Martin v. City of Struthers/Dissent Frankfurter

by Felix Frankfurter

United States Supreme Court

319 U.S. 141

Martin  v.  City of Struthers

 Argued: March 11, 1943. --- Decided: May 3, 1943

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER.

From generation to generation fresh vindication is given to the prophetic wisdom of the framers of the Constitution in casting it in terms so broad that it has adaptable vitality for the drastic changes in our society which they knew to be inevitable, even though they could not foresee them. Thus it has come to be that the transforming consequences resulting from the pervasive industrialization of life find the Commerce Clause appropriate, for instance, for national regulation of an aircraft flight wholly within a single state. Such exertion of power by the national government over what might seem a purely local transaction would, as a matter of abstract law, have been as unimaginable to Marshall as to Jefferson precisely because neither could have foreseen the present conquest of the air by man. But law, whether derived from acts of Congress or the Constitution, is not an abstraction. The Constitution cannot be applied in disregard of the external circumstances in whch men live and move and have their being. Therefore neither the First nor the Fourteenth Amendment is to be treated by judges as though it were a mathematical abstraction, an absolute having no relation to the lives of men.

The habits and security of life in sparsely settled rural communities, or even in those few cities which a hundred and fifty years ago had a population of a few thousand, cannot be made the basis of judgment for determining the area of allowable self-protection by present-day industrial communities. The lack of privacy and the hazards to peace of mind and body caused by people living not in individual houses but crowded together in large human beehives, as they so widely do, are facts of modern living which cannot be ignored.

Concededly, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not abrogate the power of the states to recognize that homes are sancturaries from intrusions upon privacy and of opportunities for leading lives in health and safety. Door-knocking and bell-ringing by professed peddlers of things or ideas may therefore be confined within specified hours and otherwise circumscribed so as not to sanctify the rights of these peddlers in disregard of the rights of those within doors. Acknowledgement is also made that the City of Struthers, the particular ordinance of which presents the immediate issue before us, is one of those industrial communities the residents of which have a working day consisting of twenty-four hours, so that for some portions of the city's inhabitants opportunities for sleep and refreshment require during day as well as night whatever peace and quiet is obtainable in a modern industrial town. It is further recognized that the modern multiple residences give opportunities for pseudo-canvassers to ply evil trades-dangers to the community pursued by the few but farreaching in their success and in the fears they arouse.

The Court's opinion apparently recognizes these factors as legitimate concerns for regulation by those whose business it is to legislate. But it finds, if I interpret correctly what is wanting in explicitness, that instead of aiming at the protection of householders from intrusion upon needed hours of rest or from those plying evil trades, whether pretending the sale of pots and pans or the distribution of leaflets, the ordinance before us merely penalizes the distribution of 'literature.' To be sure, the prohibition of this ordinance is within a small circle. But it is not our business to require legislatures to extend the area of prohibition or regulation beyond the demands of revealed abuses. And the greatest leeway must be given to the legislative judgment of what those demands are. The right to legislate implies the right to classify. We should not, however unwittingly, slip into the judgment seat of legislatures. I myself cannot say that those in whose keeping is the peace of the City of Struthers and the right of privacy of its home dwellers could not single out in circumstances of which they may have knowledge and I certainly have not, this class of canvassers as the particular source of mischief. The Court's opinion leaves one in doubt whether prohibition of all bell-ringing and door-knocking would be deemed an infringement of the constitutional protection of speech. It would be fantastic to suggest that a city has power, in the circumstances of modern urban life, to forbid house-to-house canvassing generally, but that the Constitution prohibits the inclusion in such prohibition of door-to-door vending of phylacteries or rosaries or of any printed matter. If the scope of the Court's opinion, apart from some of its general observations, is that this ordinance is an invidious discrimination against distributors of what is politely called literature, and therefore is deemed an unjustifiable prohibition of freedom of utterance, the decision leaves untouched what are in my view controlling constitutional principles, if I am correct in my understanding of what is held, and I would not be disposed to disagree with such a construction of the ordinance.

Notes