What you say seems right.
So I guess it’s only because the right to select who you want to enter your house is considered way more important by everybody than the right to select who you want to sell your house to, so the law is just following expectations, rather than any strict logic.
That argument seems circular. It begins with the premise that blacks had the right to purchase the subject properties that contained the restrictive covenant. If we state that private acts of racial discrimination and restrictive covenants are okay, then those black persons had no right to purchase the property. Just like they have no right to trespass.
No one has the right to trespass. The cops are enforcing the owner’s right to control his own property. Why he wants someone off the property doesn’t matter.
Blacks have the same right to purchase land being offered to the public as anyone else. A contract that restricts that right is legal to sign, but the government won’t enforce it. (As opposed to a contract to join with others to commit murder – that’s probably not even legal to sign, as it would constitute conspiracy. The government wouldn’t enforce that contract either.).
I don’t even see an issue here – can you come up with a better example as to how there’s no limiting principal? The trespass one seems inapt to me.
The person who violated the covenant is the seller here, not the buyers. The sellers were restricted by the covenant, and they ignored that restriction. IOW, the original owner did NOT have the legal right to sell, if we’re trying to focus on whose actions should have been smacked down by the courts, based on the prior limiting principle. Whatever rights blacks have to purchase land, it doesn’t extend to a sale that the seller can’t legally make. Why can’t the seller legally make such a sale? Again, against the existing limiting principle, because he agreed to it in a private transaction, a category of actions that the law permits (or at least it did).
Say I agree contractually to permit my dog to breed with yours so we can sell the puppies, but one of the terms of the contract is you can only sell them to someone with certified animal care training. I only want people qualified to care for the little darlings to get one. Your uncertified pal Dave wants one of the puppies, and he has as much right to buy puppies as the next guy. Maybe, but you don’t have the legal right to sell him one.
Blacks’ rights (or anyone’s) to participate in a sale is the NOT same as anyone else’s, not if that’s intended to be some sort of universal guideline. If I won’t sell my house to you because you’re black (or because I don’t like your political party or how you comb your hair), you can’t compel me to, right? You can’t overrule that restriction I imposed. Why can you overrule a contractual restriction?
Because dogs don’t have civil rights and black people do? This seems really obvious to me. Blacks do have the same right to purchase. What are talking about?
Um, if you’re trying to follow the analogy, it’s Dave’s rights you should be focusing on. Let the puppies get their own lawyer. Doesn’t Dave have the same “right” to purchase a puppy as the next guy? No, he doesn’t. Not if the next guy is certified in animal care. Dave is simply an unqualified buyer, and the only role he might play in the sale is as a party to the violation of MY rights. His rights are irrelevant in this particular scenario.
IOW, the SC (and most of the posters in this thread, frankly) turned the decision into a consideration of blacks’ rights, when in fact, the rights in question, the ones the court was asked to consider, were those of the other parties to the covenant. This may sound odd, but the black buyers were incidental to the real question. The other parties to the covenant were damaged when one of the parties decided to sell the house to a black guy. The plaintiffs said to the courts, “We have been damaged, our legal rights were violated, and we need the courts to make us whole.” The courts responded by saying that those contractual rights were legitimately constructed, but unfortunately they evaporated when they required the courts to enforce them.
Remember, the question here is whether the SC’s logic was sound with regard to the existing notion that the 14th amendment does NOT apply to private acts of discrimination. What they basically said was that if the private act–perfectly legal otherwise–required the state to intervene when someone violated the contract, then the principle doesn’t apply. Well, said jtgain, doesn’t that logic apply to ANY act–i.e., the remedy for someone ignoring an otherwise legal duty or committing a crime is to have the state intervene. He’s right. This logic, I think, retroactively made the existing notion completely weightless.
Dave’s certification status (or lack thereof) is not constitutionally protected.
On the other hand, if Dave was black and it could be shown that it was impossible for a black person to get that certification, then he may be able to convince the courts that that provision is unenforceable.
My understanding is that the court can force you to sell (or at least pay damages) if it is proven that the only reason you aren’t selling to that person is because they are black (not that this is easy to do).
Maybe it’s because I’m not American, but how hard is it to understand the following:
You’re applying current standards to it. At the time of the decision, I could refuse to sell you my house because you were black. The court even acknowledged that.
They were asking the authorities to enforce a discriminatory contract. A puppy contract is not discriminatory. This still seems pretty obvious, but I guess I’m not explaining it well. Maybe one of the experienced lawyers can step in (no offense to jtgain, but I think he just recently passed the Bar.). Bricker? Ravenman? Hamlet? The other ones I can’t remember?
Of course this also shows why the analogy is flawed - a better analogy is that you invite your black friend Dave over to watch the football game with you on Sunday afternoon. But you have a restrictive covenant that prevents black people from even entering the subdivision, and one of your neighbors is the one that calls the cops and demands that they remove Dave from your house, against your wishes. So here the Court simply rules that black citizens have the same right to purchase property from willing sellers as any other citizen, and contracts that purport to restrain willing sellers from selling to willing buyers based solely on race are void.
The case we should be talking about is probably Katzenbach v. McClung.
They were asking the authorities to enforce a legal contract. From the same decision:
That’s not an analogy so much as a restatement of the facts of the case in question.
The court did not say blacks have such an unfettered right. The same decision specifically said that voluntary adherence to the covenant would have been fine.
OK, I’ll cop to that.
To answer the op as succinctly as possible: the limit to the decision is that it only applies as long as upholding the contract results in judgment that is unconstitutional. In those cases where part of the contract is problematic, the court should apply the same principles as any other contract with unenforceable clauses (ie maintain the original purpose).
I don’t know how else to say it. The same decision had no 14th amendment issues whatsoever with the contract itself. It was legal and had everyone followed it, a black guy wanting to buy the property would have had no recourse, per the court. They basically said, the previous notion is a firm constitutional principle, but we won’t enforce it. They could spin it however they wanted, but they eviscerated the prior principle. It wasn’t modified; it was destroyed, if we follow their logic.
But that’s the point I originally tried to make. Fitzgerald agreed to sell his property to Shelley. Had Fitzgerald refused to sell because Shelley was black, no court would have stepped in.
But Kraemer said that his contract (the covenant) with Fitzgerald should take precedence. The lower courts agreed, but the Supreme Court said the covenant was invalid, and therefore not enforceable.
If you simply look at the case as one contract vs. the other, it becomes a lot clearer.
Fitzgerald could not legally sell the house to Shelley. The contract was legitimate. The courts just refused to enforce it. The question here was specifically regarding the covenant, and whether or not the 1883 guidance compelled the court to enforce it. The court decided 3 things: (1) the covenant was perfectly legal, (2) the 1883 decision was still a firm constitutional principle, and (3) as soon as it was invoked it disintegrated. It’s a non sequitur. A less-schizophrenic ruling would have said the 1883 guideline was poorly reasoned and they were overruling it on 14th amendment grounds; consequently, the covenant itself was invalid.
But the Court did not say that the covenant was invalid. It stated that it WAS valid, but unenforceable because of state action.
And there is no practical difference between that and saying that the contract was invalid. But had the Court said it was invalid, then the whole private/public distinction is meaningless. As I noted above, all contracts require state enforcement to have any meaning. Otherwise they can be violated at will.
Could the homeowners association have sued the seller for damages? That is, they couldn’t get the state to block the sale, but perhaps the state could allow a lawsuit between the HOA and the seller.
So, the contract is valid, legal to sign, and may provide damages to the signing parties. However, the provision disallowing sales to blacks was unenforceable by the state.
I don’t think anything in the decision specifically prohibited the plaintiffs from suing the grantor. But that’s not what they wanted. They wanted the court to restrain Shelley “from taking possession of the property and that judgment be entered divesting title out of petitioners Shelley and revesting title in the immediate grantor or in such other person as the court should direct.”
But I’m not sure. Would a lawsuit have any weight if the basis of it was the violation of an unenforceable covenant? The logic of the decision doesn’t seem to proscribe sucn an action, but again, the logic is pretty screwy IMO.
I think the problem here is one of party identification and procedural posture.
There was in fact no problem with enforcement of the restrictive covenant against the covenanting parties. Kraemer and the other owners in the neighborhood could have proceeded against Fitzgerald, the owner who broke the covenant, for remedies in contract.
That’s not what they did. They proceeded against the Shelleys (the black family), who were not parties to the original contract. They also sought a remedy that is almost never available even in the most basic contract action: divestment of title from a bona fide purchaser (the trial court specifically found that the Shelleys had no knowledge of the restrictive covenant.)
Leaving aside all constitutional issues, the best Kraemer et al. could have hoped for was that the court would hold that the Shelleys took subject to the covenant. Thus, they could own the house but not actually live in it. Again, even that holding would require the court to enforce the covenant against a third party who took without knowledge.
There are a number of other problems with enforcement of the covenant before we reach the constitutional issue. For example, who are “people of the Negro or Mongolian race”? How would the covenanting parties prove that the Shelleys were negroes?
This is a huge stretch. Nothing in the Civil Rights Acts provide that being in your house is a right shared by all citizens, and it would be ultra vires for any legislature to tell you what private individuals you need to let in.
ETA: Stratocaster, I didn’t see your last post before I wrote this one. The covenant was not unenforceable per se, it was merely unenforceable as against the Shelleys. A lawsuit against Fitzgerald would almost certainly have succeeded, though it would be difficult to fashion a remedy.