Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer - Milestone Documents

Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer

( 1952 ) Commentary by David Gray Adler, Idaho State University
  • “The President's power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to take possession of property as he did here. Nor is there any act of Congress to which our attention has been directed from which such a power can fairly be implied.” - Justice Hugo Black, Majority Opinion
  • “It is clear that, if the President had authority to issue the order he did, it must be found in some provision of the Constitution.” - Justice Hugo Black, Majority Opinion
  • “The order cannot properly be sustained as an exercise of the President's military power as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. … Even though ‘theater of war' be an expanding concept, we cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production. This is a job for the Nation's lawmakers, not for its military authorities.” - Justice Hugo Black, Majority Opinion
  • “Nor can the seizure order be sustained because of the several constitutional provisions that grant executive power to the President. In the framework of our Constitution, the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.” - Justice Hugo Black, Majority Opinion
  • “The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to Congress alone in both good and bad times.” - Justice Hugo Black, Majority Opinion
  • “The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President and represents an exercise of authority without law No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. … With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.” - Justice Robert Jackson, Concurring Opinion
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Hugo Black (Library of Congress)

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