United States v. Carolene Products Company was an April 25, 1938 decision by the United States Supreme Court. The case dealt with a federal law that prohibited skimmed milk compounded with non-milk fat from being shipped in interstate commerce. The defendant argued that the law was unconstitutional on both Commerce Clause and due process grounds.
The previous Term, the Court, under pressure from the Roosevelt administration's Court-packing plan had dramatically changed its Commerce Clause jurisprudence to enlarge substantially those activities considered to be in or to affect interstate commerce. It had also altered its settled jurisprudence in the area of substantive due process, that is, the constitutional law dealing with rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. These changes meant that many New Deal programs that the Court would previously have invalidated would hitherto be found constitutional.
The defendant company was charged with breaking the law described above, and at trial it had filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. The District Court for the Southern District of Illinois had granted the defendant's motion, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the District Court's ruling.
Justice Harlan Stone, writing for the Court, found that the law, being "presumptively constitutional," was essentially a legislative judgment, and hence was not for the courts to overrule. The law was supported by substantial public-health evidence, and was not arbitrary or irrational.
Much of the importance of Stone's opinion, however, is due to its fourth footnote, in which he limns a theory of judicial review to be taken up later by the Warren Court and the scholar John Hart Ely. The footnote proposes that the Court presume that social and economic legislation is constitutional, unless such legislation is aimed at "discrete and insular minorities," in which case the Court should demand that the law pass a more demanding standard of scrutiny.
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