ived the period of arbitrary laws by Parliament or Colonial
legislatures for regulating all trades and callings. Such are those of
the keepers of inns, cabs and grist mills. * * * (3) Businesses which
though not public at their inception may be fairly said to have risen to
be such and have become subject in consequence to some government
regulation. They have come to hold such a peculiar relation to the
public that this is superimposed upon them. In the language of the
cases, the owner by devoting his business to the public use, in effect
grants the public an interest in that use and subjects himself to public
regulation to the extent of that interest although the property
continues to belong to its private owner and to be entitled to
protection accordingly."

Through application of this now outmoded formula the Court found it
possible to sustain State laws regulating charges made by grain
elevators,[176] stockyards,[177] and tobacco warehouses,[178] and fire
insurance rates[179] and commissions paid to fire insurance agents.[180]
Voided, because the businesses sought to be controlled were deemed to be
not so affected, were State statutes fixing the price at which gasoline
may be sold,[181] or at which ticket brokers may resell tickets
purchased from theatres,[182] and limiting competition in the
manufacture and sale of ice through the withholding of licenses to
engage therein.[183]

Nebbia _v._ New York

In upholding, by a vote of five-to-four, a depression induced New York
statute fixing prices at which fluid milk might be sold, the Court, in
1934, finally shelved the concept of "a business affected with a public
interest."[184] Older decisions, insofar as they negatived a power to
control prices in businesses found not "to be clothed with a public use"
were now reviewed as resting, "finally, upon the basis that the
requirements of due process were not met because the laws were found
arbitrary in their operation and effect. Price control, like any other
form of regulation, is [now] unconstitutional only if arbitrary,
discriminatory, or demonstrably irrelevant to the policy the legislature
is free to adopt, and hence an unnecessary and unwarranted interference
with individual liberty." Conceding that "the dairy industry is not, in
the accepted sense of the phrase, a public utility"; that is, a
"business affected with a public interest," the Court in effect declared
that price control henceforth is to be viewed mer