United States v. Emery, 9819.

• Decision Date: 12 August 1949
• Docket Number: No. 9819.,9819.
• Citation: 85 F. Supp. 354
• Parties: UNITED STATES v. EMERY et al.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of California

85 F. Supp. 354

UNITED STATES v. EMERY et al.

No. 9819.

United States District Court S. D. California, C. D.

August 12, 1949.

Abe I. Levy, Christian V. Murray, Los Angeles, Cal., for the plaintiff.

Daniel Dougherty, Los Angeles, Cal., for the defendant.

YANKWICH, District Judge.

The action is for treble damages, restitution and injunction. The defendants have filed a motion to dismiss. They attack the validity of the Housing and Rent Act of 1947 as amended, 50 U.S.C.A.Appendix, § 1881 et seq., and the right to institute the action.

I do not agree with the recent decision in the case of Woods v. Shoreline Cooperative Apartments, Inc., D.C., 84 F. Supp. 660, by the District Court for the Eastern Division of Illinois, wherein the Housing and Rent Act of 1949, 50 U.S.C. A.Appendix, § 1881 et seq., was held unconstitutional. The present Act follows the pattern of other Rent Acts. The war emergency still exists. The United States Supreme Court has held repeatedly that war powers may be exercised for a reasonable number of years after the actual "shooting war" ends, in order to take care of the economic dislocations which follow each war. Fleming v. Mohawk etc. Lbr. Co., 1947, 331 U.S. 111, 67 S.Ct. 1129, 91 L.Ed. 1375.

In Lewis v. Anderson, Secretary of Agriculture, 9 Cir., 72 F.Supp. 119, 120, involving sugar controls, I held that administrative penalties could be imposed on retailers for violating sugar controls after the "shooting war" had ended. I used this language, which is as applicable today as it was on June 9, 1947:

"Wars have never actually terminated on the day `cease-fire' orders were given. Many of them continued for decades, not so much in the form of actual fighting, but in the disruption and dislocation which they caused in the life of the nations involved. These facts, which are truisms to any student of history, apply especially to modern warfare, as exemplified by the last war. The destruction and the dislocation of the economic life of both the victor and the vanquished continued and will continue for years after the actual hostilities with Germany and Japan ended. And so those who are in charge of regulating and controlling the economic life of the nations involved in the war have the difficult problem of determining when the various controls should come to an end. Wishful and unrealistic thinking call for immediate cessation of all governmental interference with economic life. Prudent statesmanship, economic or other, realizes the danger of immediate decontrol. The persons who are loudest in demanding the immediate return to free economy complain most vociferously about `sudden' decontrol. Rightly. For economic life cannot stand `sudden shock'. Adjustment from war to peace-time economy, if it is to be helpful, must be gradual.

"The failure to understand these fundamental economic principles is responsible for many of the contentions which are now made before the courts. Some litigants wish us to adopt the view that, regardless of what the Congress does, the actual cessation actually entitles businesses or activities under control to be relieved from it."

Th...