United States v. Darby - Further Readings

Appellant
United States
Appellee
Fred W. Darby
Appellant's Claim
That the Constitution grants Congress power under the Commerce Clause to regulate workers' hours and wages.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Attorney General; Francis Biddle, U.S. Solicitor General
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Archibald B. Lovett
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Charles Evans Hughes, Frank Murphy, Stanley Forman Reed, Owen Josephus Roberts, Harlan FiskeStone (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None (James Clark McReynolds did not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
3 February 1941
Decision
The Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 regulating wages and hours.
Significance
Darby was part of a running Court debate that began in 1903, when it upheld legislation forbidding interstate transportation of lottery tickets. The twentieth century has seen other attempts--including the act under consideration here--to make the Commerce Clause a means of promoting the public welfare on a national scale.
In 1938, Congress passed the last major piece of New Deal legislation, the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was based on the Commerce Clause of Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which provides that: "The Congress shall have Power . . . To Regulate Commerce . . . among the several States." It set maximumhours and minimum wages for workers employed in industries whose products were shipped across state lines. The act was the final piece of President Franklin Roosevelt's economic and social welfare package, which embodied his administration's plan to lift the country out of the Great Depression.
Fred W. Darby was a Georgia industrialist whose firm finished lumber, which was then shipped out of state. The federal government indicted Darby under theFair Labor Standards Act for paying his workers less than the prescribed minimum wage and requiring them to work longer than the prescribed maximum workweek. In federal district court, Darby challenged the act on Fifth and TenthAmendment grounds, claiming that Congress was attempting to assume a power that the Constitution reserved for the individual states, rather than the federal government. The district court agreed, saying that the act was an attemptto regulate manufacturing, which was not interstate commerce. The federal government then appealed this judgment directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Supreme Court Unanimously Upholds Fair Labor Standards Act
Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Stone upheld the act as an appropriateexercise of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. First, however, he had to address a Supreme Court precedent that pointed the other way. InHammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Court struck down federal legislationaimed at controlling child labor. Based on the Commerce Clause, the Child Labor Act was found to be an infringement on the powers reserved to the states in the Tenth Amendment. A bare majority of the justices had voted against thelaw, with Oliver Wendell Holmes writing an important dissenting opinion in which he stated that the commerce power allowed Congress to regulate not just products shipped through interstate commerce, but their effects. It was the Holmes dissent that Stone alluded to now:

In that case . . . the powerful and now classic dissent of Mr. Justice Holmes [set] forth the fundamental issues involved, that Congress was without power to exclude the products of child labor from interstate commerce. The reasoning and conclusion of the Court's opinion there cannot be reconciled with the conclusion which we have reached, that the power of Congress is plenary to exclude any article from interstate commerce subject only to the specific prohibitions of the Constitution . . . The conclusion is inescapable that Hammer v. Dagenhart, was adeparture from the principles which have prevailed in the interpretation of the commerce clause both before and since the decision and that such vitality,as a precedent, as it then had has long since been exhausted. It should be and now is overruled.

The decision did not put an end to the controversy. While Darby established the constitutionality of the Fair Labor Act, there still remained someconfusion about whether it covered employees who engaged who engaged "in commerce" or "in the production of goods for commerce." In Maryland v. Wirtz (1968), the Court ruled that the act also covered state employees. Eight years later, however, in National League of Cities v. Usery (1976), theCourt overturned Wirtz and revived the rule of Hammer v. Dagenhart to say that state and municipal employees were not covered by the Fair Labor Act. Then in 1985, the Court revisited the issue in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985), overruling Usery.
Related Cases

• Hammer v Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918).
  
• Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U.S. 183 (1968).
  
• National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976).
  
• Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528(1985).