United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938)

Summary

The United States indicted Carolene Products Co. for shipping a product violating the 1923 Filled Milk Act, which criminalized the interstate shipping of compounds of skim milk with any non-milk fat or oil. Carolene Products contended that this law violated the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause because, it argued, the law unreasonably interfered with its business and was intended to protect established milk producers. The Supreme Court upheld the Act using the rational-basis test, saying that the law was rationally related to public health and safety. One of the most well-known parts of this opinion is “Footnote 4,” in which Justice Stone wrote that that Court would apply stricter standards of review to laws that targeted “discrete and insular minorities.” This footnote influenced the Court in its subsequent development of the standard of review today known as “strict scrutiny.”

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Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Justice Harlan F. Stone

We may assume for present purposes that no pronouncement of a legislature can forestall attack upon the constitutionality of the prohibition which it enacts by applying opprobrious epithets to the prohibited act, and that a statute would deny due process which precluded the disproof in judicial proceedings of all facts which would show or tend to show that a statute depriving the suitor of life, liberty or property had a rational basis.

But such we think is not the purpose or construction of the statutory characterization of filled milk as injurious to health and as a fraud upon the public. There is no need to consider it here as more than a declaration of the legislative findings deemed to support and justify the action taken as a constitutional exertion of the legislative power, aiding informed judicial review, as do the reports of legislative committees, by revealing the rationale of the legislation. Even in the absence of such aids, the existence of facts supporting the legislative judgment is to be presumed, for regulatory legislation affecting ordinary commercial transactions is not to be pronounced unconstitutional unless, in the light of the facts made known or generally assumed, it is of such a character as to preclude the assumption that it rests upon some rational basis within the knowledge and experience of the legislators.

Footnote 4: There may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as those of the first ten Amendments, which are deemed equally specific when held to be embraced within the Fourteenth. . . .

It is unnecessary to consider now whether legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, is to be subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation. On restrictions upon the right to vote, see Nixon v. Herndon; Nixon v. Condon; on restraints upon the dissemination of information, see Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson; Grosjean v. American Press Co.; Lovell v. Griffin, on interferences with political organizations, see Stromberg v. California, see Fiske v. Kansas; Whitney v. California; Herndon v. Lowry, and see Holmes, J., in Gitlow v. New York, as to prohibition of peaceable assembly, see De Jonge v. Oregon.

Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious . . . or national . . . or racial minorities: whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry.

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