Allied Structural Steel Co. v. Spannaus

Justice Brennan filed a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by Justices Marshall and White. Brennan, too, offered a look into the Court's historical record with regard to states and contracts, but he viewed this not in light of the Contract Clause, but from the perspective of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Since he found nothing in the act which violated the latter, he voted to affirm the lower court's judgment.

The Contract Clause, Brennan wrote, had not been "intended to embody a broad constitutional policy of protecting all reliance interests grounded in private contracts." Rather, it had arisen from "widespread dissatisfaction" over debtor-creditor contracts in force when the United States was created. "Thus, the several provisions of Article I, 10 . . . were targeted directly at this wide variety of debt relief measures." With its use of the Contract Clause, rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, as a means of interpreting contracts, the Court "threaten[ed] to undermine the jurisprudence of property rights developed over the last 40 years," Brennan wrote.

When he addressed the present case from the perspective of the Due Process Clause, making reference to the Court's decision in Usery v. Turner Elkhorn Mining Co. (1976), Brennan found that Minnesota's act passed constitutional muster. In his view, the act did indeed "remedy a serious social problem: the utter frustration of an employee's expectations that can occur when he is terminated because his employer closes down his place of work." Furthermore, the act was "not wholly retrospective in its operation" since it only imposed the fine on companies who closed their plants after the enactment of the statute.