Record
Court opinion
1953-12-07
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
United States v. Five Gambling Devices, 346 U.S. 441 (1953)
Supreme Court decision of 7 December 1953 affirming the dismissal of two dealer indictments and a forfeiture libel under the gambling-device act of 2 January 1951, because the Act lacked the explicitness to sustain the Government's pleadings.
- Date
- 1953-12-07
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- No. 14 (and Nos. 40, 41)
- Rights
- Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, a federal work in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. CourtListener (Free Law Project) hosts the text; it is not the source institution.
Argued October 12, 1953; decided December 7, 1953. Justice Jackson announced the judgment and an opinion joined by Justices Frankfurter and Minton. The three cases were “unsuccessful attempts, by two different procedures, to enforce the view of the Department of Justice as to construction of the Act of January 2, 1951,” which, he wrote, “prohibits shipment of gambling machines in interstate commerce but includes incidental registration and reporting provisions.” Two were indictments of dealers for failing to register with the Attorney General and report their sales; the third was a libel to forfeit five machines “seized by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents from a country club in Tennessee.”
The plurality wrote: “We think the Act does not have the explicitness necessary to sustain the pleadings which the Government has drafted in these cases.” The order was “Judgments affirmed.” Justice Black wrote separately for affirmance; Justice Clark, with whom the Chief Justice and Justices Reed and Burton joined, dissented.
The Act is the Johnson Act, 64 Stat. 1134, filed in the Laws section. The conference report on the bill and Attorney General McGrath’s 1951 report on registrations under it are filed in this section.
