Hugo Black

“ I can only conclude that the Court is today overruling a number of its own decisions and abandoning the legal customs and practices in this country with reference to attachments and garnishments wholly on the ground that the garnishment laws of this kind are based on unwise policies of government which might some time in the future do injury to some individuals. In the first sentence of the argument in her brief, petitioner urges that this Wisconsin law 'is contrary to public policy'; the Court apparently finds that a sufficient basis for holding it unconstitutional. ”

“ The Court shows it believes the garnishment policy to be a "most inhuman doctrine"; that it "compels the wage earner, trying to keep his family together, to be driven below the poverty level"; that "in a vast number of cases the debt is a fraudulent one, saddled on a poor ignorant person who is trapped in an easy credit nightmare, in which he is charged double for something he could not pay for even if the proper price was called for, and then hounded into giving up his pound of flesh, and being fired besides." ”

“ There is not one word in our Federal Constitution or in any of its Amendments and not a word in the reports of that document's passage from which one can draw the slightest inference that we have authority thus to try to supplement or strike down the State's selection of its own policies. ”