Adkins v. Children's Hospital

261 U.S. 525 (1923), argued 14 Mar. 1923, decided 9 Apr. 1923 by vote of 5 to 3; Sutherland for the Court, Taft and Holmes in dissent, Brandeis not participating. Reflecting widespread popular acceptance of laissez‐faire economics, the Supreme Court in the 1890s fashioned the liberty of contract doctrine, which affirmed the constitutional right of private parties to enter contractual arrangements. This doctrine curtailed the power of government to interfere with contractual freedom through regulatory legislation. The landmark Adkins decision exemplified the Court's commitment to laissez‐faire principles and the liberty of contract.

At issue in Adkins was a 1918 federal law establishing a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia. The announced purpose of the act was to protect the health and morals of women from detrimental living conditions caused by inadequate wages. Felix Frankfurter, a future Supreme Court justice, appeared as counsel in support of the legislation. He sought to justify the measure as a valid exercise of the police power to ameliorate the handicaps experienced by women in the marketplace. Children's Hospital, on the other hand, contended that the statute was a price‐fixing law that unconstitutionally interfered with the liberty of contract for employment.

Justice George Sutherland, speaking for the majority, invalidated the minimum wage law as a violation of the liberty of contract guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Although Sutherland recognized that the terms of contracts could be regulated in certain situations, he stressed that “freedom of contract is … the general rule and restraint the exception” (p. 546). Distinguishing wage laws from measures limiting the hours of labor, he reasoned that the minimum wage law arbitrarily cast on employers a welfare function that belonged to society at large. In view of the Nineteenth Amendment and changes in the legal position of women, Sutherland further maintained that women could not be subjected to greater restrictions on their liberty of contract than men. He argued that the minimum wage law disregarded the “moral requirement implicit in every contract of employment” that the value of labor and wages should be equivalent (p. 558). In short, wages must be ascertained by the operation of the free market. (See Labor.)

In a forceful dissent, Chief Justice William Howard Taft asserted that lawmakers could limit the freedom of contract under the police power to regulate the maximum hours or minimum wages of women. He cautioned that the justices should not strike down regulatory statutes simply because they deem particular economic policies to be unwise. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes questioned the constitutional basis of the liberty of contract doctrine. Noting that “pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do some things that they want to do,” Holmes pointed out that the Court had sustained many laws that limited contractual freedom (p. 568). He argued that legislators might reasonably conclude that fixing minimum wages for female employees would improve their health and morals.

The Adkins decision was a striking expression of laissez‐faire constitutionalism. It demonstrated the Court's conviction that wage and price determinations were at the heart of the free‐market economy and must be secured against unwarranted legislative interference. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Supreme Court frequently cited Adkins for a broad interpretation of the liberty of contract doctrine. In particular, the justices invoked Adkins to overturn several state minimum wage laws.

As a consequence of the Great Depression and the political triumph of the New Deal, the Supreme Court in 1937 abandoned laissez‐faire constitutionalism and permitted both federal and state governments to play a major role in directing economic life. The Court's new outlook was revealed in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), in which the justices narrowly upheld a Washington minimum wage law for women and minors and overruled Adkins. The decision in West Coast Hotel marked the effective end of the liberty of contract doctrine as a constitutional norm.

Michael J. Phillips, The Lochner Court, Myth and Reality: Substantive Due Process from the 1890s to the 1930s (2001).

See also Contract, Freedom of.

— James W. Ely, Jr.

Adkins v. Children'S Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923), is a major precedent in the development of liberty of contract and substantive due process. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court held that the due process clauses of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments protect the rights of persons to enter into contracts (Allgeyer v. Louisiana). Lochner v. New York (1905) extended this to contracts of employment, and restricted the states' police powers to regulate hours of employment previously acknowledged in Holden v. Hardy (1898). But in Muller v. Oregon (1908), the court accepted state regulation of female employees' hours, and in Bunting v. Oregon (1917) it upheld state regulation of both hours and overtime wages, for both men and women. Knowledgeable observers concluded that Bunting had implicitly overruled Lochner. Adkins nevertheless held a District of Columbia minimum-wage statute unconstitutional. In his first major opinion, Justice George Sutherland held that "freedom of contract is…the general rule and restraint the exception." Regulation of women's wages fit none of the hitherto recognized categories of permissible state regulation, and violated "the moral requirement implicit in every contract of employment" that wages reflect exactly the value of the worker's contribution. Sutherland stated that ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 put women and men on a footing of equality, thereby implicitly condemning Muller. He denounced the policy of minimum-wage laws for forcing employers to shoulder welfare responsibilities. In dissents, Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Oliver Wendell Holmes criticized the majority for substituting their policy preferences for the legislatures'. Holmes ridiculed the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment had eliminated differences between men and women, and questioned the idea of liberty of contract itself as a constraint on the police power.

Adkins inhibited regulation of women's hours and wages until it was overruled by West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).

Bibliography

Arkes, Hadley. The Return of George Sutherland: Restoring a Jurisprudence of Natural Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Warmly supportive of the decision and its author.

Powell, Thomas Reed. "The Judiciality of Minimum-Wage Legislation." Harvard Law Review 37 (1924): 545–573. A now classic contemporary condemnation of the decision.

—William M. Wiecek

Adkins v. Children's Hospital
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued March 14, 1923 Decided April 9, 1923
Full case name: Adkins et al., constituting the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia v. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia; same v. Willie Lyons Citations: 261 U.S. 525; 43 S. Ct. 394; 67 L. Ed. 785; 1923 U.S. LEXIS 2588; 24 A.L.R. 1238 Prior history: Dismissed, D.C. Supreme Court; reversed and remanded, 284 F. 613 (D.C. Cir. 1922) Subsequent history: None
Holding
Minimum wage law for women violated the due process right to contract freely. D.C. Court of Appeals affirmed.
Court membership
Chief Justice: William Howard Taft Associate Justices: Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Edward Terry Sanford
Case opinions
Majority by: Sutherland Joined by: McKenna, Van Devanter, McReynolds, Butler Dissent by: Taft Joined by: Sanford Dissent by: Holmes Brandeis_ took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. V, XIX; Minimum Wage Law of the District of Columbia, 40 Stat. 960 (1918)
Overruled by
West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)

Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923), is a Supreme Court opinion holding that federal minimum wage legislation for women was an unconstitutional infringement of liberty of contract, as protected by the Fifth Amendment. The Court opinion, by Justice Sutherland, held that previous decisions (Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908) and Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U.S. 426 (1917)) did not overrule the holding in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), protecting freedom of contract. The Muller cases, Sutherland noted, addressed maximum hours; this case addressed a minimum wage. The maximum hour laws left the parties free to negotiate about wages, unlike this law. Moreover, the minimum wage artificially restricts the employer’s side of the negotiation. The Court argued that if legislatures were permitted to set minimum wage laws, they would be permitted to set maximum wage laws.

Chief Justice Taft, dissenting, argued that there was no distinction between minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws, considering that these essentially both add up to restrictions on the contract. He noted that Lochner’s limitations had appeared to be overruled in Muller and Bunting.

Justice Holmes, also dissenting, noted that there were plenty of other constraints on contract (e.g. blue laws, usury laws, etc.). He cited the reasonable person standard he had put forth in Lochner: if a reasonable person could see a power in the Constitution, the Court ought to defer to legislation using that power.

Adkins was overturned in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court Cases

References

• Zimmerman, J. G. (1991). The jurisprudence of equality: the women's minimum wage, the first Equal Rights Amendment, and Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1905-1923. The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1. (Jun., 1991), pp. 188-225.

External links

• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com
• Adkins v. Children's Hospital

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