Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, 341 US 123 (1951), was a United States Supreme Court opinion revolving around the right of association.

[edit] Facts

The United States Attorney General, acting under part three of Executive Order 9835, submitted information on several organizations to the Loyalty Review Board which then declared the organizations to be supporting subversive causes or movements. Under section 9A of the Hatch Act, this information was disseminated among the agencies of the government. The Anti-Fascist Refugee committee was collecting money to distribute among members of the struggle against Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The district courts and appeals courts had ruled that the organizations could not sue because there was no specified way to redress their grievances in the case.

[edit] Result

Justice Hugo Black offered a concurring opinion in which he compares government blacklists to bills of attainder. He appends a passage from the footnotes of the historian Thomas Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James the Second describing the evils of the great Act of Attainder enacted at the behest of James II.