Law Commons^™

The Consumer's Emerging Right To Boycott: Naacp V. Claiborne Hardware And Its Implications For American Labor Law, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Hard cases do not always make bad law. Sometimes, when confronted with records that will yield neither to the direct application of established legal principles nor to factual manipulation, courts articulate, or at least suggest, a new principle which should and often does refine a body of old law. The Supreme Court's decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co." should become a prominent and salutary example of such hard cases. Before Claiborne Hardware, the Court had indicated that legislatures, for rational economic policy reasons, could make peaceful consumer boycotts illegal.' Confronted with compelling facts in the Claiborne Hardware …