and so accurately graduated as to balance and record the subtleties of all these rival equities, and make them ponderable and legible beyond a reasonable doubt.
To say that the statute is not void beyond a reasonable doubt is to say that it is valid.
Me. Justice Beandeis and Me. Justice Stone join in this opinion.