Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877), argued 14, 18 Jan. 1876, decided 1 Mar. 1877 by vote of 7 to 2; Waite for the Court, Field, joined by Strong, in dissent.
Munn v. Illinois forms with the related
Granger Cases a historic ruling that tests the constitutionality of state
police power, through legislation, to regulate private business. Coming in the industrial upheaval of the late nineteenth century, the case gave vitality to the recently enacted
Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1875, the Illinois legislature, dominated by representatives sympathetic to the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange), enacted legislation setting the rates that Illinois grain elevator operators could charge their grain‐producing customers—provided the operators did business in any Illinois city larger than 100,000 in population. The law therefore applied to only one Illinois city: Chicago, where farmers were agitated that elevator operators were fixing rates and gouging farmers. The operators argued that the Illinois statute was an unconstitutional infringement on the
commerce power of the Congress and that it was violative of the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, intended to bar any state from depriving persons of property without due process of law.
For the majority, Chief Justice Morrison R.
Waite vindicated the Granger forces. He upheld the Illinois law, arguing that such a statute was clearly within the limits of the police power of the state of Illinois. Waite eloquently traced the regulatory principle from its origins in English common law, observing that “[W]hen private property is affected with a public interest,” it ceased to be exclusively private (p. 126). He went on to ground his ruling in nineteenth‐century American case law regarding bridges, ferries, railroads, and navigable waterways. Waite observed that when one devotes “property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has created” (p. 126).
Waite next asked if the facts of the case justified the legislature's statutory action—a question he answered affirmatively: “For our purposes we must assume that if a state of facts could exist that would justify such legislation, it actually did exist when the statute under consideration was passed” (p. 132). Moreover, it was the proper function of the judiciary to determine if the legislative power exercised here was a legitimate constitutional power (see
Judicial Review). If so, its exercise was a
political question: “For protection against abuses by legislatures, the people must resort to the polls, not to the courts” (p. 134)—Waite's classic statement of nineteenth‐century judicial restraint. Finally, Waite noted that the effect of the Illinois statute on interstate commerce was incidental, a local regulation that would stand in the absence of congressional involvement.
Justice Stephen J.
Field entered a vigorous dissent in which Justice William
Strong concurred. Field found the Illinois statute constitutionally impermissible and argued for a position that would come to be called substantive
due process. Field drew a distinction between private rights and public power, basing his dissent in part on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Field dismissed the argument that by using their private property to engage in the business of grain storage the private owners had granted the public an interest in that use. “If this be sound law,” Field admonished in a celebrated passage, “all property and all business in the state are held at the mercy of the Legislature” (p. 140), a right to property so fragile as to be clearly unacceptable within the property guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment (see
Property Rights).
In arguing for a substantive conception of the Due Process Clause—that a hierarchy of rights was embodied in the Constitution that representative bodies could not abridge—Field in dissent announced a position that, over time, a Supreme Court majority would embrace. While Field did not condemn all governmental regulation of business activity, especially in the matter of regulating large corporations, he sought to limit the use of the state police power as an instrument for business regulation. His argument, in addition, foresaw a more activist and interventionist role for the federal judiciary in the economic life of the states—a harbinger of the modern role of federal courts in a broad array of policy questions.
Augustus M. Burns III
