CONSTITUTIONAL LAW - DUE PROCESS AND THE FRAZIER-LEMKE ACTS

Authors

Henry Earnest Halladay, University of Michigan Law School

Abstract

Recent decisions involving the constitutional validity of the first and second Frazier-Lemke Acts have again raised the old spectre of due process. The questions involved related to the power of the Federal Government to regulate the rights, duties, and liabilities existent between debtors and creditors in the field of farm mortgages under the bankruptcy power. To forego an extended discussion of the history of due process as a limitation on governmental fiat, let it suffice to say that the concept, which began with Magna Carta ran through early definitions in the United States limiting it to procedural matters and attempts to describe its boundaries by the so-called process of "judicial inclusion and exclusion," appears today to relate to the reasonableness of the regulation, determinable by a consideration of the evils which are designed to be prevented and the manner in which the legislature has gone about preventing them. Fundamentally, of course, this type of approach may lend itself as well to flexibility as to judicial veto of supposedly progressive legislation. However this may be as a matter of contemporary polity, no field of legislation has been quite so clearly in step with times of economic stress as that having to do with the relations of debtor and creditor, or more specifically, with bankruptcy.

Recommended Citation

Henry E. Halladay, CONSTITUTIONAL LAW - DUE PROCESS AND THE FRAZIER-LEMKE ACTS, 35 Mich. L. Rev. 1130 (1937).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol35/iss7/6