Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell

Home Bldg. & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 8–9, 1933 Decided January 8, 1934
Full case name	Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, et ux.
Citations	290 U.S. 398 (more) 54 S.Ct. 231; 88 A.L.R. 1481
Prior history	Appeal from the Supreme Court of the State of Minnesota.
Holding
Minnesota's suspension of creditor's remedies was not in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act upheld.
Court membership
Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes Associate Justices Willis Van Devanter · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · George Sutherland Pierce Butler · Harlan F. Stone Owen J. Roberts · Benjamin N. Cardozo
Case opinions
Majority	Hughes, joined by Brandeis, Stone, Roberts, Cardozo
Dissent	Sutherland, joined by Van Devanter, McReynolds, Butler

Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398 (1934), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court holding that Minnesota's suspension of creditors' remedies was not in violation of the United States Constitution. Blaisdell was decided during the depth of the Great Depression and has been criticized by modern conservative and libertarian commentators.

Background and decision

In 1933, in response to a large number of home foreclosures, Minnesota, like many other states at the time, extended the time available for mortgagors to redeem their mortgages from foreclosure. The extension had the effect of enlarging the mortgagor's estate contrary to the terms of the contract.

The Supreme Court upheld the statute, reasoning that the emergency conditions created by the Great Depression "may justify the exercise of [the State's] continuing and dominant protective power notwithstanding interference with contracts." Blaisdell was the first time the court extended the emergency exception to purely economic emergencies.

While the Blaisdell judgment itself might have been held to apply only in limited instances of economic emergency, by the late 1930s the emergency exception doctrine had expanded dramatically.

Criticism

Adherents of the Chicago school of economics have characterized Blaisdell among the Court precedents that have diminished constitutional protection of individual property rights. Richard Epstein's (the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law and Adjunct Scholar at the American libertarian think tank Cato Institute) criticisms have been some of the most vocal:

Blaisdell trumpeted a false liberation from the constitutional text that has paved the way for massive government intervention that undermines the security of private transactions. Today the police power exception has come to eviscerate the contracts clause.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 290
• Gold Clause Cases (1935)

Further reading

• Fliter, John A. and Derek S. Hoff (2012). Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

External links

• Text of Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell is available from:  Findlaw  Justia