Adair v. United States
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| Adair v. United States | ||||||||||||
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| Argued October 29, 1907 Decided January 27, 1908 |
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| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Melville Fuller Associate Justices: John Marshall Harlan, David Josiah Brewer, Edward Douglass White, Rufus Wheeler Peckham, Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William R. Day, William Henry Moody |
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| Majority by: Harlan Joined by: Fuller, Brewer, White, Peckham, Day Dissent by: McKenna Dissent by: Holmes Moody took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
Adair v. United States, , was a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld "yellow-dog" contracts that forbade workers from joining trade unions.
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[edit] The case
William Adair, an official with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, had fired O. B. Coppage for belonging to a labor union. Adair's actions were in direct violation of the Erdman Act of 1898, which at the time prohibited railroads that engaged in interstate commerce from requiring that their employees refrain from membership in a labor union as a condition of employment.
[edit] The decision
The Supreme Court, on a 6-2 decision, held that the Erdman Act was unconstitutional, because it unjustly violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of contract and property rights. Furthermore, the court established that Congress' control over interstate commerce did not extend to membership in trade unions. The decision reflects the consistently pro-business slant that the Court took prior to 1910. In 1932, yellow-dog contracts were outlawed in the United States under the Norris-LaGuardia Act.
