Fred M. Vinson

“ Although the First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, press or assembly, it has long been established that those freedoms themselves are dependent upon the power of constitutional government to survive. If it is to survive it must have power to protect itself against unlawful conduct and, under some circumstances, against incitements to commit unlawful acts. Freedom of speech thus does not comprehend the right to speak on any subject at any time. ”

“ Whatever theoretical merit there may be to the argument that there is a "right" to rebellion against dictatorial governments is without force where the existing structure of the government provides for peaceful and orderly change. We reject any principle of governmental helplessness in the face of preparation for revolution, which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, must lead to anarchy. No one could conceive that it is not within the power of Congress to prohibit acts intended to overthrow the Government by force and violence. ”

“ The Government asks the courts to depart from the norm by assuming, without the introduction of evidence, that each petitioner is a pawn in a conspiracy and will, in obedience to a superior, flee the jurisdiction. To infer from the fact of indictment alone a need for bail in an unusually high amount is an arbitrary act. Such conduct would inject into our own system of government the very principles of totalitarianism which Congress was seeking to guard against in passing the statute under which petitioners have been indicted. ”

“ But where no properly limited search warrant has been issued, this Court has been scrupulously insistent on confining very narrowly the scope of search and seizure. The mere fact that a man has been validly arrested does not give the arresting officers untrammeled freedom to search every cranny and nook for anything that might have some relation to the alleged crime or, indeed, to any crime whatsoever. Authority to arrest, in other words, gives no authority whatever to search the premises where the arrest occurs and no authority to seize except under the most restricted circumstances. ”

“ I cannot agree that the Constitution forbids a state from insisting that it is not bound by any such proceedings in a distant State wanting in the power that domicile alone gives, and that its courts need not honor such an intrinsically sham proceeding, no matter who brings the issue to their attention.
That society has a vital interest in the domestic relations of its members will be almost impatiently conceded. ”

“ Since the Atomic Energy Act thus cannot cover the offenses charged, the alleged inconsistency of its penalty provisions with those of the Espionage Act cannot be sustained.
Our liberty is maintained only so long as justice is secure. To permit our judicial processes to be used to obstruct the course of justice destroys our freedom. Over two years ago the Rosenbergs were found guilty by a jury a of a grave offense in time of war. Unlike other litigants they have had the attention of this Court seven times; each time their pleas have been denied. ”

“ Too much judicial inquiry into the claim of privilege would force disclosure of the thing the privilege was meant to protect, while a complete abandonment of judicial control would lead to intolerable abuses. ”

“ Equity by its very nature denies relief if, on balance of considerations of convenience relevant to equity, it would be inequitable to grant the extraordinary remedy of an injunction. Federal courts of equity have always acted on this equitable doctrine. But it was never a doctrine of equity that a federal court should exercise its judicial discretion to dismiss a suit merely because a State court could entertain it. ”

“ One who defies the public authority and willfully refuses his obedience, does so at his peril. In imposing a fine for criminal contempt, the trial judge may properly take into consideration the extent of the willful and deliberate defiance of the court's order, the seriousness of the consequences of the contumacious behavior, the necessity of effectively terminating the defendant's defiance as required by the public interest, and the importance of deterring such acts in the future. ”

“ Since we must rest our decision on the Constitution alone, we must set aside predilections on social policy and adhere to the settled rules which restrict the exercise of our power of judicial review-remembering that the only restraint upon this power is our own sense of self-restraint. ”

“ It is for this reason-the dangerous tendency of allowing encroachments on the rights of privacy-that this Court in the Boyd case gave to the Fourth Amendment its wide protective scope.
It is vital, no doubt, that criminals should be detected, and that all relevant evidence should be secured and used. On the other hand, it cannot be said too often that what is involved far transcends the fate of some sordid offender. Nothing less is involved that that which makes for an atmosphere of freedom as against a feeling of fear and repression for society as a whole. The dangers are not fanciful. ”

“ Seizure or martial law or other affirmative action by the State might be just as deleterious to collective bargaining as enforced arbitration, apart from raising other contentious issues. If there is legislative choice it is not for us to demand that what is chosen should commend itself to our private notions of wise policy. As to strikes creating a nation-wide emergency, the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act indicate that the principle of collective bargaining may to some extent be subordinated to the interest of the public. ”

“ Rehearings are not a healthy step in the judicial process; surely they ought not to be deemed a normal procedure. Yet one who has paged the Federal Reporter for nearly fifty years is struck with what appears to be a growth in the tendency to file petitions for rehearing in the courts of appeals. I have not made a quantitative study of the facts, but one gains the impression that in some circuits these petitions are filed almost as a matter of course. This is an abuse of judicial energy. It results in needless delay. It arouses false hopes in defeated litigants and wastes their money. ”

“ Under the results reached by the Court, the state is free, if the prosecutor thinks a conviction probably cannot be won from the jury on the testimony at the trial, to stop the trial and insist that it be tried again on another day when it has stronger men on the field.
Orderly justice could not be secured if the rules allowed the defendant to ask for a mistrial at the conclusion of testimony just because the state had done well and the defense poorly. The same limitation applies to the prosecution if the scales of justice are to be kept in equal balance. ”

“ When one accepts an office of joint responsibility, whether on a board of directors of a corporation, the governing board of a municipality, or any other position in which compliance with lawful orders requires joint action by a responsible body of which he is a member, he necessarily assumes an individual responsibility to act, within the limits of his power to do so, to bring about compliance with the order. It may be that the efforts of one member of the board will avail nothing. If he does all he can, he will not be punished because of the recalcitrance of others. ”

“ Dealing with these two branches of the definition in order it is clear, first, that the occupation in which the company's employees are engaged is not farming. The company owns no farms and raises no crops. Irrigation, strictly defined-that is the actual watering of the soil-may no doubt be called farming. And the work of the farmers in seeing to it that the water released from the company's ditches is properly distributed to the growing plants undoubtedly is included in farming as being part of the process of cultivating and tilling the soil. ”

“ The offense of contempt of Congress, with which we are presently concerned, on the other hand, matures only when the witness is called to appear before the committee to answer questions or produce documents and wilfully fails to do so. Until that moment he has committed no crime. There is, in our jurisprudence, no doctrine of 'anticipatory contempt.' While the witness' testimony may show that he has elected to perjure himself or commit contempt, he does not thereby admit his guilt of some past crime about which he has been summoned for questioning but commits the criminal act then and there. ”

“ In the instant case we are met with no ordinance or statute regulating or prohibiting the use of the park; all that is here is an amorphous 'practice,' whereby all authority to grant permits for the use of the park is in the Park Commissioner and the City Council. No standards appear anywhere; no narrowly drawn limitations; no circumscribing of this absolute power; no substantial interest of the community to be served. It is clear that all that has been said about the invalidity of such limitless discretion must be equally applicable here. ”

“ When facts are found that establish the violation of a statute, the protection against conviction afforded by the First Amendment is a matter of law. The doctrine that there must be a clear and present danger of a substantive evil that Congress has a right to prevent is a judicial rule to be applied as a matter of law by the courts. The guilt is established by proof of facts. Whether the First Amendment protects the activity which constitutes the violation of the statute must depend upon a judicial determination of the scope of the First Amendment applied to the circumstances of the case. ”

“ The terse language of the Fifth Amendment is no comprehensive promise that the United States will make whole all who suffer from every ravage and burden of war. This Court has long recognized that in wartime many losses must be attributed solely to the fortunes of war, and not to the sovereign. ”

“ In my view, respondent cannot surmount the hurdle of our well-established rule by proceeding with an argument which carrries her in a circle right back to her precise point of departure. If it should be, as the majority assumes, that there is no other way that the rights of unidentified non-Caucasians can be vindicated in court, that is only an admission that there is no way in which a substantial case or controversy can be predicated upon the right which the majority is so anxious to pass upon. ”

“ When Congress has not, by plain language, extended the jurisdiction of the district courts which are the feeders of the Circuit Courts of Appeals and of this Court, an unexpressed purpose to swell the dockets of the federal judiciary ought not to be attributed to Congress by considering in isolation the desirability of allowing a particular class of litigation to be brought in a federal court. Any advantage of giving jurisdiction to the federal courts must be balanced against the disadvantages of taking away from the State courts causes of action rooted in State law. ”

“ Judicial control over the evidence in a case cannot be abdicated to the caprice of executive officers. Yet we will not go so far as to say that the court may automatically require a complete disclosure to the judge before the claim of privilege will be accepted in any case. It may be possible to satisfy the court, from all the circumstances of the case, that there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged. ”

“ The public policy underlying the constitutional guarantee of that freedom is so great as to outweigh the desirability of convicting those whose crime has been revealed through an unlawful invasion of their right to privacy. Lawless methods of law enforcement are frequently effective in uncovering crime, especially where tyranny reigns, but they are not to be countenanced under our form of government. It is not a novel principle of our constitutional system that a few criminals should go free rather than that the freedom and liberty of all citizens be jeopardized. ”

“ A court is confined within the bounds of a particular record, and it cannot even shape the record. Only fragments of a social problem are seen through the narrow windows of a litigation. Had we innate or acquired understanding of a social problem in its entirety, we would not have at our disposal adequate means for constructive solution. The answer to so tangled a problem as that of our conflicting divorce laws is not to be achieved by the simple judicial resources of either/or-this decree is good and must be respected, that one is bad and may be disregarded. ”

“ But in suggesting that the substantive evil must be serious and substantial, it was never the intention of this Court to lay down an absolutist test measured in terms of danger to the Nation. When the effect of a statute or ordinance upon the exercise of First Amendment freedoms is relatively small and the public interest to be protected is substantial, it is obvious that a rigid test requiring a showing of imminent danger to the security of the Nation is an absurdity. ”

“ It is clear from the decisions just canvassed that the States are not precluded from enacting laws on labor relations merely because Congress has-to use the conventional phrase-entered the field. It is equally clear that the boundaries within which a State may act are determined by the terrain and not by abstract projection. ”

“ That concrete amount, in the light of each defendant's testimony and that of the Government, should be fixed by the appropriate judge or Justice upon evidence relevant to the standards prescribed. It is not appropriate for the Court as a whole to fix bail where the power has been given to individual judges and Justices to do so. But there is little in our books to help guide federal judges in bail practice, and the extraordinary and recurring nature of this particular problem seems to warrant a discussion of the merits in which we would not ordinarily engage. ”

“ Where the statute as construed by the state court transgressed the First Amendment, we could not but invalidate the judgments of conviction.
The very language of the Smith Act negates the interpretation which petitioners would have us impose on that Act. It is directed at advocacy, not discussion. Thus, the trial judge properly charged the jury that they could not convict if they found that petitioners did "no more than pursue peaceful studies and discussions or teaching and advocacy in the realm of ideas." ”

“ Thus when a search of this nature degenerates into a general exploratory crusade, probing for anything and everything that might evidence the commission of a crime, the Constitution steps into the picture to protect the individual. ”

“ An American citizen may change his domicile from one State to another. And so, a State must respect another State's valid divorce decree even though it concerns its former citizens. But the real question here is whether the Full Faith and Credit Clause can be used as a limitation on the power of a State over its citizens who do not change their domicile, who do not remove to another State, but who leave the State only long enough to escape the rigors of its laws, obtain a divorce, and then scurry back. ”

“ It is my conclusion that an order denying reduction of bail is to be regarded as a final decision which may be appealed to the Court of Appeals. But this is not because every claim of excessive bail raises a constitutional question. It is because we may properly hold appeal to be a statutory right. ”

“ Speech is not an absolute, above and beyond control by the legislature when its judgment, subject to review here, is that certain kinds of speech are so undesirable as to warrant criminal sanction. Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes, that a name, a phrase, a standard has meaning only when associated with the considerations which gave birth to the nomenclature. ”

“ History is not without examples of the outlawry of certain political, religious and economic beliefs and the relentless prosecution of those who dare to entertain such beliefs. And history has a way of repeating itself. It therefore takes no stretch of the imagination to picture law enforcement officers arresting those accused of believing, writing or speaking that which is proscribed, accompanied by a thorough ransacking of their homes as an 'incident' to the arrest in an effort to uncover 'anything' of a seditious nature. ”

“ They were amply protected by the Full Faith and Credit Clause even before today's decision. The only persons at all insecure are that small minority who temporarily left their home States for a State-one of the few-offering quick and easy divorce, obtained one, and departed. Is their security so important to the Nation that we must safeguard it even at the price of depriving the great majority of States which do not offer bargain-counter divorces of the right to determine the laws of domestic relations applicable to their citizens? ”

“ If Government is aware that a group aiming at its overthrow is attempting to indoctrinate its members and to commit them to a course whereby they will strike when the leaders feel the circumstances permit, action by the Government is required. The argument that there is no need for Government to concern itself, for Government is strong, it possesses ample powers to put down a rebellion, it may defeat the revolution with ease needs no answer. ”

“ It is just as important that there should be a place to end as that there should be a place to begin litigation. After a party has his day in court, with opportunity to present his evidence and his view of the law, a collateral attack upon the decision as to jurisdiction there rendered merely retries the issue previously determined. ”

“ Overthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. Indeed, this is the ultimate value of any society, for if a society cannot protect its very structure from armed internal attack, it must follow that no subordinate value can be protected. ”

“ The whole history of legislation dealing with search and seizure shows how warily Congress has walked precisely because of the Fourth Amendment. A search of the entire premises for instruments of crime merely as an incident to a warrant of arrest has never been authorized by Congress. Nor has Congress ever authorized such search without a warrant even for stolen or contraband goods. ”