User:Ex Parte/Connally rewrite

Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385 (1926), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case which determined that the Constitution's Due Process Clauses require criminal laws to be clear enough that a common person can understand (without guessing) what the law prohibits or compels. The Court reasoned, in the majority opinion for its unanimous judgment, that this rule against vagueness was "well recognized" and consistent with "ordinary notions of fair play and the settled rules of law" and, accordingly, that it was protected by the guarantee of due process. When a criminal law fails to provide a clear mandate, under the Court's holding, that law is unenforceable.

The case concerned Sections 7255 and 7257 of the Compiled Oklahoma Statutes, which together made it a crime for a government contractor to fail to pay their employees at least "the current rate of per diem wages in the locality where the work is performed." The Court concluded that this requirement was too indeterminate to pass muster under the Due Process Clause. The "current rate" of wages was a moving target that depended on a full complex of factors, including the specific type of work performed and the efficiency of the workers. On a given day, it would not be possible to figure out with any certainty what wage the law actually required. The Court also took issue with the law's "use of the qualifying word 'locality.'" What was "local" was something that reasonable people could disagree on, meaning that the law again failed to provide a definite standard.

Since the time of the Court's decision, the vagueness doctrine—as it became known—has evolved into an important feature of American constitutional law. The doctrine has been applied to a wide variety of circumstances and has even been cited in the courts of foreign states. The Court's reasoning has also been extrapolated from its original criminal context to other areas of law, such as civil litigation and deportation. These innovations in the use of the vagueness doctrine have dramatically furthered its reach.

Although the Court's judgment in this case was unanimous, not every Justice signed on to the majority's use of the vagueness doctrine. Justices Oliver W. Holmes and Louis Brandeis concurred in the judgment solely on the grounds that the wages paid by the respondent passed muster "under any criterion" which the challenged law might require. As such, the two Justices did not think it was necessary to consider the vagueness issue in this case.

Legal background
The laws challenged in this case were enacted as part of a national trend favoring legislative regulation of wages and hours, both public and private. Such wage and labor laws, which took a variety of forms, all had the common purpose of establishing minimum standards that employers would be required to meet. One form of wage law (a current-rate requirement) proved particularly controversial because it was thought to be especially indeterminate. Those laws did not identify a specific wage that must be paid, leaving many employers to worry that there was no bright line that they could follow. To be safe from prosecution, employers would have to err on the side of higher wages, which could prove to be a potentially costly approach. These concerns gave rise to the constitutional challenge against Oklahoma's current-rate law.

Current-rate laws
Current-rate laws were not unique to Oklahoma. To the contrary, such provisions could be found across the United States. Among the states which had adopted current-rate provisions similar to Oklahoma's were: Arizona, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. In general, and as was the case with Oklahoma's current-rate law, these provisions required that workmen receive "not less than the current rate of per diem wages in the locality where the work is performed." The main difference between this type of wage law and