# Hale v. Morgan

> California Supreme Court · September 28, 1978 · 22 Cal. 3d 388

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9542090

## Case

- **Full name:** DOUGLAS C. HALE, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. JACK MORGAN, Defendant and Appellant
- **Court:** California Supreme Court
- **Decided:** September 28, 1978
- **Citations:** 22 Cal. 3d 388; 149 Cal. Rptr. 375; 584 P.2d 512; 1978 Cal. LEXIS 293
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Newman
- **Judges:** Richardson, Newman
- **Cited by:** 320 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/9542090

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- holding that although a mandatory $100-per-day penalty scheme was not necessarily facially unconstitutional, the imposition of a $17,300 penalty under the statute was constitutionally excessive in that case, given the defendant’s lesser culpability and the possibility of an un…
- concluding that a mandatory $100 per day penalty, as applied, violated due process where the total penalty imposed was confiscatory, “wholly disproportionate to any discernible and legitimate legislative goal, and . . . so clearly unfair that it [could not] be sustained”
- noting that civil penalties are “a means of securing obedience to statutes validly 6 enacted under the police power.”

## Opinion text

NEWMAN, J., Concurring.
Article I, section 17 of. the California Constitution commands that “excessive fines” not be imposed. In my view those two words justify reversal of the judgment here. There is ample reason for concluding that the constitutional prohibition covers civil as well as criminal fines.
I do not read the opinions cited by the majority here (e.g., Western Air Lines, Younger, Jayhill, and Walsh) as harbingers of a disinterred substantive-due-process review. Because of article I, section 17 of the California Constitution such a review indeed seems inappropriate in this case. Since 1937 “the [United States Supreme] Court’s abandonment of *408 ‘substantive due process’ review over economic regulation has been constant and unequivocal.” Freund et al., Constitutional Law (4th ed. 1977) page 1094.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9542090. Public record. Not legal advice.