[156] New York C.R. Co. v. Bianc, 250 U.S. 596 (1919).—Attorneys are not deprived of property or their liberty of contract by restriction imposed by the State on the fees which they may charge in cases arising under the workmen's compensation law.—Yeiser v. Dysart, 267 U.S. 540 (1925).
[157] Justice Black in Lincoln Union v. Northwestern Co., 335 U.S. 525, 535 (1949). See also pp. [141], [977-979], [985].
In his concurring opinion, contained in the companion case of American Federation of Labor v. American Sash Co., 335 U.S. 538, 543-544 (1949), Justice Frankfurter summarized as follows the now obsolete doctrines employed by the Court to strike down State laws fostering unionization. "* * * unionization encountered the shibboleths of a premachine age and these were reflected in juridical assumptions that survived the facts on which they were based. Adam Smith was treated as though his generalizations had been imparted to him on Sinai and not as a thinker who addressed himself to the elimination of restrictions which had become fetters upon initiative and enterprise in his day. Basic human rights expressed by the constitutional conception of 'liberty' were equated with theories of laissez faire. The result was that economic views of confined validity were treated by lawyers and judges as though the Framers had enshrined them in the Constitution. * * * The attitude which regarded any legislative encroachment upon the existing economic order as infected with unconstitutionality led to disrespect for legislative attempts to strengthen the wage-earners' bargaining power. With that attitude as a premise, Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908), and Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915), followed logically enough; not even Truax v. Corrigan, 257 U.S. 312 (1921), could be considered unexpected."
On grounds of unconstitutional impairment of freedom of contract, or more particularly, of the unrestricted right of the employer to hire and fire, a federal and a State statute attempting to outlaw "yellow dog" contracts whereby, as a condition of obtaining employment, a worker had to agree not to join or to remain a member of a union, were voided in Adair v. United States and Coppage v. Kansas, respectively. In Truax v. Corrigan, a majority of the Court held that an Arizona statute which operated, in effect, to make remediless [by forbidding the use of injunction] injury to an employer's business by striking employees and others, through concerted action in picketing, displaying banners advertising the strike, denouncing the employer as unfair to union labor, appealing to customers to withdraw their patronage, and circulating handbills containing abusive and libelous charges against employers, employees, and patrons, and intimidations of injury to future patrons, deprives the owner of the business and the premises of his property without due process of law.
In Wolff Packing Co. v. Industrial Court, 262 U.S. 522 (1923); 267 U.S. 552 (1925) and in Dorchy v. Kansas, 264 U.S. 286 (1924), the Court had also ruled that a statute compelling employers and employees to submit their controversies over wages and hours of labor to State arbitration was unconstitutional as part of a system compelling employers and employees to continue in business on terms not of their own making.
[158] 301 U.S. 468 (1937).
[159] Prudential Ins. Co. v. Cheek, 259 U.S. 530 (1922). In conjunction with its approval of this statute, the Court also sanctioned judicial enforcement by a State court of a local rule of policy which rendered illegal an agreement of several insurance companies having a monopoly of a line of business in a city that none would employ within two years any man who had been discharged from, or left, the service of any of the others.
[160] Chicago, R.I. & P.R. Co. v. Perry, 259 U.S. 548 (1922).
[161] Dorchy v. Kansas, 272 U.S. 306 (1926).
[162] 301 U.S. 468, 479 (1937).