Mugler v. Kansas

Argued April 11, 1887 (Mugler) and October 11, 1887 (the companion cause). Decided December 5, 1887. Error to the Supreme Court of the State of Kansas in the Mugler causes; appeal from the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Kansas in the companion cause, Kansas v. Ziebold. The Kansas judgments were affirmed; the decree of the Circuit Court dismissing the State's bill was reversed and the cause remanded with directions. Opinion of the Court by Mr. Justice Harlan. Mr. Justice Field delivered a separate opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, dissenting from the judgment in the Ziebold cause and reserving his views on the question of the right to export.

Editorial note. Kansas amended its constitution and enacted legislation prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors except for medical, scientific, and mechanical purposes. Mugler owned and operated a brewery erected before the prohibition took effect and specially adapted to brewing; he was convicted of manufacturing and of selling beer without the statutory permit. In the companion cause the State sought in equity to abate as a common nuisance a brewery operated by Ziebold and Hagelin. The owners maintained that the property had been built at great expense in reliance on the lawfulness of the business and was worth little or nothing for any other use.

Editorial note. The Supreme Court of Kansas affirmed the convictions, and those judgments came to the Supreme Court on writ of error. In the companion equity cause the federal Circuit Court dismissed the State's bill on the view that the statute could not authorise abatement of the buildings, and the State appealed. The Supreme Court affirmed the criminal judgments and reversed the equity decree.

Editorial note. The prohibition was within the legislative power of the State and did not deprive the owners of property without due process of law, nor take property for public use within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. A legislative determination that a trade is injurious to the community may be made effective by forbidding it, and the resulting loss of value in premises fitted for that trade is not a taking requiring compensation. The rule derived from the decision is that a State may forbid a use it has found harmful to the public health, morals, or safety, and the owner must bear the consequent diminution in the value of property devoted to that use; but the police power is not without limits, and a measure enacted under its name that has no real or substantial relation to those objects is subject to judicial examination.

Editorial note. Mr. Justice Harlan reasoned that all property is held subject to the implied condition that its use shall not be injurious to the equal enjoyment of others or to the rights of the community, so that a statute declaring such a use unlawful does not disturb any right the owner ever held. He distinguished the appropriation of property for the public benefit, which requires compensation, from the abatement of a use adjudged noxious, which does not. He was careful to add that the courts are not bound by the mere form of a police regulation: if a statute purporting to protect health or morals is in substance a palpable invasion of rights secured by fundamental law, it is the duty of the courts to say so. In the companion cause he held that the buildings themselves could be dealt with as a nuisance so long as they were used for the prohibited manufacture.

Editorial note. Mugler is the point at which the police power and the Takings Clause are first sharply separated in the Court's property jurisprudence, and it supplies the noxious-use premise that later regulatory-takings decisions accepted, qualified, and finally reworked. It should be read in its own terms — as a decision about the legislature's authority to declare a trade harmful — and not as an early statement of any modern takings test. Its reservation of judicial examination for measures without a real relation to public objects is the seed of the review later exercised in the zoning cases.

Editorial note. Followed and applied in Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394 (1915), which sustained the prohibition of brickmaking in a residential district on the same reasoning. Limited by Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, which held that a regulation may go so far as to require compensation notwithstanding its police-power form. Further limited by Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, which rejected the view that a legislative recitation of harm prevention is by itself sufficient to defeat a compensation claim where all economically beneficial use is destroyed, while preserving restrictions that inhere in the background principles of the State's law of property and nuisance.

Editorial note. Read with U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1, and the treatise chapters on nuisance, on zoning and the police power, and on regulatory takings.