"The question of permissible or impermissible purpose is one of fact for the court or jury....”
How later courts described this case
- "The question of permissible or impermissible purpose is one of fact for the court or jury....”
- while landlord may evict a tenant at will for any legal reason or for no reason at all, he may not evict for reasons which violate statutorily declared public policy
- eviction to deter tenant from exercising the right to vote
- constitutional discussion as aid to statutory interpretation
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
McGOWAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring except as to Parts I and II):
The considerations bearing upon statutory construction, so impressively marshalled by Judge Wright in Part III of his opinion, have made it unnecessary for me to pursue in any degree the constitutional speculations contained in Parts I and II; and it is for this reason that I do not join in them. The issue of statutory construction presented in this case has never seemed to me to be a difficult one, nor to require for its resolution the spur of avoidance of constitutional questions. A Congress which authorizes housing code promulgation and enforcement clearly cannot be taken to have excluded retaliatory eviction of the kind here alleged as a defense under
a routine statutory eviction mechanism also provided by Congress.