Popular Law-making / A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

AMERICAN LEGISLATION ON PROPERTY RIGHTS

When we come to the vast field of legislation in the United States, comprising the law-making of forty-six States, two Territories, the National Congress, and the Federal District, it is difficult to decide how to divide the subject so as to make it manageable. The division made by State codes and revisions, and the United States Revised Statutes, hardly suits our purpose, for it is made rather for lawyers than sociologists or students in comparative legislation. The division made by the valuable "Year Book of Legislation," published by the New York State Library, comprises some twenty subjects: Constitutional Law; Organic Law; Citizenship and Civil Rights; Elections; Criminal Law; Civil Law; Property and Contracts; Torts; Family; Corporations; Combinations and Monopolies; Procedure; Finance; Public Order; Health and Safety; Land and Waters; Transportation; Commerce and Industry; Banking; Insurance; Navigation and Waterways; Agriculture; Game and Fish; Mines and Mining; Labor; Charities; Education; Military Matters; and Local Government. This division, however convenient in practice, crosscuts the various fields of legislation as divided in any logical manner. The same criticism may be applied to a somewhat simpler division I have used in tabulating State legislation for the last twenty years into thirteen columns, the titles of these being, roughly speaking, Property and Taxation; Regulation of Trades and Commercial Law; Personal Liberty and Civil Rights; Labor; Criminal Law, Health and Morality; Government; Elections and Voting; Courts and Procedure; Militia and Military Law; Women, Children, Marriage and Divorce; Charities, Education, Religion and Jails; Agriculture, Mining and Forestry; Corporations, Trusts and Interstate Commerce. Is it not possible to begin with a broader and more simple division?

Now, all statutes are limitations on a state of pure individualism, defining this latter word to mean a state of society recognizing personal liberty and private property, and allowing all possible freedom of action and contract relating thereto; with a court administration for the purpose of protecting such liberty and enforcing such contracts in the courts. The usual rough division of our constitutional rights, following the phraseology of the Fourteenth Amendment, is that of life, liberty, and property; but the rights to life and liberty obviously belong to the same broad field. Our first division, therefore, may well be that which divides life and liberty rights from property rights; although in some cases, notably in the earnings of labor, they would be found to run together. Liberty rights are multifarious and indefinite; we may, therefore, first take the field of property as presenting, after all, a more simple subject. Considering all possible organizations of human society from this point of view, we shall find that all may be expressed, all at least that have hitherto been conceived, under the systems of anarchism, individualism, and socialism, these words expressing all possible states of human society when expressed in terms of individual liberty, that is to say, the free exercise of the individual will. Either one of these may exist either with or without the notion of private property; though, of course, one's action as to property would be controlled under a system of socialism, and property itself would have no legal protection under a system of anarchism. Nevertheless, the notion of property might still exist and be recognized by the custom of mankind without any sanction or enforcement from the entire community, i.e., what people call the state. When we are speaking in terms of property, we use the word communism—meaning that state of society where the conception of property exists, but the law or custom will not recognize individualism. Communism, therefore, usually implies ownership by the entire community, while in anarchism there is no property at all. There has been much confusion in the use of these terms in the popular mind, and even in ordinary writing. Many people have confounded, for instance, socialism with anarchism or nihilism, when the two things are whole poles apart. In the same manner, communism has been confounded with socialism, although the term should be used in entirely different connections—communism when we are speaking in terms of property, socialism when we are speaking in terms of individual liberty. The word individualism was used by the present writer in a series of articles entitled "The Ethics of Democracy," beginning in 1887, as the most convenient term for describing that state of society where the greatest possible individual liberty is conjoined with a strong recognition of the right of private property, substantially the laissez faire school as it existed in England in the first half of the last century; "the distinction between communistic and socialistic laws being, that the former are concerned solely with the taking or redistribution of money or property; the latter regulate or prohibit men's mode of life, acts, or contracts, either among themselves or as concerning the state." [1]

[Footnote 1: Scribner's Magazine, vol. XV, p. 653.]

Now, property is but the creature of law; and that is to say, in those of our States which have no common law, of statute. Jurists and communists are alike agreed on this. "Property is robbery," said Proudhon; property is but the creature of law, all English jurists admit. It is, of course, possible to conceive of a social system which recognizes no right of property, or one which makes all property belong to the community, or a middle ground which admits the institution, but holds that every individual holds property subject to the state's, that is, the organized community's, regulation and control. A convenient term for this state of affairs to which, perhaps, in our statutes, we are approaching, is "allowable socialism"; private property is recognized, but its use is regulated. In England they call it "gas-and-water socialism"; but this term, though picturesque, is not sufficiently comprehensive, relating, as it does, only to municipal activities. There is a third variety, the latest and perhaps the most intelligent of all, that believed in by leading modern German and American socialists, which we will call nationalism—the nationalization or municipalization of productive industry—the science of this doctrine being that private property may exist in all personal belongings, articles of pleasure, or domestic necessity, but not in lands, mines, works, or other instrumentalities used for the further production of wealth.

Whatever the future may bring, we must start with the institution of private property recognized to its fullest extent. It is expressly guaranteed in our Federal Constitution, as for the matter of that it was also in Magna Charta, as clearly as the right to liberty, and usually in the very same clause. Not only that, but when we adopted our first State constitutions, from 1776 to 1788, and the Federal Constitution in 1789, every one of them made express guarantee of this right. One or two, following the lead of Massachusetts and Virginia, recognized equality also, or, at least, equality by birth and before the law; but without exception property was expressly recognized as one of two leading constitutional rights, and even in some States, like Virginia, it was termed a natural right. The same thing is true of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and in the Federal Fifth Amendment, though it is significant that the Declaration of Independence omits the word property, and only mentions among unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which some courts have held to include private property.[1] Nevertheless, under our constitutions to-day, the right is not only doubly, but even triply, guaranteed; that is to say, by all State constitutions against State action; by the Federal Constitution against national action; and finally, by the Federal government in the Fourteenth Amendment as against State action also. This is the reason why, in any case affecting a cardinal liberty or property right, a litigant may carry his case not only through the State courts, which have sole jurisdiction of ordinary business and domestic matters, but to the courts of the United States as well.

[Footnote 1: Justice Brewer, in the Yale Law Review, for June, 1891. He holds that under "the pursuit of happiness" comes the acquisition, possession, and enjoyment of property, and that they are matters which even government cannot forbid nor destroy. That, except in punishment for crime, no man's property can be taken without just compensation, and he closes: "Instead of saying that all private property is held at the mercy of the public, it is a higher truth that all rights of the state in the property of the individual are at the expense of the people.">[

When we come to legislation on the subject, or to modern State constitutions, there is hardly a change in this particular. Naturally, we find no new legislation confirming the right of property abstractly, or restating that that institution is part of our civilization. There is but one significant exception to this statement. While most of the States in their constitutions declare that men have a natural right to acquire, possess, and protect property, and Kentucky and Arkansas go to the length of saying that the right of property is "before and higher than any constitutional sanction"—which latter statement is a legal hyperbole—Oklahoma in its recent constitution, North Carolina, and Missouri state only that men have a natural right to the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor; on the other hand there are recent intimations coming from Federal sources that individualism or private property rights, at least, and not anarchism or socialism, are part of our constitutional system. Before 1907 a Texas district judge refused to naturalize an immigrant on the ground that he was a socialist and that socialism was inconsistent with the Federal Constitution; and in that year Congress passed an act to regulate all immigration of aliens, which excludes, among other classes, persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of all government, or of all forms of law—a definition which would exclude anarchists, but not socialists; and in the case of South Carolina v. United States (199 U.S. 437), the Supreme Court of the United States gave serious consideration to the question whether State socialism was compatible with a republican form of government. This is all, so far as I am aware, that a century and a half of legislation has given us affirming the abstract right of property, though there are several constructive statutes and constitutional provisions applied to the general right to trade or labor, which we shall consider when we come to that subject.

When a right is expressly guaranteed by the Constitution, we need ordinarily have no affirmative legislation about it. Liberty and property being always guaranteed by the State constitutions, it has not been necessary for the States to legislate to protect them.

Our study of this subject, therefore, will be confined to the restrictive or limiting legislation affecting private property or property rights, and of this we shall find plenty. Now there are four, and only four, methods by which the state, that is to say, American society as organized into governments, interferes with the right to property or the enjoyment and use thereof; that is to say, taxation, which is, of course, general; eminent domain, a peculiarly American doctrine; the police power; and the regulation of rates and charges. Some authorities place the last under the police power; but It does not seem to me that it historically, if logically, belongs there.