Volume 262 — United States Reports

Board of Trade of City of Chicago v. Olsen, 262 U.S. 1 (1923), is a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court upheld the Grain Futures Act as constitutional under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.

Held: that a telephone company, complaining that rates fixed by the Commission were confiscatory, need not apply to it for a rehearing before resorting to the federal court for an injunction, and that failure so to apply was manifestly no ground for denying a temporary injunction, when the Commission by its answer insisted that the orders in question were correct. P. 48. 6.

Held: shall be conveyed, transferred, assigned, delivered, or paid over to the Alien Property Custodian.” The act has received exposition in Central Union Trust Co. v. Garvan, 254 U. S. 554 , and Stoehr v. Wallace, 255 U. S. 239 , and what it authorizes, and the conditions of the exercise of its authorization determined. Whatever problems the act presents those cases resolve.

Held: with certain reservations, that by voluntarily coming into the waters or ports of one Nation, the ships of another submit them-selvés to the laws of the former. United States v. Diekel-man, 92 U. S. 520 ; Wildenhus’s Case, 120 U. S. 1 ; The *107 Exchange, 7 Cr. 116, 144. See 2 Moore Int. Law Dig., p. 292; 8 Ops. Atty. Gen. 73; Taylor, Int. Law, § 268; Wheaton, Int.

Held: that the securities thus distributed were not in legal effect a stock dividend, and that a distributee was taxable under the income tax provision of September 8, 1916, c. 463, Tit. I, §§ 1 and 2, 39 Stat. 756 , upon the amount by which the securities he received exceeded in value his investment in the shares of the original corporation. P. 136. United States v. Phellis, 257 U. S. 156 . Affirmed.

Held: that the works were not to be deemed incomplete either (a) because a small part of the drainage system was unfinished, the effectiveness of the system not being thereby detracted from, or (b) because two of three tracts which the Government undertook to reclaim were eliminated by the Secretary, in the exercise of his discretion, greater areas having been substituted which more than counterbalanced any injury that…

Held: to have been waived by their conduct. Id. 6. An officer of a corporation having custody of its books and papers can not object to producing them upon the ground that they may disclose his own guilt. P. 158. Affirmed. Review of orders of the District Court denying petitions for the return of books and papers produced under a subpoena duces tecum.

Held: that the City could not invoke the Contract Clause or the Fourteenth Amendment, even assuming that the private corporation might have done so if its rights had not passed to the City, and that, in view of previous decisions, the City’s contention to the contrary did not present a substantial federal question. Pp. 185, 192.

Held: where it was claimed that the method adopted in c. 252, Laws of New Jersey, 1907, for fixing maximum amounts of water divertible without payment of license fees to the State, worked *193 arbitrary discriminations, prejudicial to the City of Newark. P. 195. Writ of error to review 117 Atl. 158 , dismissed.

Held: that the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois had jurisdiction of this suit, against the Commissioner of Patents and an intervening party, to determine the plaintiff’s right to have a trade-mark registered. Reversed. *210 Appeal from a decree of the District Court dismissing a bill for registration of trade-mark, for lack of jurisdiction.

Held: that the knowledge of the agent was imputable to the corporation and all its shareholders, and that the defense of bona fide purchaser was not available to the corporation in a suit by the United States to annul the patents because of the fraud. P. 221. 2.

Held: ■that the claim that the case came within the Anti-Trust Act was not frivolous, and that the bill should not have been dismissed by the District Court for want of jurisdiction. P. 274. Reversed.

Held: that a mandamus from this Court was not the proper remedy for correct-, ing its action, if erroneous. Ex parte Roe, 234 U. S. 70 . P. 275. 2.

Held: That tailings, left as refuse from the concentration of ore derived from a mine long since worked out, and which were situate on land remote from the mine and had an ascertained and adjudicated value of their own, constituted a unit of property entirely apart from the mine. P. 332.

Held: that, as to certificate holders who were not parties, and did not appear in the suit, and against whom no relief was prayed, the attempt to bar their rights and cancel their certificates was plainly void; and that the contention that a judgment of a state court, in so holding, failed to give full faith and credit to the District Court’s decree, as required by the Constitution and acts of Congress, was frivolous.

Held: that a contention that he was denied due process of law was not even colorable. Id. Writ of error dismissed. Error to a judgment of a county court, of Texas, (the highest court to which the cause could be taken in that State,) in favor of the City of Olney, in its action to collect a sidewalk assessment from the plaintiff in error. Mr. A. H. Corrigan for plaintiff in error.

Held: that this Court was not called upon to scrutinize the voluminous record of his examination, and decide, for the first time, whether such contentions were justified, especially as the District Judge, in the contempt proceeding, had expressed his opinion that answers to the questions might furnish incriminating information. P. 360. Affirmed.

Held: that the necessary effect of the combination, viewed in the light of what was done under it, was to suppress competition, in violation of the Sherman Act. P. 388. American Column & Lumber Co. v. United States, 257 U. S. 377 . 275 Fed. 939 , reversed. Appeal from a decree of the District Court dismissing a bill for an injunction, brought under the Sherman Act.

Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court that held that the "Siman Act", a 1919 Nebraska law prohibiting minority languages as both the subject and medium of instruction in schools, violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court's ruling is one of the earliest articulations of substantive due process.

Held: “ The manifest design of this language statute is to supplement the compulsory education law by requiring that the branches enumerated to be taught shall be taught in the English language, and in no other. The evident purpose is that no other language shall be taught in any school, public or private, during the tender years of youth, that is, below the eighth grade.” 191 Iowa, 1060 . Numbers 181 and 182.

Held: That the statute, considering this distinction, does not in effect, depart from the Commission’s definition of net income, nor, as applied to *414 interstate railroads, does it directly burden interstate commerce, or discriminate against it, (other public service corporations, wholly intrastate, being treated in the same way); nor does it, with other railroad taxes of the State, make an aggregate burden violating…

Held: in Bassing v. Cady, 208 U. S. 386 , 391, not to constitute jeopardy.

Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447 (1923), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court rejected the concept of taxpayer standing. The case was consolidated with Frothingham v. Mellon. The plaintiffs in the cases, Frothingham and Massachusetts, sought to prevent certain federal government expenditures which they considered to violate the Tenth Amendment. The court rejected the suits on the basis that neither plaintiff suffered particularized harm, writing: We have no power per se to review and annul acts of Congress on the ground that they are unconstitutional. The question may be considered only when the justification for some direct injury suffered or threatened, presenting a justiciable issue, is made to rest upon such an act. ...

<p>Decided on the authority of Willard, Sutherland & Co. v. United States, ante, 489.</p>

Held: That the North Carolina Act does not violate the provision of the Federal Constitution, Art. I, § 10, cl. 1, which prohibits a State from making anything except gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. P. 659.

Held: does not constitute an element of just compensation (Cox v. Philadelphia, etc., R. R. Co., 215 Pa. St. 506 ; 2 Lewis on Eminent Domain, 3d ed., § 727), in the absence of a statute expressly allowing it. Whiting v. Commonwealth, 196 Mass. 468 ;. Oakland v. Pacific Coast Lumber Co., 171 Cal. 392 , 398. This statute therefore does not deny a right; it grants one, and limits it to a business already established.

Rindge Co. v. County of Los Angeles, 262 U.S. 700 (1923), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that a county government could use its power of eminent domain to take land from a private landowner to build a scenic highway.

Held: that landowners who did not see fit to avail themselves of their opportunity to object and be heard, could not attack the appraisals as arbitrary in a suit for an injunction. P.- 722. 72 Colo. 268 , affirmed.

<p>Error to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.</p>

<p>Error to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.</p>