1902 U.S. Supreme Court case holding state quarantine laws constitutional
1902 United States Supreme Court case
Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana Board of Health, 186 U.S. 380 (1902), was a United States Supreme Court case which held constitutional state laws requiring the involuntary quarantine of individuals to prevent the spread of disease. Louisiana's quarantine laws, Justice Edward White said, were a reasonable exercise of the state's police power that conflicted with neither the Dormant Commerce Clause nor the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In dissent, Justice Henry Billings Brown, joined by John Marshall Harlan, agreed that while quarantine laws were constitutional, Louisiana's went beyond the scope of the state's authority over interstate commerce, even violating several treaties between the United States and other nations.
The case had arisen in 1898, when the S.S. "Britannia" sailed from Palermo to Marseille, then across the Atlantic for New Orleans. Before docking there, it had stopped at a state-run quarantine station further down the Mississippi River, where all 408 passengers, most of whom were Italian immigrants, were certified as free from disease. At New Orleans, however, the ship was not allowed to land them there nor in any nearby parish, as it was told that a "cordon sanitaire" had been declared on land, forbidding the entry of any uninfected persons into the area.
Compagnie Française de Navigation à Vapeur ("French Steam Navigation Company", in English), the "Britannia"'s French owner, filed for a restraining order in Orleans Parish District Court enjoining the state Board of Health from enforcing the quarantine, arguing that the real purpose of the quarantine was to prevent the immigrants from landing in New Orleans; after the court declined the "Britannia" took its passengers to Pensacola, Florida, to be unloaded and then returned to New Orleans to deliver its cargo. The company's complaint against the state for damages was dismissed, a decision upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court on appeal.
Quarantine laws had never been challenged, but "dicta" in the Court's opinions since "Gibbons v. Ogden" in 1824 had recognized them as a justifiable use of state power. Some earlier cases had challenged aspects of quarantine laws such as the taxes collected to fund them, but "Compagnie Francaise" challenged the application of quarantine law itself, under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. It has been cited by later courts as holding involuntary quarantines constitutional, as recently as a case arising from the 2014 African Ebola epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Background.
Starting in 1796, when it was under Spanish colonial administration, New Orleans began suffering outbreaks of yellow fever every few years, and reported cases every summer. Death tolls began increasing, both from the disease and some then-common treatments for it (such as mercury injections), as the city's population grew following its return to French rule in 1800 and cession to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase three years later. The first American territorial governor, William C. C. Claiborne, lost two wives and his daughter to the disease, which he himself also contracted but recovered from.
Many other migrants from elsewhere in the U.S. followed; they proved more susceptible to yellow fever than longtime residents. An 1817 outbreak killed 800 in New Orleans alone, prompting the state legislature to create a New Orleans Board of Health, the first government public health agency in the U.S., only to dissolve it two years later as ineffectual after an outbreak that year claimed 2,000 lives. These deaths were often exacerbated by local newspapers' refusal to report on the disease, as businesses feared the economic effects of a public panic.
After left almost 8,000 residents of New Orleans dead, the state again created a Board of Health and made it permanent. The Union Navy's blockade of New Orleans six years later, as the Civil War began, the city for the first time in the century recorded no deaths from yellow fever. When General Benjamin Butler took over control of the city when it fell to Union forces in 1862, he went further, dispatching 2,000 troops to dispose of the city's garbage and instituting a quarantine requirement for arriving ships. At a point down the Mississippi River from the city, all vessels were stopped by gunboats and held for 40 days while they were monitored for disease. There were few deaths from yellow fever in New Orleans for the remainder of the war.
Yellow fever epidemics in the city resumed after the war, when an 1867 outbreak killed 3,000. During this one the Board of Health was active, putting quarantine flags on houses with known cases and fumigating spaces. , which afflicted cities in the Lower Mississippi Valley as far north as Memphis, Tennessee, led the newspapers to abandon their past practice of downplaying outbreaks to avoid public panics since, they realized, it had actually made the epidemics worse.
Businesses, particularly shipping companies, still chafed at the quarantine laws. In 1882 the Louisiana legislature amended the statutes to require that vessels stopping at the quarantine station pay as much as $30 ($ in today's dollars) in fees, depending on their size, with the proceeds going to fund the board's operations and infrastructure. One New Orleans–based shipper challenged this in court as a tonnage tax, which they called an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause since the federal government alone had authority to levy one; they further alleged that it was being used for the city of New Orleans' general revenue rather than its stated purpose.
Four years later, the shipper's case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal from its state counterpart. Unanimously, the nine justices held that the fee was not a tax and even if it were one, would still have been constitutional as while the federal government had the authority to require and enforce quarantines, it was only exclusive to it if it actually did so. As it had historically left that to the states, Louisiana could act as it saw fit within the Constitution to exercise its police power and protect public health.
"If there is a city in the United States which has need of quarantine laws, it is New Orleans", Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, a physician prior to his legal career, wrote for the Court. He noted that despite being a hundred miles (160 km) upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, it was the largest and busiest port on that waterbody. Many of the ships that came to New Orleans from the Gulf often came from warmer countries to the south, where tropical diseases were common, and past epidemics of yellow fever and cholera in the Mississippi Valley had all been identified as having spread from the city.
Around that time Italian immigrants began arriving in New Orleans in great numbers; eventually the city would be home to more of them than any other in the South. They were met with considerable fear and prejudice from longtime residents; in 1891 an angry mob lynched 11 Italians, one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, after the city's popular police chief was killed, supposedly implicating Italians with his last words. Among the many reasons the Italian immigrants were considered undesirable was the belief that they brought diseases into the U.S.
In September 1897 a yellow fever outbreak believed to have originated in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, spread to New Orleans, where it led to a single death and several cases. The Louisiana Board of Health initiated quarantines on any travelers returning to New Orleans from Ocean Springs or neighboring Biloxi, ordering railroads not to stop there on the way to New Orleans, and fumigating all luggage that travelers had brought back. It told the newspapers that it was willing to spend a million dollars to contain the outbreak.
The house quarantines ordered by the Board of Health, enforced by armed guards, aroused resentment in New Orleans. Despite the possibility of prison for violators, some quarantined residents began sneaking out of their back doors at night. Elsewhere in the state, fear of the disease led to violence. In Rayne a band of armed residents prevented a train from entering their parish. A group in Calcasieu Parish burned a rail bridge near Lake Charles with similar aims of controlling disease.
Underlying dispute.
A year after the 1897 outbreak, the SS "Britannia", owned by the French corporation Compagnie Française de Navigation á Vapeur, left the Sicilian port of Palermo carrying cargo and Italian emigrants, along with some returning U.S. citizens. After stopping in Marseille to pick up more passengers and cargo, it sailed across the Atlantic Ocean into the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi River. In late September, the vessel duly stopped at the quarantine station, near Fort Jackson, where all 408 passengers and the ship's cargo were certified as free from disease and allowed to continue to New Orleans.
Two days later, when the "Britannia" reached its destination, port officials told the crew it could not unload any passengers. In the interim, the state's Board of Health had placed New Orleans and the neighboring parishes within a hundred miles under a "cordon sanitaire" forbidding the entry of any uninfected persons, a measure the state legislature had authorized the board to take earlier that year. The "Britannia"'s crew were reportedly additionally told that if they landed anywhere outside of the quarantined area with the intention of offloading their passengers, those areas would be added to the quarantine.
The company's agents in New Orleans filed a petition in Orleans Parish District Court for a restraining order enjoining the state from enforcing the quarantine against the "Britannia"'s passengers, and a judgement of $2,500 against the board and its members "in solido". They argued the state's real objective had been to prevent it from landing Italian immigrants, noting that the board had taken no measures to prevent the entry into New Orleans of Italian immigrants who had disembarked at New York and taken the train to Louisiana, and had allowed other large groups to enter the city later. After the court dismissed the petition for failure to show cause, the "Britannia" took its passengers to Pensacola, Florida, to put off and returned to New Orleans, where it unloaded its cargo. The company refiled its action as a damage claim, increasing its requested judgement to $11,000 and naming the individual board members as defendants.
In this filing the company alleged that Act 192 of the Laws of 1898, authorizing the "cordon sanitaire", violated a provision of the recently adopted state constitution requiring that laws have one goal clearly specified by a title, and in this case the title limited the act to applying to travel within the state, not vessels arriving from outside the state or country. Its application to an international arrival, they argued, also violated the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, since only Congress could regulate foreign commerce, and was also banned by treaties with France and Italy, from whence the "Britannia" had come. Lastly, the company argued, the order barring the landing of the passengers was a denial of its equal protection and due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Again, the district court dismissed the case after the board of health made a peremptory plea arguing no cause of action existed for Compagnie Francaise. The company appealed the decision to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Louisiana Supreme Court.
In March 1899 the state's Supreme Court reached its decision in the case. Chief Justice Francis T. Nicholls, a former governor of the state, wrote for a unanimous court affirming the district court.
Nicholls started with the state constitutional claim, and the presumption that the legislature intended Act 192 to be in accordance with the state constitution. He found its title had several clauses which could justify the power to declare and establish a "cordon sanitaire", and reiterated another recent holding of the court that the titles of bills need only state the general purpose of the act rather than the enumerated specifics. The language of the act was broad enough to allow the board to impose the measure, as well, even if it did not specifically mention it. "[It] does not limit the board to prohibiting the introduction of persons from one portion of the state to ... an infected portion" Nicholls wrote, "but evidently looks as well to the prohibition of the introduction of persons from outside the state into any infected portion of the state"; it would defeat