Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon

1922-12-11

Headline: Court strikes down Pennsylvania law that banned underground coal mining under cities where coal rights were reserved, protecting coal owners’ contract and property rights and limiting state police power to forbid mining.

Holding: The Court held that the Kohler Act cannot be sustained as a valid exercise of the police power insofar as it forbids mining coal under streets or cities where the right to mine had been previously reserved.

Real World Impact:

Protects coal owners’ reserved mining rights under streets and cities.
Limits state police power to abolish mining rights without compensation.
Likely prevents enforcement of similar bans against reserved mining rights.

Topics: property rights, coal mining, state regulation of industry, public safety vs private property

Summary

Background

A coal company reserved the right to remove all coal under land in an 1878 deed while selling the surface to others. Homeowners sued to stop the company from mining beneath their house because mining would remove support and cause the house to sink. Pennsylvania’s 1921 Kohler Act made it illegal to mine in ways that cause subsidence of dwellings and other structures, and the homeowners said the statute now took away the company’s earlier rights.

Reasoning

The Supreme Court asked whether the state’s power to protect public health and safety (the police power) could be stretched so far as to destroy previously recognized property and contract rights without compensation. Justice Holmes’s majority said that as applied to mining under streets and cities where the right to mine had been reserved, the law went too far. Making mining commercially impracticable was treated like an appropriation of the coal, and the Court held the statute could not stand in those situations. The Court reversed the state court’s decree that had enforced the homeowners’ claims.

Real world impact

The ruling protects mining companies that hold reserved underground rights from being stripped of those rights by similar state rules in cities and streets without compensation. It restricts how far states can use public-safety laws to abolish valuable estates created by past deeds. The opinion leaves open other parts of the Kohler Act that deal with public buildings, streets, and facilities; those provisions were discussed separately by the dissent and may still be treated differently.

Dissents or concurrances

Justice Brandeis dissented, arguing coal in place is land and the legislature may forbid uses that threaten public safety without paying compensation; he viewed the Kohler Act as a proper exercise of the police power.