Buchanan v. Warley

No. 33. Argued April 10 and 11, 1916; restored to the docket for reargument April 17, 1916; reargued April 27, 1917. Decided November 5, 1917. Error to the Court of Appeals of the State of Kentucky. Judgment reversed (165 Kentucky 559, reversed). Opinion of the Court by Mr. Justice Day. The report records no separate opinion.

Editorial note. A Louisville ordinance divided the city's residential blocks by the race of the majority of their existing occupants and made it unlawful for a person of the other race to move into and occupy a residence in such a block. Buchanan, a white owner, contracted to sell a lot to Warley, a coloured purchaser, on terms making the purchaser's obligation to pay conditional on his being lawfully able to occupy the property as a residence. The block in question contained a majority of houses occupied by white persons, so the ordinance forbade the occupancy for which the contract provided.

Editorial note. Buchanan sued for specific performance in the Chancery Court; Warley pleaded the ordinance as the ground on which he could not be compelled to perform. The Court of Appeals of Kentucky sustained the ordinance and denied relief. The Supreme Court reversed on writ of error, holding the case properly presented because the seller's own right to sell was directly impaired.

Editorial note. The ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving the owner of property without due process of law. The right to acquire, use, and dispose of property is a right protected against state abridgment, and an ordinance that forbids an owner to sell to a purchaser solely because of the purchaser's colour destroys an essential incident of ownership. The rule derived is that a State may not, in the name of the police power, allocate residential occupancy by race; the interests advanced in support of such a measure cannot justify the direct annihilation of the power of disposition.

Editorial note. Mr. Justice Day accepted that the police power is broad and that the Court had upheld many severe restrictions on the use of land, but reasoned that this ordinance operated not upon the use of property in relation to its neighbours but upon the identity of the person permitted to occupy it. He treated the case as controlled by the settled understanding that property in a thing consists of the unrestricted right of use, enjoyment, and disposal. The asserted justifications — the preservation of public peace, the prevention of racial conflict, and the maintenance of property values — were held insufficient, since the ordinance's operation was to deny to one class of citizens a civil right expressly secured by the Amendment and by the enforcement legislation Congress had enacted under it.

Editorial note. Buchanan places a constitutional boundary around the police power at the moment American cities were beginning to district land, and it does so on a property rationale rather than a rationale of equal citizenship: the ordinance failed because it destroyed the owner's power of alienation. That reasoning explains what followed. Because state ordinances were foreclosed, exclusion moved into privately drafted covenants, which the Court initially declined to reach as state action in Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926), and finally addressed in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). The decision is therefore the first term in the treatise's account of residential segregation and of the constitutional limits on land-use regulation.

Editorial note. Followed and applied. The Court has consistently adhered to Buchanan in striking down racial occupancy restrictions imposed by law, and Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), and Barrows v. Jackson, 346 U.S. 249 (1953), completed the analysis by denying judicial enforcement, at equity and at law, to privately drafted racial covenants.

Editorial note. Read with U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1, and the treatise chapters on fair housing and civil rights and on zoning and the police power.