National Labor Relations Board v. Cheney California Lumber Co.

Mr. Chief Justice Stone,

concurring.

I concur on a ground which the Court’s opinion points out and which is alone sufficient to sustain its decision, *390 namely, that the court below erroneously applied Labor Board v. Express Publishing Co., 312 U. S. 426 . But I cannot say that when the court Below was appealed to as a court of equity to enforce by its injunction the Board’s order, § 10 (e) of the National Labor Relations Act rendered the court powerless to frame its own injunction consistently with the record, on which that section requires it to act, and in conformity to accepted principles governing the scope of the injunction; or that if the tables were turned the section would require the reviewing court to repeat, by the excessive scope of its injunction, the very abuse of power condemned by the Express Publishing Company case.

The prohibition by § 10 (e) of the court’s consideration of objections which the parties did not urge before the Board is a limitation upon the court’s review of the grounds for granting or denying relief. This Court has treated it as such. See Marshall Field & Co. v. Labor Board, 318 U. S. 253 . But we have not held that § 10 (e) could, and I think it cannot rightly, be construed to be also a limitation on the court’s power to conform its own process to accepted legal standards applied to the “entire record” which § 10 (e) requires to be filed with it. Nor is that, prohibition a command to the court to act as a mere ministerial agency to execute the order of the Board, without regard to those standards which control the court’s use of its own process, even though the Board and the parties have ignored them.

Only recently we have held that the imposition of a mandatory duty on. a federal court of equity to restrain violations of a statute is not to be taken as depriving the court of its traditional power to administer its remedies according to its own governing principles and in conformity to the standards of public interest. See Hecht Co. v. Bowles, 321 U. S. 321, 331 . In that case we held that a command explicitly addressed to a court of equity, *391 by § 205 (a) of the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, to grant an injunction enforcing the act when violation of it is shown, did not deprive the court of its equitable discretion to grant or withhold an injunction. It has been well said that § 205 (a), which directs that the court upon showing of violation “shall” grant the injunction, “does not change the historic conditions for the exercise by courts of equity of their power to issue injunctions . . .” 321U. S.331.

It should likewise be held that the present statute does not alter the power of a court of equity to frame its injunction according to equitable principles applied in the light of the record on which it must act. Here the statute is not mandatory. It does not purport to curtail the court’s power to define the scope of its process. The section only confers on the court the power to make “a decree enforcing, modifying, arid enforcing as so modified, or setting aside in whole or in part the order of the Board.” This emphasizes what was implicit in the statute involved in the Hecht case, and made explicit by the opinion, that when a statute authorizes an appeal to equity to enforce a liability created by statute, the exercise is invoked of those powers which pertain to it as a court of equity. This at least includes the power to fix, on its own motion, the scope of the decree which it may be required to enforce by contempt proceedings, in conformity to recognized equitable standards applied to the record before it.