Bailey v. Alabama – Personal service contracts enforced by jail time no more

t Hughes1911. Showed the attractive side of Lochnerlogic. Still good law.

t This case constitutionalized the old rule that personal service contracts cannot be enforced by ordering specific performance.

t Dissent - Holmes. Argued that this interfered with the freedom of contract of black laborers, and would ultimately make them worse off.

t Historical background is relevant to evaluating Holmes’s claim:

n Ever since Reconstruction, wealthy white landowners had striven to maintain their supply of cheap and reliable agricultural labor by foreclosing all other options to blacks. For the most part, the white landowners had won.

n The legal system connived with the planters to keep the blacks in harness.

i. Those not already under contract could be arrested on any of a number of vague charges – failing all else, vagrancy – whereupon they would only be able to pay their fines by signing labor contracts and getting advances; the alternative as the chain gang, where “annual death rates for prisoners were staggering – typically around 20% and in some places approaching 50%.

ii. “Enticement statutes established the proprietary claims of employers to ‘their’ Negroes by making it a crime to hire away a laborer under contract to another man.” Sometimes, if white farmers were short of hands at harvest, the police would simply sweep through the streets arresting every able-bodied black they saw.

t This historical background made Bailey a very easy case, but also diverted attention from the deep problem in contract theory that Holmesperceived:

n Does liberty include the right to sell oneself into slavery?

n 13^th Amendment, as interpreted by SCt, says no. Is that a violation or vindication of liberty?

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 750