Connally v. General Construction Co.
The Court struck down Oklahoma's criminal wage law, ruling that requiring contractors to pay 'not less than the current rate of per diem wages in the locality' was too vague to support criminal penalties.
Because wages varied widely among employers and no one could say what area counted as the 'locality,' the law left ordinary people guessing at what conduct was illegal, violating the basic fairness the Constitution requires before someone can be criminally punished.
“a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess. at its meaning and differ as to its application, violates the first essential of due process of law.”
The Court's core statement of the void-for-vagueness standard for criminal statutes.
How it got here: A three-judge federal court granted the company an interlocutory injunction blocking enforcement of the wage law, and the state officials appealed that ruling directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A construction company building bridges for Oklahoma under state contracts paid its laborers wages it considered fair and agreeable to the workers themselves. The state's Commissioner of Labor claimed the company was underpaying compared to the 'current rate' of wages in the area and threatened criminal prosecution under a state law requiring contractors on public projects to pay prevailing local wages, with fines and jail time for violations.
The question before the Court
Could Oklahoma punish a bridge-building contractor for failing to pay the 'current rate of per diem wages in the locality' when neither term was clearly defined?
Why it matters
The ruling protects contractors and workers from being prosecuted under laws so unclear that reasonable people could not know in advance what they required. It set a lasting standard that criminal laws must give fair notice of what is forbidden, a principle still used today to strike down vague statutes in many areas of law.
What changes now
The injunction blocking enforcement of Oklahoma's wage law against the construction company stands, meaning the state could not prosecute the company under this provision. The decision is a final ruling on the constitutional question, though it arose from review of an interlocutory injunction. States seeking to enforce prevailing-wage requirements would need to draft clearer standards to avoid the vagueness problems identified here.
What this does not decide
The Court did not rule that states cannot require contractors to pay prevailing or minimum wages on public projects. It held only that this particular law's undefined terms — 'current rate of wages' and 'locality' — were too vague to support criminal punishment, leaving room for more clearly drafted wage laws.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Holmes
Justices Holmes and Brandeis agreed the injunction should be affirmed, but on narrower grounds. They would not have declared the statute unconstitutionally vague in general; instead, they concluded only that the company was not violating the law under any wage standard actually available in the vicinity of Cleveland, Oklahoma.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the void-for-vagueness principle: a criminal law must be clear enough that ordinary people can know in advance what conduct it forbids, otherwise it violates due process — the constitutional guarantee of fair legal procedures.
- The Court found that 'current rate of wages' does not point to one specific amount, but instead spans a whole range of minimum, maximum, and in-between wages actually paid for similar work, so the law never says which figure in that range a contractor must meet.
- The Court explained that ordinary tools of legal interpretation could not fix this problem, because the flaw was not awkward wording but a genuine impossibility of knowing which of many different amounts the legislature intended.
- The Court then found a second layer of vagueness in the word 'locality,' reasoning that reasonable people could easily disagree about how large an area counts as the same 'locality,' especially since wages could vary significantly even within a small region.
- Combining these two sources of uncertainty, the Court concluded that whether a contractor had broken the law would depend on the unpredictable guesses of individual juries rather than on a fixed legal standard, which is exactly what due process forbids in a criminal statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. Cohen Grocery Co. (255 U.S. 81)
Relied on this earlier ruling that a vague 'unjust or unreasonable' price law lacked any ascertainable standard of guilt.
Reaffirms International Harvester Co. v. Kentucky (234 U.S. 216)
Used this earlier case's reasoning that laws requiring people to guess at their meaning violate due process.