Court Opinion

ID: 9418818
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:40:20.926899+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:11.345730
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Sutherland,
concurring.
Mr. Justice Van Devanter, Mr. Justice McReynolds, Mr. Justice Butler and I concur unreservedly in the judgment of the court holding the Arkansas statute void as in contravention of the contract impairment clause of the Federal Constitution. We concur thus specially because we are unable to agree with the view set forth in the opinion that the differences between the Arkansas statute and the Minnesota mortgage moratorium law, which was upheld as constitutional in the Blaisdell case, are substantial. On the contrary, we are of opinion that the two statutes are governed by the same principles and the differences found to exist are without significance, so far as the question of constitutionality is concerned. The reasons set forth in the dissenting opinion in the Blaisdell case, and the long line of cases previously decided by this court there cited, fully support this conclusion. We were unable Then, as we are now, to concur in the view that an emergency can ever justify, or, what is really the same thing, can ever furnish an occasion for justifying, a nullification of the constitutional restriction *435upon state power in respect of the impairment of contractual obligations. Acceptance of such a view takes us beyond the fixed and secure boundaries of the fundamental law into a precarious fringe of extraconstitutional territory-in which no real boundaries exist. We reject as unsound and dangerous doctrine, threatening the stability of the deliberately framed and wise provisions of the Constitution, the notion that violations of those provisions may be measured by the length of time they are to continue or the extent of the infraction, and that only those of long duration or of large importance are to be held bad. Such was not the intention of those who framed and adopted that instrument. The power of this court is not to amend but only to expound the Constitution as an agency of the sovereign people who made it and who alone have authority to alter or unmake it. We do not possess the benevolent power to compare and contrast infringements of the Constitution and condemn them when they are long-lived or great or unqualified, and condone them when they are temporary or small or conditioned.