Pitney, Mahlon (1858–1924)

• Author: Stanley I. Kutler
• Pages: 1911-1912

Page 1911

Mahlon Pitney was the last of President WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT'S appointments to the Supreme Court. Organized labor and some progressives vigorously protested the nomination because of Pitney's antilabor opinions as a New Jersey state judge, but his views paralleled Taft's. During Pitney's decade on the bench (1912?1922), he made prophets of his critics, as his opinions reflected a consistent hostility to the claims of organized labor. Nevertheless, Taft, as Chief Justice, derided Pitney as a "weak" member of his Court.

In COPPAGE V. KANSAS (1915) Pitney concluded that a Kansas statute prohibiting YELLOW DOG CONTRACTS violated FREEDOM OF CONTRACT. The opinion largely followed doctrine laid down in LOCHNER V. NEW YORK (1905), and reinforced in ADAIR V. UNITED STATES (1908), when the Court nullified an 1898 congressional law prohibiting railroads from imposing yellow dog contracts. In Coppage, Pitney attacked the state law as a restraint on a worker's right to contract, a right he saw as essential to the laborer as to the capitalist, "for the vast majority of persons who have no other honest way to begin to acquire property, save by working for money." Rejecting the statute's avowed intent of enabling workers to organize and bargain collectively, Pitney held that its primary effect was to interfere with "the normal and essentially innocent exercise of personal liberty or of property rights."

Two years later, Pitney wrote the Supreme Court's opinion favoring labor INJUNCTION and again sustained the validity of yellow dog contracts. In HITCHMAN COAL AND COKE CO. V. MITCHELL (1917) he upheld an injunction forbidding the United Mine Workers from seeking to organize workers who had previously agreed not to join a union. Every miner who had affiliated with the union "was guilty of a breach of contract," he said; furthermore, Pitney found that the union knowingly had violated the employer's "legal and constitutional right to run its mine 'non-union.' " Pitney's implacable defense of yellow dog contracts and injunctions galvanized labor's growing antagonism to the federal judiciary and its demands for congressional relief. Eventually, in 1932, the NORRISLAGUARDIA ACT forbade federal courts to enforce yellow dog contracts or issue labor injunctions, thus severely limiting the effects of Pitney's COPPAGE and HITCHMAN opinions.

In DUPLEX PRINTING CO. V. DEERING (1921) Pitney reinfoced the judicial ban on secondary BOYCOTTS...