Court Opinion

ID: 9419963
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:20.291494+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.342757
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rutledge,
dissenting.
The unique history and conditions surrounding the activities of river port pilots, shortly recounted in the Court’s opinion, justify a high degree of public regulation. But I do not think they can sustain a system of entailment for the occupation. If Louisiana were to provide by statute in haec verba that only members of John Smith’s family would be eligible for the public calling of pilot, I have no doubt that the statute on its face would infringe the Fourteenth Amendment. And this would be true, *565even though John Smith and the members of his family-had been pilots for generations. It would be true also if the right were expanded to include a number of designated families.
In final analysis this is, I think, the situation presented on this record. While the statutes applicable do not purport on their face to restrict the right to become a licensed pilot to members of the families of licensed pilots, the charge is that they have been so administered. And this charge not only is borne out by the record but is accepted by the Court as having been sustained.1
The result of the decision therefore is to approve as constitutional state regulation which makes admission to the ranks of pilots turn finally on consanguinity. Blood is, in effect, made the crux of selection. That, in my opinion, is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guaranty against denial of the equal protection of the laws. The door is thereby closed to all not having blood relationship to presently licensed pilots. Whether the occupation is considered as having the status of “public officer” or of highly regulated private employment, it is beyond legislative power to make entrance to it turn upon such a criterion. The Amendment makes no exception from its prohibitions against state action on account of the fact that public rather than private employment is affected by the forbidden discriminations. That fact simply makes violation all the more clear where those discriminations are shown to exist.
It is not enough to avoid the Amendment’s force that a familial system may have a tendency or, as the Court puts it, a direct relationship to'the end of securing an efficient pilotage system. Classification based on the pur*566pose to be accomplished may be said abstractly to be sound. But when the test adopted and applied in fact is race or consanguinity, it cannot be used constitutionally to bar all except a group chosen by such a relationship from public employment. That is not a test; it is a wholly arbitrary exercise of power.
Conceivably the familial system would be the most effective possible scheme for training many kinds of artisans or public servants, sheerly from the viewpoint of securing the highest degree of skill and competence. Indeed, something very worth while largely disappeared from our national life when the once prevalent familial system of conducting manufacturing and mercantile enterprises went out and was replaced by the highly impersonal corporate system for doing business.
But that loss is not one to be repaired under our scheme by legislation framed or administered to perpetuate family monopolies of either private occupations or branches of the public service. It is precisely because the Amendment forbids enclosing those areas by legislative lines drawn on the basis of race, color, creed and the like, that, in cases like this, the possibly most efficient method of securing the highest development of skills cannot be established by law. Absent any such bar, the presence of such a tendency or direct relationship would be effective for sustaining the legislation. It cannot be effective to overcome the bar itself. The discrimination here is not shown to be consciously racial in character. But I am unable to differentiate in effects one founded on blood relationship.
The case therefore falls squarely within the ruling in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356,2 not only with relation *567to the line of discrimination employed, but also in the fact that unconstitutional administration of a statute otherwise valid on its face incurs the same condemnation as if the statute had incorporated the discrimination in terms. Appellants here are entitled, in my judgment, to the same relief as was afforded in the Yick Wo case.
Mr. Justice Reed, Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Murphy join in this dissent.

 The record shows that in a few instances over a course of several years nonrelatives of licensed pilots have received appointment as apprentices and qualified. But the general course of administration has been that such appointments are limited to relatives.

 To like effect is Alston v. School Board of Norfolk, 112 F. 2d 992; cf. Burt v. City of New York, 156 F. 2d 791; Remedies for Discrimination by State and Local Administrative Bodies (1946) 60 Harv. L. Rev. 271.