Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, dissenting.
The Court this day decides that when Congress prescribes for a limited Governmental purpose, enforceable by appropriate sanctions, the form in which some records are to be kept, not by corporations but by private individuals, in what in everyday language is a private and not a Governmental business, Congress thereby takes such records out of the protection of the Constitution against self-incrimination and search and seizure. Decision of constitutional issues is at times unavoidable. But in this case the Court so decides when it is not necessary. The Court makes a drastic break with the past in disregard of the settled principle of constitional adjudication not to pass on a constitutional issue-and here a grave one involving basic civil liberties-if a construction that does no violence to the English language permits its avoidance. This statute clearly permits it. Instead, the Court goes on the assumption that an immunity statute must be equated with the privilege, although only recently the Court attributed to Congress a gratuitous grant of immunity where concededly the Constitution did not require it, under circumstances far less persuasive than the statutory language and the policy underlying it. See United States v. Monia, 317 U.S. 424, 63 S.Ct. 409, 87 L.Ed. 376.
Instead of respecting 'serious doubts of constitutionality' by giving what is at least an allowable construction to the Price Control Act which legitimately avoids these doubts, the Court goes outo f its way to make a far-reaching pronouncement on a provision of the Bill of Rights. In an almost cursory fashion, the Court needlessly decides that all records which Congress may require individuals to keep in the conduct of their affairs, because they fall within some regulatory power of Government, become 'public records' and thereby, ipso facto, fall outside the protection of the Fifth Amendment that no person 'shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.'
In reaching out for a constitutional adjudication, especially one of such moment, when a statutory solution avoiding it lay ready at hand, the Court has disregarded its constantly professed principle for the proper approach toward congressional legislation. 'When the validity of an act of the Congress is drawn in question, and even if a serious doubt of constitutionality is raised, it is a cardinal principle that this Court will first ascertain whether a construction of the statute is fairly possible by which the question may be avoided.' Crowell v. Benson, 285 U.S. 22, 62, 52 S.Ct. 285, 296, 76 L.Ed. 598, quoted by Mr. Justice Brandeis with supporting citations in Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288, 348, note 8, 56 S.Ct. 466, 484, 80 L.Ed. 688. And see, generally, for duty to avoid constitutional adjudication, Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U.S. 549, 568 et seq., 67 S.Ct. 1409, 1419, 91 L.Ed. 1666.
Departure from a basic canon of constitutional adjudication is singularly uncalled for in a case such as this, where the statute not only permits a construction avoiding constitutional considerations but on fair reading requires it.
In conferring powers of investigation upon the Administrator, Congress designed to secure the promptest disclosure of the books and records of the millions of private enterprises subjected to the regulations of the Office of Price Administration. The would contradict that vital aim to attribute to Congress the conflicting purpose of hampering the free flow of knowledge contained in businessmen's books by inviting controversies regarding still undetermined claims of privilege under the Fifth Amendment, in the absence of an expression of such propose made much more manifest than the broad language of § 202(g) which conferred immunity for the very purpose of avoiding such controversies.