Question

How did the 1877 Supreme Court case Munn v. Illinois affect farming?

Answer 1

This case involved the right of the Illinois legislature to prescribe maximum charges for the storage of grain. Its implications, however, were far more sweeping, because it directly affected the constitutionality of state railroad regulation as well. The case arose because nine business firms acting together were able to fix the prices of storage and handling in Chicago grain elevators and warehouses, through which the produce of a vast middle-western farming area had to pass on its way to market. The Illinois legislature passed a law regulating warehouse storage charges. When the Illinois law was tested in the Supreme Court, the problem before the Court was to find a legal basis for regulating such property as grain elevators and railroads without setting a precedent for the regulation of all private property. For precedent, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite went back to Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-castury English jurist, whe had laid down the principle that property "affected with a public interest" ceases to be an object of private law alone and becomes liable to public regulation. Having applied this doctrine to elevators, Chief Justice Waite in other cases applied it to railroads as well. The Munn decision set a legal foundation for regulation, but its value was whittled down by later decisions which took their cue from Justice Field`s dissent in this case.