Adair V. United States - The Supreme Court's Decision

The Supreme Court's Decision

In a 6-2 decision, the Court held that Section 10 of the Erdman act was unconstitutional. In the majority opinion, written by Justice John M. Harlan, the question to be decided was described as such:

"May Congress make it a criminal offense against the United States -- as by the tenth section of the act of 1898 it does -- for an agent or officer of an interstate carrier, having full authority in the premises from the carrier, to discharge an employee from service simply because of his membership in a labor organization?"

In answering this question, Harlan first examined whether Section 10 of the act on which the indictment against Adair was based "is repugnant to the Fifth Amendment." Harlan found that the due process clause of the Amendment guarded against "an invasion of the personal liberty, as well as the right of property", and that "uch liberty and right embraces the right to make contracts for the purchase of the labor of others and equally the right to make contracts for the sale of one's own labor". Harlan further cited the landmark decision in Lochner v. New York (1905) in which the Court had struck down state regulation which was found to infringe on the laborers' "liberty of contract". In reference to the prerogatives of both parties in the termination of a labor contract, Harlan wrote:

"In all such particulars, the employer and the employee have equality of right, and any legislation that disturbs that equality is an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract which no government can legally justify in a free land."

Having found that the Fifth Amendment barred against limiting the right of an employer to fire an employee due to membership in a labor union, Harlan concluded that Congress could not criminalize such action. Furthermore, it had been argued by the government in defending the statute that Section 10 was a valid exercise of Congress' powers under the Commerce Clause. In the second part of the opinion, Harlan examined this claim, at first acknowledging that Congress had "a large discretion in the selection or choice of the means to be employed in the regulation of interstate commerce". But this discretion was dependent on the regulation:

"Manifestly, any rule prescribed for the conduct of interstate commerce, in order to be within the competency of Congress under its power to regulate commerce among the States, must have some real or substantial relation to or connection with the commerce regulated."

Harlan rejected that the provision had any such connection, asking rhetorically:

"But what possible legal or logical connection is there between an employee's membership in a labor organization and the carrying on of interstate commerce? Such relation to a labor organization cannot have, in itself, and in the eye of the law, any bearing upon the commerce with which the employee is connected by his labor and services."

Harlan concluded that Congress' control over interstate commerce did not extend to membership in labor unions:

"(...) e hold that there is no such connection between interstate commerce and membership in a labor organization as to authorize Congress to make it a crime against the United States for an agent of an interstate carrier to discharge an employee because of such membership on his part."

Justices Joseph McKenna and Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. filed separate dissents.