Adair v. United States
The Supreme Court struck down a federal law that made it a crime for interstate railroads to fire employees for belonging to a union, ruling that the law violated both the employer's and employee's constitutional freedom to make and end labor contracts as they choose.
The decision, grounded in a 'liberty of contract' theory that dominated the era, blocked Congress from protecting union membership through this kind of law and left railroad workers without federal criminal-law protection against being fired for unionizing.
“In all such particulars the employer and the employe 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.”
The majority's core rationale for striking down the law as an unconstitutional interference with liberty of contract.
How it got here: A federal grand jury indicted Adair; he was convicted and fined $100 after the trial court rejected his challenge to the law's constitutionality, and he brought the case directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A federal law passed in 1898 set up arbitration procedures for railroad labor disputes and also made it a crime for interstate railroads to fire or threaten workers because they belonged to a union. William Adair, a master mechanic for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, fired locomotive fireman O.B. Coppage, and the government charged Adair with violating that law because Coppage was a member of the Order of Locomotive Firemen.
The question before the Court
Could Congress make it a federal crime for a railroad official to fire a worker simply because he belonged to a union?
Why it matters
Railroad workers lost a federal criminal-law shield against being fired for joining a union, leaving them dependent on private negotiation or later legislation for that protection. The ruling also signaled that Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce could not be used to justify labor protections the Court viewed as unrelated to the physical movement of trains, shaping labor law fights for decades until later Courts took a different view of both liberty of contract and the commerce power.
What changes now
The Court reversed Adair's conviction outright, directing the trial court to sustain his demurrer to the indictment and dismiss the case entirely rather than retry him. The Court expressly limited its ruling to the anti-discrimination/anti-discharge provision at issue, leaving the statute's separate arbitration provisions untouched. The decision stood as controlling precedent on labor legislation and the commerce power until later Courts, addressing New Deal-era statutes, took a broader view of both liberty of contract and congressional commerce authority.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly did not decide the validity of the act's other provisions, such as its arbitration scheme, or whether Congress could criminalize breach of an actual labor contract with a fixed term. It also left open what rights a railroad corporation itself, as opposed to its individual agent, might have under the Fifth Amendment.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice McKenna
Justice McKenna argued the majority isolated Section 10 from the rest of the statute's coordinated arbitration scheme, which the section was designed to support by preventing carriers from disrupting mediation efforts through arbitrary firings of union members. He pointed to Congress's experience with the failed 1888 arbitration law and the 1894 Chicago strike as evidence the provision had a real, substantial connection to preventing disruptions of interstate commerce, comparable to the employer-liability and safety-appliance laws the Court had already upheld.
Dissent — Justice Holmes
“The ground on which this particular law is held bad is not so much that it deals with matters remote from commerce among the States, as that it interferes with the paramount individual rights, secured by the Fifth Amendment.”Holmes identifies what he sees as the majority's real objection to the law.
Justice Holmes argued that labor unions of railroad workers are at least as closely connected to the business of interstate carriers as safety couplers or employer liability rules, both of which Congress could already regulate. He viewed the law as only a limited interference with contract freedom that did not require carriers to hire anyone, and he would have upheld it even if its only effect were to encourage unionization, since Congress could reasonably judge that fostering strong unions served the interests of workers, railroads, and the country.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court framed the question as whether the Fifth Amendment's protection of liberty and property includes a general 'liberty of contract' that covers both an employer's right to hire or fire and an employee's right to take or leave a job, subject only to reasonable restrictions genuinely tied to the public interest.
- Applying that liberty-of-contract principle, the Court reasoned that an employer's right to decide who works for it and an employee's right to decide who to work for are mirror images of each other, so a law protecting only one side's reason for ending the relationship (union membership) upset that equality without adequate justification.
- The Court then asked whether the law could instead be justified as a regulation of interstate commerce, since Congress's commerce power can support otherwise-unusual rules if they have a real, substantial connection to interstate business, as the Court had found for safety-equipment and employer-liability rules in prior cases.
- The Court concluded there was no such connection here: an employee's fitness, diligence, and safety on the job do not depend on whether he belongs to a labor organization, so a rule turning solely on union membership does not regulate the physical or economic conduct of interstate commerce at all.
- Because the provision could not be justified as a commerce regulation and directly interfered with the liberty and property interests protected by the Fifth Amendment, the Court held it invalid as applied to Adair's discharge of Coppage.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45)
The Court relies on Lochner's recognition of a constitutional liberty of contract to strike down the anti-discrimination provision.