Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway Co. v. Cade

Citations

• 233 U.S. 642
• 34 S. Ct. 678
• 58 L. Ed. 1135
• 1914 U.S. LEXIS 1208

Syllabus

<p>Where a state statute has been held unconstitutional under the state constitution by an inferior state court, and subsequently has been upheld by the highest court of the State, this court, when the case is properly here under § 237, Judicial Code, must regard the statute as valid under the state constitution and consider only the question of its validity under the Federal Constitution, although intermediately this court has followed the decision of the lower state court.</p> <p>The validity of a state statute under the cómmerce clause or the Act to Regulate Commerce cannot be attacked in a suit which is not based upon a claim arising out of interstate commerce.</p> <p>A State may classify claims against persons or corporations where there is no classification of debtors and where the claims are not grouped together for the purpose of bearing against any class of citizens or corporations.</p> <p>A state police regulation designed to promote payment of small claims of certain classes and discourage unnecessary litigation respecting them should not be set aside by thé Federal courts on the ground that claims of other kinds have not been included, where the legislature was presumably dealing with an actual mischief and made the act as broad in its scope as seemed necessary from the practical standpoint.</p> <p>The Fourteenth Amendment does not require that state laws shall be perfect.</p> <p>In the absence of a construction by the state courts to that effect, this court will not concede that a state statute confers its benefits only upon natural persons who are plaintiffs in certain classes of actions and not upon corporation plaintiffs.</p> <p>A defendant corporation is not in a position to assail a state statute as denying equal protection of the law because its benefits do not inure to corporations which are plaintiffs.</p> <p>If the classification is otherwise reasonable, a state statute does not deny equal protection of the law because attorney’s fees are allow