In 1933, in response to a large number of home foreclosures, Minnesota, like many other states at the time,[5] extended the time available for mortgagors to redeem their mortgages from foreclosure. The appellee owned a lot in Minneapolis that was in the foreclosure process. The extension had the effect of enlarging the mortgagor's estate contrary to the terms of the contract.
The Supreme Court upheld the statute, reasoning that the emergency conditions created by the Great Depression "may justify the exercise of [the State's] continuing and dominant protective power notwithstanding interference with contracts."[6]Blaisdell was the first time the court extended the emergency exception to purely economic emergencies.
While the Blaisdell judgment itself might have been held to apply only in limited instances of economic emergency, by the late 1930s the emergency exception doctrine had expanded dramatically.[7]
Blaisdell trumpeted a false liberation from the constitutional text that has paved the way for massive government intervention that undermines the security of private transactions. Today the police power exception has come to eviscerate the contracts clause.[2]
^Burch, Alan R. (1999). "Purchasing the Right to Govern: Winstar and the Need to Reconceptualize the Law of Regulatory Agreements". Kentucky Law Journal. 88: 245, 279. ISSN0023-026X.
^Arkes, Hadley (1999). "On the Novelties of an Old Constitution: Settled Principles and Unsettling Surprises". American Journal of Jurisprudence. 44: 15–42. doi:10.1093/ajj/44.1.15. ISSN0065-8995.
^Wright, Fred (2005). "The Effect of New Deal Real Estate Residential Finance and Foreclosure Policies Made in Response to the Real Estate Conditions of the Great Depression". Alabama Law Review. 57: 231, 240–241. ISSN0002-4279.
^Butler, Henry N.; Ribstein, Larry E. (1999). "Regulating Corporate Takeovers: State Anti-takeover Statutes and the Contract Clause". University of Cincinnati Law Review. 57: 611, 627. ISSN0009-6881.
Fliter, John A. and Derek S. Hoff (2012). Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Works related to Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell at Wikisource
