Magna Carta, and Other AddressesGuthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
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Magna Carta, and Other Addresses
Guthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
Constitutional law -- United States
Now, if this argument meant anything it certainly meant that, in
the opinion of the speaker, an ex-President of the United States,
the justices of the Supreme Court should have disregarded the
Constitution as they understood it in order to allow a widow to
recover notwithstanding the unconstitutionality of the act under and
by virtue of which she was suing. You will not find a single word of
reference by Mr. Roosevelt in his whole address to the only point
upon which the majority, speaking by Mr. Justice White, decided the
cases. Of course, the statement of what was actually decided would have
been tame and unsensational. The criticism in form and substance was
based upon a distorted and unfair statement of what was decided, and
it was calculated to create in the minds of the members of the Ohio
constitutional convention, as well as in the minds of the uninformed
public, the belief that the justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States had "set a standard of injustice for all similar cases" and
had denied to Congress the power to pass a fair and just employers'
liability statute properly limited to interstate commerce. The contrary
was plainly the truth, as the subsequent decision of the court had
clearly shown, for this latter decision was rendered and published
before Mr. Roosevelt made his address.
Another example of distorted statement and unfair criticism of the
courts will be found in the same address. It related to the decision of
the New York Court of Appeals in the case of Ives _vs._ South Buffalo
Railway Company,[18] decided last year, in which the court held that a
statute concededly novel and revolutionary, creating liability on the
part of an employer to his workmen although the employer and his agents
were wholly free from negligence or fault of any kind and had neglected
no duty of care, supervision or selection, was unconstitutional because
taking the property of the employer and giving it to the workman
without due process of law. Ives was a brakeman employed by the
defendant railway company. While walking on the top of the cars of a
very long train, he gave a signal to the engineer to close up a space
or slack and was thrown to the ground by the resulting jar, concededly
without any negligence on the part of the railway company, and probably
through his own carelessness. The injury consisted of a sprained ankle
and slight bruises. There was no claim in the complaint that the injury
was in any sense permanent, and as matter of fact Ives sued for loss of
wages during only five weeks, claiming fifty dollars as the measure of
his damage. I am informed that the injury was not serious, that Ives
entirely recovered and resumed his work within four weeks after the
injury, that the railroad company ultimately paid him for his loss of
time, that he has since been continuously employed by the same company
at similar work, and that in no sense whatever was his ability to earn
his livelihood impaired.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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