Coppage v. Kansas
The Supreme Court struck down a Kansas law that made it a crime for an employer to require workers to promise not to join a labor union as a condition of employment, ruling that such 'liberty of contract' is protected against state interference by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The decision extended the Court's earlier ruling striking down a similar federal law and became one of the leading cases protecting so-called 'yellow-dog contracts,' limiting states' ability to regulate the terms employers could demand from at-will workers.
How it got here: A Kansas county court convicted Coppage; the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed over two dissents; Coppage brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court claiming a federal due-process violation.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A railroad superintendent named Coppage told a switchman, Hedges, that he could keep his job only if he signed a paper agreeing to quit his union, the Switchmen's Union of North America. Hedges refused and was fired. Kansas had made it a crime for an employer to demand such an anti-union pledge from a worker, and Coppage was convicted and fined under that law.
The question before the Court
Could a state make it a crime for an employer to insist that a worker agree not to join a union as a condition of keeping his job?
Why it matters
Employers in Kansas and other states with similar laws could keep demanding that workers give up union membership to get or keep a job, and courts elsewhere used this ruling to strike down comparable worker-protection statutes. The decision curbed early 20th-century labor legislation until Congress and later courts changed course decades afterward.
What changes now
The judgment of the Kansas Supreme Court was reversed and the case sent back for further proceedings consistent with the opinion, meaning Coppage's conviction could not stand. This was a final decision on the merits, and it left Kansas's anti-yellow-dog-contract law unenforceable as applied, a result the dissent warned would doom similar laws in other states. Congress and courts did not revisit this doctrine favorably until later decades.
What this does not decide
The Court repeatedly stressed it was not deciding any case involving actual coercion, duress, or undue influence by either employers or unions, nor questions about monopoly or third-party or public interference by labor organizations. It also did not question the basic legality of workers joining unions.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Holmes
Justice Holmes argued the judgment should be affirmed, reasoning that a worker might reasonably believe joining a union is the only way to get a fair contract, and that the law could permissibly enforce equality of bargaining power between employer and employee. He went further than the majority's critics, saying both Adair v. United States and Lochner v. New York should be overruled outright.
Dissent — Justice Day
Justice Day, joined by Justice Hughes, argued that Adair only addressed an employer's right to fire a worker for union membership, not the separate question of requiring a no-union pledge as a hiring condition, so Adair did not control this case. He would have upheld the Kansas law as a legitimate use of the police power to protect workers' freedom to join unions, drawing on precedent recognizing unequal bargaining power between employers and employees.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court framed the issue as whether the 'liberty of contract' protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause allows a state to criminalize an employer's demand that a worker forgo union membership as a job condition, once any element of true coercion or duress is set aside.
- It relied on Adair v. United States, where the Court had struck down a nearly identical federal ban on the same practice under the Fifth Amendment, reasoning that because the Fifth Amendment binds Congress the same way the Fourteenth Amendment binds the states, a rule invalid for Congress must also be invalid for a state legislature.
- The Court reasoned that because employer and employee have 'equality of right' to end their at-will relationship for any reason, each side may also insist in advance on terms — including a no-union pledge — as a condition of starting or continuing that relationship, since the power to set conditions follows from the power to walk away.
- Applying rational-basis-style review of the police power (the state's authority to regulate for public health, safety, morals, or welfare), the Court found no such public-welfare purpose in the part of the statute at issue, once the coercion-related language was set aside, because the only apparent goal was to correct economic inequality between employers and workers.
- The Court concluded that using the police power merely to level financial inequality, without an independent public-welfare justification, was not a legitimate exercise of that power and instead directly invaded the liberty and property rights the Fourteenth Amendment protects.
- Because the statute, as applied, punished a normal and voluntary business condition rather than actual coercion, the Court held it unconstitutional under the due process clause.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Adair v. United States (208 U.S. 161)
The Court re-examined and reaffirmed Adair's rule that banning anti-union employment conditions violates constitutional liberty of contract.