Struggling with the Depression – mortgage foreclosures: East New York Savings Bank v. Hahn – New York, 1944 (59 N.E.2d 625)
Struggling with the Depression – fair competition codes: People v. Nebbia – New York, 1933 (186 N.E. 694), affirmed, 291 U.S. 502 (1934); Darweger v. Staats – New York, 1935 (196 N.E. 61); Rohrer v. Milk Control Board – Pennsylvania, 1936 (186 A. 336); Johnson & Johnson v. Weissbard – New Jersey, 1937 (191 A. 873)
Struggling with the Depression – unemployment compensation: Commonwealth ex rel. Schnader v. Liveright – Pennsylvania, 1932 (161 A. 697); Commonwealth v. Perkins – Pennsylvania, 1941 (21 A.2d 45)
| Federal relief camp for unemployed women, Pennsylvania (1934) - courtesy Wikimedia Commons March of unemployed workers, Camden, New Jersey (1935) - courtesy Wikimedia Commons “Doubtless the statute before us would be condemned by an earlier generation as a temerarious interference with the rights of property and contract …; with the natural law of supply and demand. But we must not fail to consider that the police power is the least limitable of the powers of government and that it extends to all the great public needs; that constitutional law is a progressive science; that stats aiming to establish a std of social justice, to confirm the law to the accepted standards of the community, … are to be interpreted with that degree of liberality which is essential to the attainment of the end in view.” - Justice Cuthbert Pound, in Nebbia “This is a commercial emergency, not involving public safety, health or morals. [T]he Constitution … has yielded to reasonably flexible and prudent interpretations by conservatively progressive judges, but the time has not yet come when the courts of this state ought to surrender to the doctrine that governmental prefects, in times of peace and plenty, may supervise the rearing of cattle or the price of milk.” – Justice John O’Brien (dissenting), in Nebbia “The greatest menace to the well-being and safety of the state is for it to have hundreds of thousands of its able-bodied and willing citizens suffering with their families, from hunger and lack of clothing and shelter because work is unobtainable. An appropriation from a public treasury to relieve this suffering is no more a ‘charitable’ appropriation than an appropriation made to suppress an uprising, repel an invasion, or to combat a pestilence.” - Justice George Maxey (concurring), in Liveright |
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