Diamond Glue Co. v United States Glue Company, 187 U.S. 611
This case was also decided on January 5, 1903, 33 days after Holmes was sworn in as a Justice. In the fin de siecle many of the cases that reached the Supreme Court were economic cases. The country's Industrial Revolution had been in full swing for decades and there was uncertainty on how a Constitution written in 1789 would apply to an economic revolution of which the Framers had not the remotest anticipation. The facts of these cases are sometimes dizzying and the Court's decisions are of necessity lengthy, again for the time. This one is also six pages long with no dissent written or recorded. Holmes styled this case as one in breach of contract. It was not that simple. Interstate commerce was involved but Holmes, in a pattern for him, forced the simplicity of breach of contract.
It is said that the contract in suit, as carried out, was concerned in part with interstate commerce...[but] The foundation of the commerce outside the state was doing business within it. ... The interference with the regulation of commerce between the states is more remote than when a bridge between two states...is taxed.
And with that, away with interstate commerce. It is a forced simplicity to get to standard breach of contract law and to avoid the issue that made this case a real tangle.
In modern societies every part is related so organically to every other that what affects any portion must be felt more or less by all the rest.
That is a "general proposition" that does "not carry us far", as Holmes wrote in his first-ever opinion in Otis v Parker. But it carries Holmes where he wants to go.
Therefore, unless everything is to be forbidden and legislation is to come to a stop, it is not enough to show that, in the working of a statute, there is some tendency, logically discernible, to interfere with commerce or existing contracts. Practical lines have to be drawn, and distinctions of degree must be made.
There's the pragmatist.
...we rest our decision upon the narrower ground of the foregoing considerations taken in connection with what we are about to say.
"Narrower ground". Holmes was carving the narrower ground away from the broader ground to which it was inextricably attached.
"What we are about to say". He had a very strong mind; he knew it, others knew it, and he flaunted it in his didactic manner.
Yet another objection to the statute remains to be mentioned.
Mentioned to be dismissed.
It is argued that the act, so far as it applied to the former, was contrary to Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution of the United States, and to the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore was invalid throughout. We shall not consider the validity of the law as applied to unincorporated associations, because, in our opinion, the application of the provision to corporations was severable from, and independent of, its application to partnerships. ...
This from the man who just wrote one page prior,
In modern societies every part is related so organically to every other...
...The independence seems to us obvious on reading the statute...
It's obvious, boy, don't be trying to muck it up.
Judgment affirmed.