McGowan v. Maryland

The Fourteenth Amendment allows states broad latitude to make economic and social classifications. A classification is unconstitutional only when it rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the state’s objective; the Court will uphold it if any reasonably conceivable state of facts could justify it.

Maryland could reasonably permit Sunday sales of such items as food, gasoline, medicines, newspapers, tobacco, and refreshments because people may need them for health, travel, or recreation on a day of rest. Likewise, the State could allow some amusements and recreational activities while still seeking to limit ordinary commercial activity and preserve a general atmosphere of repose.

Maryland could also treat Anne Arundel County differently from other counties. Equal protection protects persons, not geographic areas as such, and a state may adapt its laws to local customs, needs, and conditions without imposing uniform rules in every county.

The State could rationally allow beach and amusement-park operators to sell goods customarily connected with their facilities while barring general retail stores from selling the same goods. Limiting sales to the places where the goods would likely be used served public recreation while reducing the number of employees required to work on Sunday and avoiding the difficult enforcement problem of policing large stores that sold both permitted and prohibited goods.

A businessperson of ordinary intelligence could determine what goods were customarily sold at nearby beaches or amusement parks through ordinary commercial knowledge or a reasonable investigation. The statute therefore did not force merchants to guess at its meaning before deciding whether their conduct was criminal.

The Court did not address possible evidentiary disputes over whether the particular goods sold by the appellants were in fact customarily sold at beaches or amusement parks. Those questions had not been raised in the Maryland Court of Appeals and were not properly before the Supreme Court.

Ordinarily, a litigant may assert only his own constitutional rights. The employees did not identify their religion, claim that they observed a Sabbath other than Sunday, or allege that the Sunday-sales prohibition interfered with their own religious observance.

The Court also declined to allow the employees to assert the religious rights of customers or other third parties. Those persons could bring their own claims, and no special circumstance justified departing from the ordinary standing rule.

The employees had standing to raise an Establishment Clause challenge because they alleged direct economic injury from a law they claimed imposed Christian religious tenets upon them. Establishment concerns extend beyond a claimant’s own religious exercise because government support for religion may threaten civil liberty and political authority generally.

The Court acknowledged that early English, colonial, and Maryland Sunday laws were expressly religious and were designed to enforce observance of the Christian Sabbath. But a law’s historical religious origin does not conclusively determine the constitutional character of its modern form, purpose, and operation.

Modern Sunday laws had developed substantial secular justifications. Governments and labor organizations supported common rest days to protect health, reduce the pressure of seven-day commercial competition, and provide families and communities a shared time for recreation, visiting, and relief from ordinary work routines.

Maryland’s extensive exceptions for food, recreation, beaches, amusement parks, alcohol in some places, and even some games of chance showed that the current scheme was not designed simply to enforce religious observance. The Court accepted the Maryland Court of Appeals’ conclusion that the legislative plan was to require a day of rest while permitting necessary and recreational activities.

A one-day-in-seven rule allowing every person or business to choose its own day off would not necessarily achieve the State’s goal of a shared day of quiet and family or community activity. Maryland could reasonably choose Sunday because it was already the day most people treated as distinct from ordinary commercial life, regardless of the reason that custom had developed.

The Court distinguished direct state aid or coercion of religious practice, such as religious instruction in public schools, from a secular labor and commercial regulation that happened to coincide with the practices of predominant religious groups. The Court emphasized that a Sunday law could still violate the Establishment Clause if its purpose or operative effect were shown to use state coercion to aid religion.