Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“ This perhaps more plainly concerns the justice of the law in its bearing upon the plaintiff in error, when compared with its operation upon tobacco raisers who are said to have doubled or trebled their prices, than on the constitutional question proposed. But it also concerns that, for it shows how impossible it is to think away the principal facts of the case as it exists, and say what would have been the price in an imaginary world. Value is the effect in exchange of the relative social desire for compared objects expressed in terms of a common denominator. ”

“ The very community, the intensity of whose wish relatively to its other competing desires determines the price that it would give, has to be supposed differently organized and subject to other influences than those under which its acts. ”

“ But Kentucy grows tobacco, and the farmers were dissatisfied with the prices that they were able to get, being oppressed, as they alleged, by a combination of buyers. So, on March 21, 1906, a statute was enacted that made it lawful for any number of persons to combine the crops of wheat, tobacco, corn, oats, hay, or other farm products raised by them, for the purpose of obtaining a higher price than they could get by selling them separately. ”

“ It goes no further than to recognize that, as with negligence, between the two extremes of the obviously illegal and the plainly lawful there is a gradual approach, and that the complexity of life makes it impossible to draw a line in advance without an artificial simplification that would be unjust. ”

“ The conditions are as permanent as anything human, and a great body of precedents on the civil side, coupled with familiar practice, make it comparatively easy for common sense to keep to what is safe. But if business is to go on, men must unite to do it and must sell their wares. ”

“ The reason is not the general uncertainties of a jury trial, but that the elements necessary to determine the imaginary ideal are uncertain both in nature and degree of effect to the acutest commercial mind. ”

“ The plaintiff in error saved its rights under the 14th Amendment and brought the cases here.
The law of Kentucky in its present form is the result of the construction of several statutes somewhat far apart in time and of seemingly contradictory import. It was argued that construction could not take the place of express language in a statute, and Louisville & N. R. Co. ”