Coppage v. Kansas
Case Date: 05/19/2024
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Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that held that employers could make contracts that forbid employees from joining unions. These types of contracts were called yellow-dog contracts. This case was decided in the era prior to the American Great Depression when the Supreme Court invalidated laws that imposed restrictions on contracts, especially those of employment. During this time, liberty of contract was viewed as a fundamental right, and therefore, only in extreme circumstances, could this right be abridged. When the fundamental right of freedom of contract was abridged, it violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Coppage, an employer, forbade his employees from joining labor unions by making it part of their contract, which the employee signed before being hired. This "no joining unions" section violated a Kansas state law that prohibited these kinds of anti-union contracts. The majority opinion, by Justice Pitney, held that the law prohibiting these contracts violated Coppage's due process rights. The Court held that it is not the government's job to ensure equal bargaining power.
"[It] is said [...] to be a matter of common knowledge that 'employees, as a rule, are not financially able to be as independent in making contracts for the sale of their labor as are employers in making contracts of purchase thereof.' No doubt, wherever the right of private property exists, there must and will be inequalities of fortune. [Since] it is self-evident that [...] some persons must have more property than others, it is [...] impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights."
He concluded that a state in the exercise of its police power did not have the right to redress imbalances of bargaining power and that requiring a man to give up the right to be in a union as a condition of employment "[does] not to ask him to give up any part of his constitutional freedom."
Justice Holmes's dissent called again for Lochner to be overruled, and stated that there is nothing in the Constitution that specifically prohibits a law like the one Kansas had, and therefore the law should be upheld.
Justice Day's dissent would have affirmed the liberty of contract against arbitrary legislative restraints but deferred more to the legislature on the question of whether this law upheld the public welfare. He also argued, "A man may not barter away his life or his freedom, or his substantial rights," arguing against Pitney's majority that such contracts were in fact coercive and not entered into freely.
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