Lochner v. New York

198 U.S. 45 (1905), argued 23–24 Feb. 1905, decided 17 Apr. 1905 by vote of 5 to 4; Peckham for the Court, Harlan and Holmes in dissent. In 1905 the Supreme Court invalidated a New York regulation limiting the hours of labor in bakeries to ten per day or sixty per week. At the turn of the century it was not uncommon for journeymen bakers to work more than one hundred hours per week. In cities, bakeries were usually located in the cellar of a tenement house. The combination of long hours exposed to flour dust, plus the dampness and extremes of hot and cold in tenement cellars, was thought to have an ill effect on workers' health. Because this unsanitary environment affected both the product and the workers, the state in 1895 enacted legislation to regulate sanitary conditions as well as reform working conditions and reduce the hours of labor prevalent in the industry.

Proponents of shorter hours statutes had for decades been arguing that such legislation was needed to promote citizenship, improve family life, and protect health and safety. But mostly shorter hours laws were seen as a means to assure fairness for workers who were in no position to bargain for equitable conditions of employment. Opponents based their arguments on theories of social Darwinism and laissez‐faire economics. To them such legislation represented unwarranted governmental intrusion into the marketplace.

Political conditions in late nineteenth‐century New York did not favor laws regulating business and industry. State government was dominated by a business oriented Republican political machine headed by boss Thomas Collier Platt. Large cities were controlled by Democratic machines like Tammany Hall. Organized labor, the most likely proponent of such laws, represented only a small portion of the labor force. State regulation of the baking industry was made possible only when other reformers took an interest. Journalist Edward Marshall observed the squalor of New York City's cellar bakeries while serving on the Tenement House Committee of 1894. Beginning with an editorial in the New York Press, he led a crusade to clean up the industry and improve conditions of employment. Marshall was able to convince mainstream urban reformers that problems in the baking industry were linked to tenement reform and social reform generally. Meanwhile, Henry Weismann, an opportunistic leader of the Bakers' Union, seized the moment by getting his union behind the proposed law. Marshall's connection with urban mainstream reformers, however, provided the clout needed to push bakeshop regulation through the legislature. With their backing, the Bakeshop Act unanimously passed both houses of the legislature and was signed by the governor on 2 May 1895.

The people hurt most by the new legislation were master bakers or “boss bakers.” These were owners of the small shops that made up the bread‐baking industry. Most employed fewer than five workers and operated on a small margin of profit. Joseph Lochner owned this type of shop in Utica, New York. In 1902 he was fined fifty dollars for allowing an employee to work more than sixty hours in one week. Lochner appealed his conviction to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, where he lost by a vote of 3 to 2. He then appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, where he lost again in a 4‐to‐3 ruling. Ironically, former labor leader Henry Weismann came to his aid. After a falling out with the Bakers' Union, Weismann had opened two bakeshops and become an active member of the Master Bakers' Association. He also studied law. With the help of attorney Frank Harvey Field, Weismann took Lochner's appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lochner claimed the Bakeshop Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving him of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Due process was originally thought of only as a guarantee that laws would be enforced through correct judicial procedure, but the concept changed drastically in the late nineteenth century. Under a theory called “substantive due process” courts assumed the power to examine the content of legislation as well as the means by which it was enforced. In the late 1880s the doctrine was employed successfully to overrule state attempts at regulating railroads. But it carried the broader implication that the Court could invalidate any type of state economic or reform legislation determined to be in conflict with a right protected by the Constitution.

In Lochner's case, the right arguably infringed by New York's workday ceiling was “liberty of contract” (see Contract, Freedom of). This was not a right written into the Constitution. Rather, like substantive due process, it evolved through judicial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Stephen Field, dissenting in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), first advanced the idea that the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause included “the right to pursue an ordinary trade or calling.” With subsequent decisions expanding the idea, it became the means by which the judicial supervision envisioned by proponents of substantive due process could be applied to laws regulating the employer‐employee relationship. Laws such as those requiring that wages be paid in cash rather than company scrip or setting standards for computing miners' pay were invalidated. By the 1880s this doctrine—liberty of contract—was being used by state courts to suggest that the Constitution protected a right to enter into any agreement free from unreasonable governmental interference. However, the U.S. Supreme Court had applied the theory only once, in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897).

Justice Rufus Peckham, who wrote Allgeyer, also wrote Lochner. He more firmly entrenched the doctrine of liberty of contract into constitutional law by ruling that New York's attempt to regulate hours of labor in bakeries “necessarily interfered with the right of contract between the employer and the employee.” Peckham held that the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment included the right to purchase and sell labor. Therefore, any statute interfering with it would be invalid “unless there are circumstances which exclude that right.”

Liberty of contract was recognized, but it was not absolute. The protection it provided had to be balanced against the legitimate exercise of the state's power to govern. This authority was referred to as the police power of the states. As originally understood, the phrase was used to simply distinguish the function of state governments from that of the federal government. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was transformed into an ill‐defined limit on the power of states to govern within their own sphere of authority. When interpreted broadly as the duty to enhance the general welfare, police power could accommodate most any type of law. But Peckham had a narrow conception of police power in mind when he wrote the Lochner decision. For him only legislation designed to protect public morals, health, safety, or peace and good order represented a legitimate exercise of a state's police power.

In the Lochner case this became a question of whether the Bakeshop Act was necessary to protect the public health or health of bakers. In Holden v. Hardy (1898), the Court upheld an eight‐hour day for workers in mines and smelters. There the danger was obvious. But the claim that baking was an unhealthy trade was not so graphic. Reformers maintained that long hours of labor in bakeshops created a likelihood that workers would develop respiratory ailments such as “consumption.” Peckham rejected this idea outright. Taking judicial notice of a “common understanding” that baking was never considered an unhealthy trade, he concluded that the Bakeshop Act was not a legitimate exercise of the police power and was therefore unconstitutional.

Dissenting, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued that the majority started its reasoning from the wrong presumption. Harlan believed that, when the validity of a statute was questioned on constitutional grounds, a presumption ought to exist in favor of the legislature's determination. In his words, legislative enactments should be enforced “unless they are plainly and palpably beyond all question in violation of the fundamental law of the Constitution” (p. 68). Harlan did not disagree that liberty of contract applied to this situation. Nor did he disagree that concern for worker health and safety would be the only legitimate justification for the Bakeshop Act. Harlan was simply more willing than Peckham and the majority to recognize that there was evidence supporting that claim. The very fact that there was room for debate should have laid to rest all arguments that the law was unconstitutional. The weighing of claims regarding health conditions in the industry was a matter of legislative discretion.

Taking a position similar to Harlan's, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained that a state law should be upheld unless a rational person would necessarily admit that it would infringe upon fundamental principles of American laws and traditions (see Fundamental Rights). But Holmes's famous dissent also criticized the majority's decision to expand liberty of contract and its narrow view of the police power. Recognizing that these doctrines reflected the theories of social Darwinism and laissez‐faire economics, Holmes directly attacked the underlying premise of the decision. “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” he wrote. “It is made for people of fundamentally differing views” (p. 74). For Holmes, the opinion was dangerous because it represented the unwarranted infusion into the Constitution of a new fundamental right.

Peckham claimed his opinion did not substitute the judgment of the Court for that of the legislature on the matter of health in the baking industry. But many observers thought this was exactly what he had done. The Bakeshop Act had passed the state legislature unanimously. One hundred and nineteen elected representatives had voted in favor of the workday ceiling. Even seven of the twelve appellate judges who had previously ruled on Lochner's case voted to uphold the law. Critics maintained that the Court had no special knowledge of the industry and that it was in no better position than the state legislature to determine if the trade was unhealthy. And, although it was not irrefutable that the baking trade was unhealthy, ample statistical support for that contention was included in the record before the Supreme Court.

The usurpation of legislative authority and glaring subjectivity of Peckham's ruling brought the case into the limelight. In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt pointed at Lochner when denouncing the judiciary for erecting insurmountable obstacles in the path of needed social reform (see Judicial Activism). Critics found it frustrating that the opinion of one appointed judge could reverse the reforms adopted by elected legislatures. For the next three decades, Lochner symbolized judicial misuse of power.

The specific outcome was not the most important thing about the Lochner case. It was a setback, but not a fatal blow to the shorter hours movement. By 1912 collective bargaining gave the union bakers of New York the ten‐hour day. In Muller v. Oregon (1908) the Court upheld a work‐day limit for women, and in Bunting v. Oregon (1917) it gave its blessing to a ten‐hour ceiling for adult males as well as women and children working in most industries. (See Gender.)

Of more lasting importance was the rationale adopted by the Lochner majority. It made the Court the overseer of all kinds of state regulatory legislation. Between 1905 and 1937, when the Court rejected this rationale in *West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), countless subsequent attempts to reform social and economic conditions were challenged on the precedent of Lochner. Many of these state regulations were upheld. But state statutes such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, regulations of the banking, insurance, and transportation industries were vetoed by the Court. Enough reform statutes were invalidated that the history of constitutional law during that time is commonly called “the Lochner era.”

The Court is said to have made the mistake in Lochner of becoming involved in formulating policy rather than interpreting the law. As Holmes pointed out, it also embraced one theory of the function of government at the expense of all others. Judicial construction alone had imbedded that theory into the fundamental law of the land. For these reasons the case still stands as a symbol of unrestrained judicial activism.

See also Due Process, Substantive.

Bibliography

• Felix Frankfurter, Hours of Labor and Realism in Constitutional Law, Harvard Law Review 23 (1916): 353.
• Paul Kens, Judicial Power and Reform Politics: The Anatomy of Lochner v. New York (1990).
• Bernard H. Siegan, Rehabilitating Lochner, San Diego Law Review 22 (1985): 453.
• Cass R. Sunstein, Lochner's Legacy, Columbia Law Review 87 (1987): 873

— Paul Kens

• 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
• Vote: 5–4
• For the Court: Peckham
• Dissenting: Harlan, White, Day, and Holmes

Joseph Lochner owned a small bakery shop in Utica, New York. In 1901 the state charged him with violating the Bakeshop Act, a New York law that banned bakers from working more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. Lochner had required an employee, Aman Schmitter, to work more than the 60 hours per week permitted by the state law. The Oneida County Court convicted Lochner, and he appealed his case. After losing in the New York State appellate courts, Lochner appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Issue

Lochner said that the Bakeshop Act violated the 14th Amendment because it deprived him of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Lochner claimed that the Bakeshop Act unconstitutionally interfered with his freedom to make a contract with his workers about pay and hours of work. State officials countered that the Bakeshop Act was intended to protect the health and well-being of workers against employers who might otherwise exploit them.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Rufus Peckham, writing for the Court, said the Bakeshop Act was unconstitutional because it took away “the right of the individual to liberty of person and freedom of contract.” Under the 14th Amendment, Peckham argued, individuals were free to purchase and sell labor. Therefore, any state law interfering with this “liberty of contract” would be unconstitutional “unless there are circumstances which exclude that right.”

This right was not stated in the Constitution. Rather, the Court “found” this right through its interpretation of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, which says that no state government shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Thus, the Court developed the doctrine of substantive due process, by which it claimed the power to examine the content of laws to determine their fairness. In this way, the Court decides whether laws violate any fundamental rights of individuals, such as rights the Court believes to be associated with “life, liberty, or property.” This doctrine of substantive due process was a departure from the traditional understanding of due process solely as government procedures that follow rules of fairness.

Dissent

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sharply disagreed with the Lochner decision and the doctrine of substantive due process upon which it was based. He argued that the Bakeshop Act was a “reasonable” regulation of private business in behalf of a compelling public interest, as determined by a majority of the people's representatives in the state government.

According to Holmes, the Court had no authority to strike down laws made by legislative majorities on the basis of the personal opinions of the justices, which they read into the Constitution through the specious doctrine of substantive due process. Holmes believed that “liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment” was “perverted” when “held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion” (the legislative majority) unless a “rational and fair man” would conclude that the law and tradition. Holmes charged that the Court overstepped the boundaries of its judicial powers by using substantive due process to substitute its opinion of wise social policy for that of the popularly elected state legislature.

Significance

The Lochner decision did not stop the movement for legal regulation of the workplace to protect employees. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), for example, the Court upheld a state law limiting the number of hours per day that women could work. And in Bunting v. Oregon (1917), the Court sustained a 10-hour workday limit for male workers. However, the Court continued to use the Lochner decision as the basis for overseeing legislative regulations of businesses. In 1937, however, the Court overruled Lochner v. New York with its decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937). In this case, the Court upheld a state law regulating minimum wages for children and women workers.

See also Due process of law; Muller v. Oregon; West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish

Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). Lochner, proprietor of a Utica, New York, bakery, had been arrested, tried, and convicted for violation of a state law setting maximum work hours for workers in the baking industry at ten hours per day and sixty hours per week. Seven years earlier, in Holden v. Hardy, the Supreme Court had upheld a Utah law regulating hours for workers in dangerous industries. But in Lochner, the Court argued that such protections were unnecessary in industries that required care in cleanliness and sanitation. The Court, rejecting the New York law's stated intent to safe-guard public health, held the act void as a violation of freedom of contract.

Bibliography

Gillman, Howard. The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

Kens, Paul. Judicial Power and Reform Politics: The Anatomy of Lochner v. New York. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990.

———. Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

In Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S. Ct. 539, 49 L. Ed. 937 (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law restricting the hours employees could work in the baking industry, as a violation of the freedom of contract guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This seemingly minor decision spawned a new era in constitutional interpretation.

Constitutional law is often divided into three eras, the center of which is Lochner. In the pre-Lochner era (1789-1870), courts interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to have primarily a procedural content that protected persons against arbitrary governmental deprivations of life, liberty, and property. This procedural right meant that individuals were entitled to sufficient notice and a fair hearing before the government could take harmful action against them. Courts reviewed only the manner in which a particular law infringed on a substantive right, without evaluating the importance of the right or the severity of the infringement.

During the Lochner era (1870-1937), courts interpreted the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to have a substantive content that protected from governmental intrusion certain economic and property interests, such as the right of employers and employees to determine the terms and conditions of their employment relationship. (Though Lochner was decided in 1905, prior cases going back to 1870 contributed to Lochner and are included in the Lochner era.)

The post-Lochner era (1937-present) is marked by decreased constitutional protection for economic and property rights, and increased recognition of "fundamental" constitutional rights that protect minorities from discrimination, safeguard the interests of criminal defendants, and delineate a sphere of private conduct upon which the state may not encroach.

The Lochner era was an outgrowth of the U.S. industrial revolution. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the output of manufactured goods tripled, and the value of those goods soared from $3 billion to over $13 billion. The national labor force kept pace during this period, growing from 13 million workers to 19 million. Along with the growth of industry came a large disparity in the wealth and working conditions of U.S. citizens. Although some business proprietors were working fewer hours and making more money, many of their employees were working more hours in unhealthy conditions for scant wages. The bakers of New York were one group of such workers.

New York bakers at this time reportedly worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in a confined and uncomfortable environment. This lifestyle left little time for rest, causing some bakers to live in their kitchen and sleep at their workbench. A number of bakers died at an early age, and others contracted debilitating diseases. In 1895 the New York state legislature unanimously passed the Bakeshop Act, which attempted to address these problems by limiting the working hours of bakers to ten a day and sixty a week.

In 1902 Joseph Lochner, who owned a small bakery in Utica, was fined $50 for permitting an employee to work more than sixty hours in a week. During the trial Lochner offered no defense, and was convicted. On appeal he challenged the constitutionality of the Bakeshop Act, claiming that it interfered with his right to pursue a lawful trade. The state defended the statute by arguing that it represented a legitimate exercise of its police powers, pursuant to which the legislature may enact laws to preserve and promote the health, safety, and morality of society.

Lochner's claim did not lack precedent. In 1897 the Supreme Court nullified a Louisiana statute that attempted to regulate contracts between state residents and out-of-state insurance companies (Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578, 17 S. Ct. 427, 41 L. Ed. 832 [1897]). Holding that that statute impaired the liberty of contract guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court said that the Louisiana resident had a right "to live and work where he will," "to earn a livelihood by any lawful calling," and to "enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential to … carrying out … the purposes above mentioned."

In addition to this precedent, the general mood of the country also favored Lochner's claim. Despite the universal support for the Bakeshop Act in the New York Legislature, a large number of U.S. citizens were still committed to the idea that in a capitalistic market, a government that governs least governs best (an idea that reflects laissez-faire economics).

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld Lochner's due process claim, striking down the Bakeshop Act as an interference with the right of employers and employees "to make contracts regarding labor upon such terms as they may think best, or upon which they may agree." Writing for the majority, Justice Rufus W. Peckham said that despite statistics indicating that the baking industry was not as healthy as some other trades, the common understanding of the Court suggested otherwise. "The trade of a baker," Peckham wrote, "is not … unhealthy … to such a degree which would authorize the legislature … to cripple the ability of the laborer to support himself and his family."

The Court acknowledged that state governments possess police powers to protect the health and safety of their residents. However, the Court said, a statute must have a direct relation to a material danger that would compromise the public health or the health of employees before it may restrict the hours of labor in any trade or profession. In this case, the Court concluded, the connection between the Bakeshop Act and the health and welfare of New York bakers was too remote.

Two dissenting opinions were written in Lochner, one by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the other by Justice John M. Harlan. Both dissents attacked the majority opinion as judicial activism and extolled the virtues of judicial self-restraint.

Harlan conceded that the Due Process Clause contains a substantive content that protects the liberty of contract. But this liberty, Harlan emphasized, may be circumscribed by state regulations that are calculated to promote the general welfare. Such regulations, Harlan argued, must be sustained by state and federal courts unless they clearly exceed legislative power, bear no substantial relation to societal welfare, or invade rights secured by fundamental law. Harlan concluded that doubts as to the validity of a statute must be resolved in favor of upholding its validity. Applying this standard, Harlan found the Bakeshop Act valid.

Holmes's dissent is considered a classic exposition of judicial self-restraint. As part of the U.S. system of democracy, Holmes said, a majority of adults residing in any state have the "right to embody their opinions in law," even if those opinions are tyrannical or injudicious. It is the judiciary's role in this system to interpret and apply the laws passed by the coordinate branches of government.

The ideas articulated in Holmes's dissenting opinion subsequently became the law of the land when the Supreme Court overruled Lochner in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 378, 57 S. Ct. 578, 81 L. Ed. 703 (1937). Parrish examined the validity of a Washington state statute that established a minimum wage for women. A hotel owner challenged the constitutionality of the statute on the grounds that it violated his liberty of contract guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The hotel owner relied on Lochner, and a series of subsequent cases that nullified various state regulations as inconsistent with the substantive rights protected by the Due Process Clause. One of these cases, Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525, 43 S. Ct. 394, 67 L. Ed. 785 (1923), invalidated a similar minimum wage law in the District of Columbia. But the Supreme Court was no longer persuaded by the rationale underlying Lochner, and ruled that the Washington statute was a reasonable exercise of the state's police powers.

During the thirty-two years between Lochner and Parrish, the United States was confronted by a stock market crash in 1929, which precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to combat some of the more serious problems of the Depression by initiating a host of federal laws known as the New Deal. These events made many U.S. citizens more sympathetic to governmental largesse.

The Supreme Court was also affected by these events. Where Lochner had underscored free-market principles of laissez-faire, Parrish highlighted the unequal bargaining power of employers and employees, as well as the oppression and exploitation of female workers. Freedom of contract, the Supreme Court said in Parrish, is not an absolute and uncontrollable liberty.

Any lingering doubts as to the validity of Lochner were eliminated by the Supreme Court in United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 58 S. Ct. 778, 82 L. Ed. 1234 (1938), which held that courts must sustain state and federal laws that regulate economic interests, unless there is no rational basis to support them. By contrast the Court said that legislation that "appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, … restricts … political processes … [or is] prejudic[ial] against discrete and insular minorities" will be subject to stricter scrutiny.

The Carolene Products case ushered in the post-Lochner era. During this era the Supreme Court has offered little constitutional protection for contract and other property rights. At the same time, the Court has offered increasing protection against legislation that touches upon a fundamental constitutional right or denies a governmental benefit to a suspect class of persons, what the Court in Carolene Products called "discrete and insular minorities."

Fundamental rights include most of the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, as well as the right to privacy, the right to travel, the right to vote, and the right to education. Suspect classes include groups of persons who are discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, national origin, or other "immutable" genetic characteristics (Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 93 S. Ct. 1764, 36 L. Ed. 2d 583 [1973]).

See: Due Process of Law; Jurisprudence; Labor Law; Rational Basis Test; Substantive Law; West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish.

by R. W. Peckham, J. M. Harlan, and O. W. Holmes, Jr., 1905

In a 5 to 4 decision handed down on April 17, 1905, the Supreme Court reversed the rulings of two New York courts in the important case of Lochner v. New York. A New York state law of 1897 had set the hours of bakers at no more than ten a day or sixty a week. Lochner, the owner of a bakery, had been fined $50 for violating the law. The Supreme Court, in declaring the law unconstitutional, ruled that it interfered with the right of free contract under the Fourteenth Amendment, and, furthermore, that it was outside the legal police powers of the state. The following selection comprises portions of three opinions: the dissent of Justice John Harlan, who was joined in it by two other justices; the dissent of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; and the opinion for the majority by Justice Rufus Peckham. The decision dealt a serious blow to social welfare legislation for a generation.

Mr. Justice Peckham. The indictment, it will be seen, charges that the plaintiff in error violated the 110th Section of Article 8, Chapter 415, of the Laws of 1897, known as the Labor Law of the State of New York, in that he wrongfully and unlawfully required and permitted an employee working for him to work more than sixty hours in one week. There is nothing in any of the opinions delivered in this case, either in the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals of the state, which construes the section, in using the word "required," as referring to any physical force being used to obtain the labor of an employee. It is assumed that the word means nothing more than the requirement arising from voluntary contract for such labor in excess of the number of hours specified in the statute.

There is no pretense in any of the opinions that the statute was intended to meet a case of involuntary labor in any form. All the opinions assume that there is no real distinction, so far as this question is concerned, between the words "required" and "permitted." The mandate of the statute that "no employee shall be required or permitted to work" is the substantial equivalent of an enactment that "no employee shall contract or agree to work" more than ten hours per day; and as there is no provision for special emergencies, the statute is mandatory in all cases.

It is not an act merely fixing the number of hours which shall constitute a legal day's work but an absolute prohibition upon the employer, permitting, under any circumstances, more than ten hours work to be done in his establishment. The employee may desire to earn the extra money which would arise from his working more than the prescribed time, but this statute forbids the employer from permitting the employee to earn it.

The statute necessarily interferes with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor in the bakery of the employer. The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the federal Constitution (Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578). Under that provision no state can deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The right to purchase or to sell labor is part of the liberty protected by this amendment, unless there are circumstances which exclude the right.

There are, however, certain powers existing in the sovereignty of each state in the Union somewhat vaguely termed "police powers," the exact description and limitation of which have not been attempted by the courts. Those powers, broadly stated and without, at present, any attempt at a more specific limitation, relate to the safety, health, morals, and general welfare of the public. Both property and liberty are held on such reasonable conditions as may be imposed by the governing power of the state in the exercise of those powers, and with such conditions the Fourteenth Amendment was not designed to interfere. ...

The state, therefore, has power to prevent the individual from making certain kinds of contracts, and in regard to them the federal Constitution offers no protection. If the contract be one which the state, in the legitimate exercise of its police power, has the right to prohibit, it is not prevented from prohibiting it by the Fourteenth Amendment. Contracts in violation of a statute, either of the federal or state government, or a contract to let one's property for immoral purposes, or to do any other unlawful act could obtain no protection from the federal Constitution as coming under the liberty of person or of free contract.

Therefore, when the state, by its legislature, in the assumed exercise of its police powers, has passed an act which seriously limits the right to labor or the right of contract in regard to their means of livelihood between persons who are sui juris (both employer and employee), it becomes of great importance to determine which shall prevail - the right of the individual to labor for such time as he may choose, or the right of the state to prevent the individual from laboring or from entering into any contract to labor beyond a certain time prescribed by the state.

This Court has recognized the existence and upheld the exercise of the police powers of the states in many cases which might fairly be considered as border ones, and it has, in the course of its determination of questions regarding the asserted invalidity of such statutes, on the ground of their violation of the rights secured by the federal Constitution, been guided by rules of a very liberal nature, the application of which has resulted, in numerous instances, in upholding the validity of state statutes thus assailed. ...

It must, of course, be conceded that there is a limit to the valid exercise of the police power by the state. There is no dispute concerning this general proposition. Otherwise the Fourteenth Amendment would have no efficacy and the legislatures of the states would have unbounded power, and it would be enough to say that any piece of legislation was enacted to conserve the morals, the health, or the safety of the people; such legislation would be valid, no matter how absolutely without foundation the claim might be. The claim of the police power would be a mere pretext - become another and delusive name for the supreme sovereignty of the state to be exercised free from constitutional restraint.

This is not contended for. In every case that comes before this Court, therefore, where legislation of this character is concerned and where the protection of the federal Constitution is sought, the question necessarily arises: Is this a fair, reasonable, and appropriate exercise of the police power of the state, or is it an unreasonable, unnecessary, and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family? Of course the liberty of contract relating to labor includes both parties to it. The one has as much right to purchase as the other to sell labor.

This is not a question of substituting the judgment of the Court for that of the legislature. If the act be within the power of the state, it is valid, although the judgment of the Court might be totally opposed to the enactment of such a law. But the question would still remain - Is it within the police power of the state? - and that question must be answered by the Court.

The question whether this act is valid as a labor law, pure and simple, may be dismissed in a few words. There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of person or the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor in the occupation of a baker. There is no contention that bakers as a class are not equal in intelligence and capacity to men in other trades or manual occupations, or that they are not able to assert their rights and care for themselves without the protecting arm of the state, interfering with their independence of judgment and of action. They are in no sense wards of the state.

Viewed in the light of a purely labor law, with no reference whatever to the question of health, we think that a law like the one before us involves neither the safety, the morals, nor the welfare of the public, and that the interest of the public is not in the slightest degree affected by such an act. The law must be upheld, if at all, as a law pertaining to the health of the individual engaged in the occupation of a baker. It does not affect any other portion of the public than those who are engaged in that occupation. Clean and wholesome bread does not depend upon whether the baker works but ten hours per day or only sixty hours a week. The limitation of the hours of labor does not come within the police power on that ground.

It is a question of which of two powers or rights shall prevail - the power of the state to legislate, or the right of the individual to liberty of person and freedom of contract. The mere assertion that the subject relates though but in a remote degree to the public health does not necessarily render the enactment valid. The act must have a more direct relation, as a means to an end, and the end itself must be appropriate and legitimate before an act can be held to be valid which interferes with the general right of an individual to be free in his person and in his power to contract in relation to his own labor. ...

We think the limit of the police power has been reached and passed in this case. There is, in our judgment, no reasonable foundation for holding this to be necessary or appropriate as a health law to safeguard the public health or the health of the individuals who are following the trade of a baker. If this statute be valid, and if, therefore, a proper case is made out in which to deny the right of an individual, sui juris, as employer or employee, to make contracts for the labor of the latter under the protection of the provisions of the federal Constitution, there would seem to be no length to which legislation of this nature might not go. ...

It is impossible for us to shut our eyes to the fact that many of the laws of this character, while passed under what is claimed to be the police power for the purpose of protecting the public health or welfare, are, in reality, passed from other motives. We are justified in saying so when, from the character of the law and the subject upon which it legislates, it is apparent that the public health or welfare bears but the most remote relation to the law. The purpose of a statute must be determined from the natural and legal effect of the language employed; and whether it is or is not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States must be determined from the natural effect of such statutes when put into operation and not from their proclaimed purpose. ...

It is manifest to us that the limitation of the hours of labor as provided for in this section of the statute under which the indictment was found and the plaintiff in error convicted has no such direct relation to and no such substantial effect upon the health of the employee as to justify us in regarding the section as really a health law. It seems to us that the real object and purpose were simply to regulate the hours of labor between the master and his employees (all being men, sui juris) in a private business not dangerous in any degree to morals or in any real and substantial degree to the health of the employees. Under such circumstances the freedom of master and employee to contract with each other in relation to their employment, and in defining the same, cannot be prohibited or interfered with without violating the federal Constitution.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals of New York as well as that of the Supreme Court and of the Country Court of Oneida Country must be reversed and the case remanded to the Country Court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

Mr. Justice Harlan, with whom Mr. Justice White and Mr. Justice Day concurred, dissenting.

While this Court has not attempted to mark the precise boundaries of what is called the police power of the state, the existence of the power has been uniformly recognized, both by the federal and state courts. All the cases agree that this power extends at least to the protection of the lives, the health, and the safety of the public against the injurious exercise by any citizen of his own rights. ...

Speaking generally, the state, in the exercise of its powers, may not unduly interfere with the right of the citizen to enter into contracts that may be necessary and essential in the enjoyment of the inherent rights belonging to everyone, among which rights is the right "to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation." This was declared in Allgeyer v. Louisiana. ... But in the same case it was conceded that the right to contract in relation to persons and property or to do business within a state may be "regulated and sometimes prohibited when the contracts or business conflict with the policy of the state as contained in its statutes." ...

I take it to be firmly established that what is called the liberty of contract may, within certain limits, be subjected to regulations designed and calculated to promote the general welfare or to guard the public health, the public morals, or the public safety. "The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not impart," this Court has recently said, "an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good." Jacobson v. Massachusetts. ...

Granting, then, that there is a liberty of contract which cannot be violated even under the sanction of direct legislative enactment, but assuming, as according to settled law we may assume, that such liberty of contract is subject to such regulations as the state may reasonably prescribe for the common good and the well-being of society, what are the conditions under which the judiciary may declare such regulations to be in excess of legislative authority and void? Upon this point there is no room for dispute; for the rule is universal that a legislative enactment, federal or state, is never to be disregarded or held invalid unless it be, beyond question, plainly and palpably in excess of legislative power. ...

If there be doubt as to the validity of the statute, that doubt must therefore be resolved in favor of its validity, and the courts must keep their hands off, leaving the legislature to meet the responsibility for unwise legislation. If the end which the legislature seeks to accomplish be one to which its power extends and if the means employed to that end, although not the wisest or best, are yet not plainly and palpably unauthorized by law, then the court cannot interfere. In other words, when the validity of a statute is questioned, the burden of proof, so to speak, is upon those who assert it to be unconstitutional (M'Culloch v. Maryland). ...

Let these principles be applied to the present case. By the statute in question it is provided that,

No employee shall be required or permitted to work in a biscuit, bread, or cake bakery or confectionery establishment more than sixty hours in any one week, or more than ten hours in any one day, unless for the purpose of making a shorter work day on the last day of the week; nor more hours in any one week than will make an average of ten hours per day for the number of days during such week in which such employee shall work.

It is plain that this statute was enacted in order to protect the physical well-being of those who work in bakery and confectionery establishments. It may be that the statute had its origin, in part, in the belief that employers and employees in such establishments were not upon an equal footing, and that the necessities of the latter often compelled them to submit to such exactions as unduly taxed their strength. Be this as it may, the statute must be taken as expressing the belief of the people of New York that, as a general rule, and in the case of the average man, labor in excess of sixty hours during a week in such establishments may endanger the health of those who thus labor.

Whether or not this be wise legislation it is not the province of the Court to inquire. Under our systems of government the courts are not concerned with the wisdom or policy of legislation. So that in determining the question of power to interfere with liberty of contract, the Court may inquire whether the means devised by the state are germane to an end which may be lawfully accomplished and have a real or substantial relation to the protection of health as involved in the daily work of the persons, male and female, engaged in bakery and confectionery establishments.

But when this inquiry is entered upon I find it impossible, in view of common experience, to say that there is here no real or substantial relation between the means employed by the state and the end sought to be accomplished by its legislation (Mugler v. Kansas, supra). Nor can I say that the statute has no appropriate or direct connection with that protection to health which each state owes to her citizens (Patterson v. Kentucky, supra); or that it is not promotive of the health of the employees in question (Holden v. Hardy, Lawton v. Steele, supra); or that the regulation prescribed by the state is utterly unreasonable and extravagant or wholly arbitrary (Gundling v. Chicago, supra). Still less can I say that the statute is, beyond question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law (Jacobson v. Massachusetts, supra).

Therefore, I submit that this Court will transcend its functions if it assumes to annul the statute of New York. It must be remembered that this statute does not apply to all kinds of business. It applies only to work in bakery and confectionery establishments, in which, as all know, the air constantly breathed by workmen is not as pure and healthful as that to be found in some other establishments or out-of-doors.

Professor Hirt in his treatise on the "Diseases of the Workers" has said:

The labor of the bakers is among the hardest and most laborious imaginable, because it has to be performed under conditions injurious to the health of those engaged in it. It is hard, very hard work, not only because it requires a great deal of physical exertion in an overheated workshop and during unreasonably long hours, but more so because of the erratic demands of the public, compelling the baker to perform the greater part of his work at night, thus depriving him of an opportunity to enjoy the necessary rest and sleep, a fact which is highly injurious to his health.

Another writer says:

The constant inhaling of flour dust causes inflammation of the lungs and of the bronchial tubes. The eyes also suffer through this dust, which is responsible for the many cases of running eyes among the bakers. The long hours of toil to which all bakers are subjected produce rheumatism, cramps, and swollen legs. The intense heat in the workshops induces the workers to resort to cooling drinks, which together with their habit of exposing the greater part of their bodies to the change in the atmosphere is another source of a number of diseases of various organs. Nearly all bakers are pale-faced and of more delicate health than the workers of other crafts, which is chiefly due to their hard work and their irregular and unnatural mode of living, whereby the power of resistance against disease is greatly diminished. The average age of a baker is below that of other workmen; they seldom live over their fiftieth year, most of them dying between the ages of forty and fifty. ...

We judicially know that the question of the number of hours during which a workman should continuously labor has been, for a long period, and is yet, a subject of serious consideration among civilized peoples and by those having special knowledge of the laws of health. Suppose the statute prohibited labor in bakery and confectionery establishments in excess of eighteen hours each day. No one, I take it, could dispute the power of the state to enact such a statute. But the statute before us does not embrace extreme or exceptional cases. It may be said to occupy a middle ground in respect of the hours of labor. What is the true ground for the state to take between legitimate protection, by legislation, of the public health and liberty of contract is not a question easily solved, nor one in respect of which there is or can be absolute certainty.

There are very few, if any, questions in political economy about which entire certainty may be predicated. One writer on relation of the state to labor has well said: "The manner, occasion, and degree in which the state may interfere with the industrial freedom of its citizens is one of the most debatable and difficult questions of social science." ...

We also judicially know that the number of hours that should constitute a day's labor in particular occupations involving the physical strength and safety of workmen has been the subject of enactments by Congress and by nearly all of the states. Many, if not most, of those enactments fix eight hours as the proper basis of a day's labor.

I do not stop to consider whether any particular view of this economic question presents the sounder theory. What the precise facts are it may be difficult to say. It is enough for the determination of this case, and it is enough for this Court to know, that the question is one about which there is room for debate and for an honest difference of opinion. There are many reasons of a weighty, substantial character, based upon the experience of mankind, in support of the theory that, all things considered, more than ten hours' steady work each day, from week to week, in a bakery or confectionery establishment may endanger the health and shorten the lives of the workmen, thereby diminishing their physical and mental capacity to serve the state and to provide for those dependent upon them. If such reasons exist that ought to be the end of this case, for the state is not amenable to the judiciary, in respect of its legislative enactments, unless such enactments are plainly, palpably, beyond all question inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States.

We are not to presume that the state of New York has acted in bad faith. Nor can we assume that its legislature acted without due deliberation, or that it did not determine this question upon the fullest attainable information and for the common good. We cannot say that the state has acted without reason nor ought we to proceed upon the theory that its action is a mere sham. Our duty, I submit, is to sustain the statute as not being in conflict with the federal Constitution, for the reason - and such is an all-sufficient reason - it is not shown to be plainly and palpably inconsistent with that instrument. Let the state alone in the management of its purely domestic affairs, so long as it does not appear beyond all question that it has violated the federal Constitution. This view necessarily results from the principle that the health and safety of the people of a state are primarily for the state to guard and protect.

I take leave to say that the New York statute, in the particulars here involved, cannot be held to be in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment without enlarging the scope of the amendment far beyond its original purpose and without bringing under the supervision of this Court matters which have been supposed to belong exclusively to the legislative departments of the several states when exerting their conceded power to guard the health and safety of their citizens by such regulations as they in their wisdom deem best. Health laws of every description constitute, said Chief Justice Marshall, a part of that mass of legislation which "embraces everything within the territory of a state, not surrendered to the general government; all which can be most advantageously exercised by the states themselves." (Gibbons v. Ogden). ...

A decision that the New York statute is void under the Fourteenth Amendment will, in my opinion, involve consequences of a far-reaching and mischievous character; for such a decision would seriously cripple the inherent power of the states to care for the lives, health, and well-being of their citizens. Those are matters which can be best controlled by the states. The preservation of the just powers of the states is quite as vital as the preservation of the powers of the general government. ...

The judgment in my opinion should be affirmed.

Mr. Justice Holmes. I regret sincerely that I am unable to agree with the judgment in this case and that I think it my duty to express my dissent.

This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further and long before making up my mind. But I do not conceive that to be my duty, because I strongly believe that my agreement or disagreement has nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law. It is settled by various decisions of this Court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we as legislators might think as injudicious or if you like as tyrannical as this, and which equally with this interfere with the liberty to contract. Sunday laws and usury laws are ancient examples. A more modern one is the prohibition of lotteries.

The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.

The other day we sustained the Massachusetts vaccination law (Jacobson v. Massachusetts). ... United States and state statutes and decisions cutting down the liberty to contract by way of combination are familiar to this Court (Northern Securities Co. v. United States). ... Two years ago we upheld the prohibition of sales of stock on margins or for future delivery in the constitution of California (Otis v. Parker). ... The decision sustaining an eight-hour law for miners is still recent (Holden v. Hardy). ...

Some of these laws embody convictions or prejudices which judges are likely to share. Some may not. But a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez-faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.

General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise. But I think that the proposition just stated, if it is accepted, will carry us far toward the end. Every opinion tends to become a law. I think that the word "liberty" in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion, unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute proposed would infringe fundamental principles as they have been understood by the traditions of our people and our law.

It does not need research to show that no such sweeping condemnation can be passed upon the statute before us. A reasonable man might think it a proper measure on the score of health. Men whom I certainly could not pronounce unreasonable would uphold it as a first installment of a general regulation of the hours of work. Whether in the latter aspect it would be open to the charge of inequality I think it unnecessary to discuss.

Lochner v. New York
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 23–24, 1905 Decided April 17, 1905
Full case name	Joseph Lochner, Plaintiff in Error v. People of the State of New York
Citations	198 U.S. 45 (more) 25 S. Ct. 539; 49 L. Ed. 937; 1905 U.S. LEXIS 1153
Prior history	Defendant convicted, Oneida County Court, New York, 2-12-1902; affirmed, 76 N.Y.S. 396 (N.Y. App. Div. 1902); affirmed, 69 N.E. 373 (N.Y. 1904)
Subsequent history	None
Holding
New York's regulation of the working hours of bakers was not a justifiable restriction of the right to contract freely under the 14th Amendment's guarantee of liberty.
Court membership
Chief Justice Melville Fuller Associate Justices John M. Harlan · David J. Brewer Henry B. Brown · Edward D. White Rufus W. Peckham · Joseph McKenna Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. · William R. Day
Case opinions
Majority	Peckham, joined by Fuller, Brewer, Brown, McKenna
Dissent	Harlan, joined by White, Day
Dissent	Holmes
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1897 N.Y. Laws art. 8, ch. 415, § 110

Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that held a "liberty of contract" was implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case involved a New York law that limited the number of hours that a baker could work each day to ten, and limited the number of hours that a baker could work each week to 60. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the law was necessary to protect the health of bakers, deciding it was a labor law attempting to regulate the terms of employment, and calling it an "unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract." Justice Rufus Peckham wrote for the majority, while Justices John Marshall Harlan and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. filed dissents.

Lochner was one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history, starting what is now known as the Lochner era. In the Lochner era, the Supreme Court invalidated scores of federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. A typical criticism of the decision is that the Court discarded sound constitutional interpretation in favor of personal ideology, favoring property rights over the efforts of democratic majorities to enact progressive economic regulations. This was reflected in Justice Holmes' dissent, in which he wrote that "[t]he Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." This was a reference to a book in which Spencer advocated a strict libertarian philosophy.

During the quarter-century that followed Lochner, the Supreme Court generally upheld economic regulations, but also issued several rulings invalidating such regulations. The Court also began to use the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect personal (as opposed to purely property) rights, including freedom of speech and the right to send one's child to private school (which was the beginning of a line of cases interpreting privacy rights). The Lochner era is considered to have ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), in which the Supreme Court took a much broader view of the government's power to regulate economic activities.

Contents 1 Background of the case 2 The Court's decision 2.1 Harlan's dissent 2.2 Holmes' dissent 3 Subsequent developments 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Background of the case

In 1896, the New York Legislature unanimously enacted the Bakeshop Act, a law that prohibited individuals from working in bakeries for more than ten hours per day or sixty hours per week. In 1899, Joseph Lochner, owner of Lochner's Home Bakery in Utica, was fined $25 for overworking an employee. For a second offense in 1901, he drew a fine of $50 from the Oneida County Court.

Lochner chose to appeal his second conviction. However, the conviction was upheld by the Appellate Department of the New York Supreme Court in a 3-2 vote. Lochner appealed again to the New York Court of Appeals, where he lost by a 4-3 margin. After his defeat in the Court of Appeals (New York's highest court), Lochner took his case to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lochner's appeal was based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides: "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." In a series of cases starting with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court established that the due process clause (in both the 5th and 14th Amendments) is not merely a procedural guarantee, but also a "substantive" limitation on the type of control the government may exercise over individuals. Although this interpretation of the due process clause is a controversial one (see substantive due process), it had become firmly embedded in American jurisprudence by the end of the nineteenth century. Lochner argued that the "right to free contract" was one of the rights encompassed by substantive due process.

The Supreme Court had accepted the argument that the due process clause protected the right to contract seven years earlier, in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897). However, the Court had acknowledged that the right was not absolute, but subject to the "police power" of the states. For example, Holden v. Hardy (1898), the Supreme Court upheld a Utah law setting an eight-hour work day for miners. In Holden, Justice Henry Brown wrote that while "the police power cannot be put forward as an excuse for oppressive and unjust legislation, it may be lawfully resorted to for the purpose of preserving the public health, safety, or morals." The issue facing the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York was whether the Bakeshop Act represented a reasonable exercise of the state's police power.

Lochner's case was argued by Henry Weismann (who had ironically been one of the foremost advocates of the Bakeshop Act when he was Secretary of the Journeymen Bakers' Union). In his brief, Weismann decried the idea that "the treasured freedom of the individual ... should be swept away under the guise of the police power of the State." He denied New York's argument that the Bakeshop Act was a necessary health measure, claiming that the "average bakery of the present day is well ventilated, comfortable both summer and winter, and always sweet smelling."

The Court's decision

Justice Rufus Peckham delivered the opinion of the Court.

The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, ruled that the law limiting bakers' working hours did not constitute a legitimate exercise of police powers. The opinion of the Court was delivered by Justice Rufus Peckham. Peckham began by asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment protected an individual's "general right to make a contract in relation to his business." He acknowledged that the right was not absolute, referring disparagingly to the "somewhat vaguely termed police powers" of the state. At the same time, Peckham argued that the police power was subject to certain limitations; otherwise, he claimed, the Fourteenth Amendment would be meaningless, and states would be able to pass any law using the police power as a pretext. He asserted that it was the court's duty to determine whether legislation is "a fair, reasonable and appropriate exercise of the police power of the State, or ... an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual ... to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate."

The Attorney General of New York, Julius M. Mayer, had claimed in his brief that the government "has a right to safeguard a citizen against his own lack of knowledge." Peckham responded to this argument by writing that bakers "are in no sense wards of the State." He remarked that bakers "are ... able to assert their rights and care for themselves without the protecting arm of the State, interfering with their independence of judgment and of action."

Next, Peckham proceeded to disclaim the idea that long working hours posed a threat to the health of bakers. He addressed the argument with the following words: "To the common understanding, the trade of a baker has never been regarded as an unhealthy one." Although conceding the "possible existence of some small amount of unhealthiness," Justice Peckham contended that it was insufficient to justify interference from the state.

Hence, Peckham and his fellow Justices reached the conclusion that the New York law was not related "in any real and substantial degree to the health of the employees." Consequently, they held that the New York law was not a valid exercise of the state's police powers. Lochner's conviction was accordingly vacated.

Harlan's dissent

Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices White and Day. Justice Harlan contended that the liberty to contract under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is subject to regulation imposed by a State acting within the scope of its police powers. Justice Harlan offered the following rule for determining whether such statutes are unconstitutional:

“

The power of the courts to review legislative action in respect of a matter affecting the general welfare exists only "when that which the legislature has done comes within the rule that, if a statute purporting to have been enacted to protect the public health, the public morals or the public safety, has no real or substantial relation to those objects, or is, beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the fundamental law."

”

Justice Harlan asserted that the burden of proof should rest with the party seeking to have such a statute deemed unconstitutional.

Harlan contended that it was "plain that this statute was enacted in order to protect the physical wellbeing of those who work in bakery and confectionery establishments." Responding to the majority's assertion that the profession of a baker was not an unhealthy one, he quoted at length from academic studies describing the respiratory ailments and other risks that bakers faced. He argued that the Supreme Court should have deferred to the New York Legislature's judgment that long working hours threatened the health of bakery employees. According to Harlan, "If the end which the legislature seeks to accomplish be one to which its power extends, and if the means employed to that end, although not the wisest or best, are yet not plainly and palpably unauthorized by law, then the court cannot interfere."

Holmes' dissent

Another dissenting opinion was penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.. Although only three paragraphs long, Holmes' dissent is well-remembered and often quoted. Holmes accused the majority of judicial activism, pointedly claiming that the case was "decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain." He attacked the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment enshrined the liberty of contract, citing laws against Sunday trading and usury as "ancient examples" to the contrary. He added, "Some of these laws embody convictions or prejudices which judges are likely to share. Some may not. But a constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory."

Subsequent developments

Although not absolute in invalidating economic and labor regulations, the Supreme Court continued to take a narrow view of state police powers in the three decades that followed Lochner. For example, in Coppage v. Kansas (1915), the Court struck down statutes forbidding "Yellow Dog contracts." Similarly, in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), the Supreme Court held that minimum wage laws violated the due process clause (although Chief Justice William Howard Taft strongly dissented, suggesting that the Court instead should have overruled Lochner). The doctrine of substantive due process was coupled with a narrow interpretation of congressional power under the commerce clause. Justices James McReynolds, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler emerged during the 1920s and 30s as the foremost defenders of traditional limitations on government power on the Supreme Court; they were collectively dubbed by partisans of the New Deal the "Four Horsemen of Reaction" as a result.

In 1934 the Supreme Court decided Nebbia v. New York stating that there is no constitutionally protected fundamental right to freedom of contract. In 1937, the Supreme Court decided West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which expressly overruled Adkins and implicitly signaled the end of the Lochner era. The decision repudiated the idea that freedom of contract should be unrestricted

“

The legislature has also recognized the fact, which the experience of legislators in many States has corroborated, that the proprietors of these establishments and their operatives do not stand upon an equality, and that [p394] their interests are, to a certain extent, conflicting. The former naturally desire to obtain as much labor as possible from their employes, while the latter are often induced by the fear of discharge to conform to regulations which their judgment, fairly exercised, would pronounce to be detrimental to their health or strength. In other words, the proprietors lay down the rules and the laborers are practically constrained to obey them. In such cases, self-interest is often an unsafe guide, and the legislature may properly interpose its authority.

”

[1]

Although the Supreme Court did not explicitly overrule Lochner, it did agree to give more deference to the decisions of state legislatures. The Court sounded the death knell for economic substantive due process several years later in Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma (1955). In that case, a unanimous Supreme Court declared: "The day is gone when this Court uses the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought." Coming at a time of mounting political pressure over the judiciary's stance toward the New Deal, the Court's shift is sometimes called “The switch in time that saved nine.”

In the post-Lochner era, the Supreme Court has applied a lower standard (rational basis test) in reviewing restrictions on economic liberty, but stricter standards in reviewing legislation impinging on personal liberties, especially privacy. A line of cases dating back to the 1923 opinion by Justice McReynolds in Meyer v. Nebraska (citing Lochner as establishing limits on the police power) has established a privacy right under substantive due process. More recently, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court held that a woman had a privacy right to determine whether or not to have an abortion. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirmed that right, though the Court no longer used the term "privacy" to describe it.

The Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York has drawn the ire of some liberal and conservative legal scholars. For example, Robert Bork called the decision an "abomination". Similarly, Attorney General Edwin Meese said that the Supreme Court "ignored the limitations of the Constitution and blatantly usurped legislative authority." However, the decision has attracted defenders, including the libertarian Cato Institute, and scholars Richard Epstein and Randy Barnett who argue that Lochner was correct in its protection of individual economic liberty.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 198
• The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873)
• Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1876)
• Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887)
• Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578 (1897)

References

• Text of Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) is available from:  · Enfacto · Findlaw · LII

• Bernstein, David E. (2005) Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Retrospective. Washington University Law Review
• Hall, Kermit, et al. (1992). The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kens, Paul. (1998). Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
• Tushnet, Mark (2008). I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 81–92. ISBN 9780807000366. 
• Warren, Charles. (1924). The Supreme Court in United States History. (3 volumes). Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
• African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts: From Reconstruction to the New Deal.' The Cato Institute. Mar. 7, 2001.

External links

• Case Brief for Lochner v. New York available at Lawnix.com

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