# Schechter Poultry v. United States (1935) **Argued:** May 2–3, 1935 · **Decided:** May 27, 1935 · **Unanimous, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes** · 295 U.S. 495 The "sick chicken case" that killed the [[National Industrial Recovery Act]] and ended the only period in American history when federal policy deliberately suspended the antitrust laws. The Schechter brothers ran a kosher poultry slaughterhouse in Brooklyn. They were convicted of violating the Live Poultry Code — one of some 550 NIRA "codes of fair competition" — on charges including selling an unfit chicken and allowing customers to select individual birds from a coop, which the code forbade as "straight killing." ## Three grounds, all unanimous **No emergency power.** "Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power." **Unconstitutional delegation.** NIRA §3 let the President approve industry-written codes with no meaningful standard beyond "fair competition." Hughes: "Congress is not permitted by the Constitution to abdicate, or to transfer to others, the essential legislative functions with which it is vested." **Beyond the commerce power.** The Schechters' intrastate slaughtering affected interstate commerce only *indirectly*, and Hughes insisted on "a necessary and well-established distinction between direct and indirect effects" — the same reasoning as [[United States v. E. C. Knight Co]] forty years earlier. Justice Cardozo, who had dissented in the *Panama Refining* delegation case four months before, concurred with Stone and supplied the line that outlived the case: > "This is delegation running riot." ## Why it belongs in an antitrust timeline The NIRA is the control case. For two years the federal government's official position was that ruinous **competition**, not monopoly, had caused the Depression — so the largest firms in each industry were invited to write binding price, output, wage and hour rules, exempt from the [[Sherman Antitrust Act]] by NIRA §5. *Schechter* forced the [[New Deal]] to choose between planning and antitrust, and by 1938 it had chosen antitrust: [[Thurman Arnold]] took over the [[Antitrust Division]] and brought close to half of all Sherman Act cases filed in the statute's first fifty years. The nondelegation holding has had a much longer afterlife than the commerce holding, which *Wickard v. Filburn* (1942) effectively buried. *Schechter* remains one of only two cases in which the Supreme Court has struck down a statute on nondelegation grounds — and it is the anchor of every modern effort to revive the doctrine against the administrative state. See [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]].