Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, with whom The CHIEF JUSTICE and Mr. Justice BURTON concur in result, dissenting.
The issue in this case is clear and simple. It is this. When officers make an arrangement on behalf of their organization, whether a corporation or a union, while acting in the regular course of business and within their general authority as such officers, is the organization liable for what these officers did if the court should subsequently find that such an arrangement is prohibited by the Sherman Law? The issue is clear and it is susceptible of a clear answer. Neither the issue nor the answer should be obscured. Either the organization is subject to the liability that the law in other respects imposes upon organizations for the acts of their agents, or the Norris-LaGuardia Act freed unions and corporations from such liability. The lower courts must apply the law as laid down by this Court and we owe them clarity of pronouncement. They cannot very well guide juries, or even themselves in equity suits, if told that the principles of the law of agency do not apply to unions and corporations under the Sherman Law, but that perhaps they 'can' apply. What the Court means to decide ought to be brought out of the twilight of ambiguity. It does not advance the administration of justice to impart new doubts to an old statute. And the Sherman Law is not merely old. It embodies, as this Court has often indicated, a vital policy.
By explicit language Congress forbade 'corporations and associations' no less than individuals to engage in combinations and conspiracies in restraint of interstate trade. Section 8 of the Sherman Law, 15 U.S.C.A. § 7. And it has long been settled that trade unions are 'associations' under the Sherman Law. United Mine Workers of America v. Coronado Coal Co., 259 U.S. 344, 42 S.Ct. 570, 66 L.Ed. 975, 27 A.L.R. 762. Before the Coronado decision and since, repeated efforts were made to have Congress take trade unions from under the Sherman Law. Regardless of the political complexion of Congress, these efforts have consistently failed. Equally futile have been efforts to have this Court read the liability of trade unions out of the Sherman Law by judicial construction. This Court has undeviatingly held that trade unions are within 'the general interdict of the Sherman Law', although later enactments have withdrawn' specifically enumerated practices of labor unions' from the scope of that law. See § 20 of the Clayton Act, 38 Stat. 730, 738, 29 U.S.C. § 52, 29 U.S.C.A. § 52; United States v. Hutcheson, 312 U.S. 219, 230, 61 S.Ct. 463, 465, 85 L.Ed. 788, and Apex Hosiery Co. v. Leader, 310 U.S. 469, 487, 488, 60 S.Ct. 982, 988, 989, 84 L.Ed. 1311, 128 A.L.R. 1044. In the light of this history it would be strange indeed to find that Congress, by hitherto unsuspected indirection, had, from the point of view of effectiveness, sterilized the Sherman Law as to trade unions and particularly as to those which alone could to any serious extent unreasonably restrain commerce. It is a conclusion which can be reached only by disregarding the circumstances to which § 6 of the Norris-LaGuardia Act was addressed, and by wrenching it from the context of history in which it must be read.
The construction given by the Court to § 6 is based on considerations which move in a world of unreality. The argument is quite unmindful of the way in which trade unions function-their organization, the authority of their international officers, the inevitable influence of the international office upon the affiliated locals. In short, such a construction is unmindful of the anatomy and physiology of trade union life. It is especia ly the powerful international unions who are in strategic positions to impose unreasonable restraints on commerce, and it is these that are especially rendered immune by the construction the Court gives to § 6. It is such unions that can most readily b insulated from responsibility for the acts of their leading officers, although such action be taken in furtherance of the vital concerns of the union and in every other aspect of legal responsibility be deemed within the direct authority of these officers and binding on the union.