People v. Russell
| Decision Date | 10 January 1883 |
| Citation | 14 N.W. 568,49 Mich. 617 |
| Court | Michigan Supreme Court |
| Parties | PEOPLE v. RUSSELL. |
State legislation interfering with the rights conferred by letters patent under United States law is void as an invasion of national authority. But a municipal ordinance requiring peddlers to obtain a license is no such interference even though the peddler be the manufacturer and patentee of the articles sold. Such an ordinance is merely such a police regulation as may be adopted under the general police authority of the state.
No ordinary exercise of congressional authority can take from a state any portion of its general police power. The acts of congress assume the existence of state regulations.
The patent laws confer exclusive rights, but do not determine personal capacity to contract or prescribe the requisites for sales of patented articles or impose the customary restrictions which are supposed to be important to the protection of public morals. These matters are left to state law.
Where a city charter gives power to license and regulate peddlers but not to tax them, a municipal ordinance requiring them to pay a license fee of $15 a year cannot be held invalid as requiring a fee that is clearly excessive.
Error to Branch.
J.J Van Riper and Henry H. Barlow, for plaintiff.
L.T.N Wilson, for defendant and appellant.
An ordinance of the city of Coldwater provides among other things that "no person shall hawk or peddle any meat goods, wares or merchandise from door to door within the limits of the city of Coldwater without a license from the mayor." For the license, when not for the sale of meat $15 is required to be paid for one year, or $3 for one day. The defendant has been convicted under this ordinance, on evidence that without license he traveled from door to door in said city and sold a clothes-wringer. The clothes-wringers were manufactured by the defendant at Sturgis in this state under letters patent of the United States issued to him and one Shepardson as patentees.
1. It is objected to the ordinance that if applied to the sale of patented articles it is an interference with the power of congress to grant exclusive rights to patentees to make and sell their inventions, and an encroachment upon the rights which the patent assures to the patentees. We agree that if this is the case the ordinance can have no such application. The power of congress to grant the exclusive right to make and sell the articles which from their originality and value have been found deserving is exclusive, and any state legislation which undertakes to limit or restrict in any manner the privileges which the letters patent confers is an invasion of the sphere of national authority and therefore void. This was shown in Cranson v. Smith, 37 Mich. 309, and what is said there need not be repeated.
But the ordinance in question does not assume to interfere with or in any way to abridge the exclusive rights which...
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