Article Title

Property, Liberty, and the Rights of the Community: Lessons from Munn v. Illinois

Authors

Paul Kens, Texas State University-San Marcos

First Page

157

Document Type

Article

Rights

Abstract

When considering the extent to which the United States Constitution places a limit on government regulation of business, today's historians and constitutional theorists treat the question as a matter of balancing economic liberty or property rights against government power. Moreover, modem scholars commonly maintain that this balancing formula represents the predominant tradition in constitutional history. Tracing it back to the tenants of Jacksonian democracy that emphasized distrust of government, they imply that constitutional history has developed as a straight line: always with an emphasis on individual liberty and always with a presumption that entrepreneurial liberty should be favored over governments' power to regulate.

This paper will use the 1877 case Munn v. Illinois to demonstrate that prior to the late 1880s the paradigm for determining the constitution's limits on government regulation of business was actually quite different. There is no doubt that the Court has always emphatically recognized the importance of property rights. Nevertheless, during the first century under the Constitution, it treated business regulation as a matter of balancing entrepreneurial liberty against the rights of the community. Furthermore, it consistently held that, because state economic regulations were an expression of popular sovereignty and rights of the community, they should be presumed to be valid.

Munn is significant because in the conventional narrative it is portrayed as a steppingstone in the straight line evolution of constitutional doctrine that emphasizes individual liberty. A closer look at the case and the events surrounding it will demonstrate, however, that the majority in Munn actually based its opinion on the traditional emphasis on rights of the community. It will further demonstrate that for more than a decade after the opinion the Supreme Court steadfastly clung to that traditional view. Even under persistent pressure to change.

Recommended Citation

Paul Kens, Property, Liberty, and the Rights of the Community: Lessons from Munn v. Illinois, 30 Buff. Envtl. L.J. 157 (2011).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/bpilj/vol30/iss1/6