# Hudgens v. National Labor Relations Board

> Supreme Court of the United States · March 3, 1976 · 424 U.S. 507

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9426291

## Case

- **Full name:** HUDGENS v. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD Et Al.
- **Court:** Supreme Court of the United States
- **Decided:** March 3, 1976
- **Citations:** 424 U.S. 507; 91 L.R.R.M. (BNA) 2489; 96 S. Ct. 1029; 47 L. Ed. 2d 196; 1976 U.S. LEXIS 5
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Powell
- **Judges:** Stewart, Burger, Blackmün, Powell, Rehnquist, White, Marshall, Brennan, Stevens
- **Cited by:** 580 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9426291

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- holding that a private person may exclude certain speakers from his or her property without violating the First Amendment
- holding that Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 92 S.Ct. 2219, 33 L.Ed.2d 131 (1972), implicitly overruled Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U.S. 308, 88 S.Ct. 1601, 20 L.Ed.2d 603 (1968)
- holding that federal constitution did not protect employees’ right to picket inside shopping center
- stating that “the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play” in incidents involving speech activities on private property unless the property has been wholly “dedicat[ed] . . . to public use”
- stating that “the constitutional guarantee of free expression has no part to play” in cases involving speech activities on private property unless the property has been wholly “‘dedicated . . . to public use’”

## Opinion text

Mr. Justice Powell,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, concurring.
Although I agree with Mr. Justice White’s view concurring in the result that Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U. S. 551 (1972), did not overrule Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza, 391 U. S. 308 (1968), and that the present case can be distinguished narrowly from Logan Valley, I nevertheless have joined the opinion of the Court today.
The law in this area, particularly with respect to whether First Amendment or labor law principles are applicable, has been less than clear since Logan Valley analogized a shopping center to the “company town” in Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U. S. 501 (1946). Mr. Justice Black, the author of the Court’s opinion in Marsh , thought the decisions were irreconcilable. 1 I now agree *524 with Mr. Justice Black that the opinions in these cases cannot be harmonized in a principled way. Upon more mature thought, I have concluded that we would have been wiser in Lloyd Corp. to have confronted this disharmony rather than draw distinctions based upon rather attenuated factual differences. 2
The Court’s opinion today clarifies the confusion engendered by these cases by accepting Mr. Justice Black’s reading of Marsh and by recognizing more sharply the distinction between the First Amendment and labor law issues that may arise in cases of this kind. It seems to me that this clarification of the law is desirable.
In his dissent in Logan Valley, Mr. Justice Black stated that “Marsh was never intended to apply to this kind of situation. . . . [T]he basis on which the Marsh decision rested was that the property involved encompassed an area that for all practical purposes had been turned into a town; the area had all the attributes of a town *524 and was exactly like any other town in Alabama. I can find very little resemblance between the shopping center involved in this case and Chickasaw, Alabama.” 391 U. S., at 330, 331 .
The editorial “we” above is directed primarily to myself as the author of the Court’s opinion in Lloyd Corp.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9426291. Public record. Not legal advice.