ABSTRACT
The United States Supreme Court decision of 1940 in the case of Thorn hill v. Alabama has been described as “the high water mark in the constitutional rights of labor’ and as “the most significant majority opinion” rendered by Justice Frank Murphy during his more than nine years on the nation’s highest tribunal. The decision equated peaceful picketing to a degree with free speech and extended to the discussion aspect of picketing the protection of both the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the federal Constitution. Mr. Justice Murphy’s opinion in the Thornhill case raised more questions than it answered, and what the Michigan Justice intended and what his words actually meant quickly became matters of some controversy. Murphy’s opinion has been hailed as “a great milestone in labors long struggle to safeguard the Bill of Rights from being whittled away by reactionary and anti-labor forces,” and criticized as “one of the greatest pieces of folly the Supreme Court ever perpetrated.”.
