West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish

300 U.S. 379 (1937), argued 16–17 Dec. 1936, decided 29 Mar. 1937 by vote of 5 to 4; Hughes for the Court, Sutherland in dissent. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, the Supreme Court supposedly made “the switch in time that saved nine.” The decision was handed down less than two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his plan to pack the Supreme Court with justices supportive of New Deal economic regulation. Yet the circumstances surrounding the Parrish decision have made it seem more of a direct reaction to the court‐packing plan than it probably was.

Parrish heralded greater Supreme Court deference to economic regulation by upholding a Washington state minimum wage law for women. In doing so, the Court ratified a policy that many argued was desperately needed by underpaid women workers. However, because the minimum wage for women rested on a theory of women's inequality, and because labor restrictions based on gender interfered with women's employment opportunities, many feminists opposed minimum wage laws.

In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court had struck down a statute restricting the number of hours bakers could work on the basis that it violated the due process rights of employers and employees to freedom of contract. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), however, the Court had upheld a statute limiting the number of hours women could work under the theory that states had a greater interest in regulating the employment of women because their central role as childbearers meant that women's health was essential to the well‐being of future generations. The Court distinguished maximum hours legislation from minimum wage legislation, and ruled in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923) that a minimum wage law for women and children violated freedom of contract. Just one year before Parrish was decided, the Court had applied Adkins and struck down a minimum wage for women in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936).

In Parrish, the Court overturned the Adkins decision. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, writing for a majority of five, argued that the concept of freedom of contract was not unlimited. “What is this freedom?” Hughes asked. “The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract” (p. 391). The Constitution protected liberty, but subject to reasonable regulation in the interest of the community. Hughes found that state power to restrict freedom of contract was especially evident in the area of protective labor legislation for women. Relying on Muller, he argued that women's physical structure and their role as mothers required that the state protect them in order to “preserve the strength and vigor of the race” (p. 394). Hughes could find no relevant difference between laws regulating hours and those regulating wages, and suggested that state legislatures could address the abuses of unconscionable employers who paid their workers less than a living wage. Hughes adopted a posture of deference to legislative judgment, suggesting that even if the wisdom of a policy was debatable, the legislature was entitled to enact it as long as it was not arbitrary or capricious.

Justice George Sutherland wrote a vigorous dissent. He argued, in part, that women and men were equal under the law and that, consequently, legislation that treated them differently with respect to the right to contract constituted arbitrary discrimination.

Because Justice Owen Roberts, who voted with the majority in Morehead, provided the fifth vote in Parrish, his role in the decision has received much attention. There has been much speculation as to whether Roberts switched his vote in response to President Roosevelt's pressure. Two factors militate against such a conclusion. First, because the Morehead majority rested on very narrow grounds, Roberts could argue that he had not changed his position because he had never expressed an opinion on the substantive issue in Adkins. More important, a vote on Parrish was taken in December 1936, before the court‐packing plan, and Roberts voted to sustain the minimum wage law. Consequently, the court‐packing plan seems not to have directly affected Roberts's vote. Harsh criticism of the Court preceded the court‐packing plan, however, so it remains likely that Roberts's vote in Parrish was to some degree responsive to the concerns and pressures of the times.

See also Due Process, Substantive.

Bibliography

• Charles A. Leonard, A Search for a Judicial Philosophy: Mr. Justice Roberts and the Constitutional Revolution of 1937 (1971)

— Mary L. Dudziak

• 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
• Vote: 5–4
• For the Court: Hughes
• Dissenting: Sutherland, Butler, McReynolds, and Van Devanter

Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington. Her pay was $12 for a 48-hour week. This was less than the amount required by the state of Washington's minimum wage law. So Elsie Parrish brought suit against her employer. The state supreme court decided in favor of Parrish, but the hotel owners appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Issue

One year earlier, in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936), the Court ruled a New York State minimum wage law unconstitutional. The Court argued for liberty of contract between employer and employee to decide without government regulation about wages and hours of work. This liberty of contract was held to be protected from state government regulations by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Did the state of Washington's minimum wage law violate the 14th Amendment?

Opinion of the Court

The Court upheld the state minimum wage law and reversed the decisions in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936) and Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), upon which the Morehead decision was based. In Adkins, the Court declared unconstitutional an act of Congress that established a minimum wage for children and women workers in the District of Columbia. The dissenting view in Morehead—by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone—was the foundation for the Court's opinion in this case, written by Hughes. Justice Owen Roberts joined the four Morehead dissenters to form the Court majority in this case.

Chief Justice Hughes rejected the idea of liberty of contract set forth in the Adkins and Morehead cases. He wrote:

The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. … The liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is adopted in the interests of the community is due process.

Significance

Justice Roberts's vote in support of the Washington State minimum wage law was a complete change from his vote in the Morehead case, and it made the difference in the Parrish case. Reporters called it “the switch in time that saved nine.” This reference was to the court-packing plan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had been frustrated by several of the Court's decisions against his New Deal programs involving government regulation of businesses on behalf of the public good. So the President had proposed that Congress enact legislation to enable him to appoint six new justices to the Supreme Court. After the Parrish decision, however, the President backed away from his plan to alter the membership of the Court.

The Parrish decision provided legal support for Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which included a minimum wage provision for businesses involved in interstate commerce. The Parrish decision also provided a precedent for federal court decisions against liberty of contract claims that would endanger important community interests and the public good.

See also Court-Packing Plan (1937)

West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), was a decision by the Supreme Court involving the constitutional validity of a Washington State statute creating a commission with power to fix minimum wages for women in the state. The Court thought that the close division by which the case of Adkins v. Children's Hospital (holding a similar act unconstitutional in 1923) had been decided—and changed economic conditions since that case—called for reconsideration of the constitutional issue in question: Does minimum-wage legislation constitute an undue infringement of the freedom of contract guaranteed by the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, speaking for the Court, reaffirmed the state's authority to interfere in labor contracts where it appeared that the parties were not equal in bargaining power or where the failure to intervene would endanger public health. The Court argued that to deny women a living wage imperiled their health and cast a burden on the community to support them. The enactment of a minimum-wage law for women, said the Court, was not a taking of "liberty" without "due process of law," and the Adkins case, being wrongly decided, should be overruled. Four justices, reiterating the arguments of the Adkins case, dissented. Dramatically ending a series of decisions overturning New Deal legislation, the West Coast Hotel opinion helped establish the legitimacy of federal economic controls and social welfare policies.

Bibliography

Chambers, John W. "The Big Switch: Justice Roberts and the Minimum Wage Cases." Labor History 10 (1969): 49–52.

Leonard, Charles A. A Search for a Judicial Philosophy. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971.

The Supreme Court's decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379, 57 S. Ct. 578, 81 L. Ed. 703 (1937), marked the end of an era in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. The Court in Parrish repudiated substantive due process and the "freedom of contract" doctrine that prior courts had used to invalidate state laws that regulated business and labor. By reversing precedent, the Court sent a signal to Congress and state legislatures that it would exercise judicial restraint and not stand in the way of legislation that had a legitimate government purpose.

In the case the West Coast Hotel Company challenged the constitutionality of the state of Washington's minimum wage law for women. Elsie Parrish, a hotel chambermaid, had filed a lawsuit seeking to recover the difference between the wages paid her and the minimum wage prescribed by law. The hotel company argued that the wage law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Washington Supreme Court upheld the law, and the company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Many observers believed that the Court would strike down the law because of its decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525, 43 S. Ct. 394, 67 L. Ed. 785 (1923), which invalidated a minimum wage law for women and children. The Court in Adkins had reiterated that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment barred states from interfering with the freedom of employees to negotiate the terms of their employment with their employers. This doctrine of substantive due process was used to limit the substance of government regulations and other activities that affected "life, liberty, and property." Substantive due process was the basis for the freedom of contract doctrine that the Court had used to strike down state laws that regulated hours and work conditions, as well as wages.

However, in Parrish the Court, on a 5-4 vote, rejected the freedom of contract doctrine. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes noted that the Constitution does not refer to freedom of contract. Rather, it proscribes deprivation of liberty without due process of law. Hughes pointed out that freedom is not absolute. Moreover, "the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people." Thus, constitutional liberty is "necessarily subject to restraints of due process" as long as government regulation is reasonable and furthers the interests of the community. He branded the Adkins decision as "a departure from the true application of the principles governing the regulation by the state of the relation of employer and employed."

The decision was made at the height of the Great Depression. Hughes took judicial notice of "the unparalleled demands for relief" arising out of the economic hard times. He concluded that the state of Washington was free to correct the abusive practices of "unconscionable employers" who disregard the public interest.

Parrish marked the end of an era in U.S. constitutional law. Substantive due process as a limitation on government power in the field of economic regulation became a dead letter.

See: New Deal.

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 16 – 17, 1936 Decided March 29, 1937
Full case name: West Coast Hotel Company v. Ernest Parrish, et ux. Citations: 300 U.S. 379; 57 S. Ct. 578; 81 L. Ed. 703; 1937 U.S. LEXIS 1119; 1 Lab. Cas. (CCH) P17,021; 8 Ohio Op. 89; 108 A.L.R. 1330; 1 L.R.R.M. 754; 7 L.R.R.M. 754 Prior history: Judgment for defendant, Chelan County Superior Court, Nov. 9, 1935; reversed, 55 P.2d 1083 (Wash. 1936) Subsequent history: None
Holding
Washington's minimum wage law for women was a valid regulation of the right to contract freely because of the state's special interest in protecting their health and ability to support themselves. Supreme Court of Washington affirmed.
Court membership
Chief Justice: Charles Evans Hughes Associate Justices: Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Harlan Fiske Stone, Owen Josephus Roberts, Benjamin N. Cardozo
Case opinions
Majority by: Hughes Joined by: Brandeis, Stone, Roberts, Cardozo Dissent by: Sutherland Joined by: Van Devanter, McReynolds, Butler
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; Minimum Wages for Women Act, 1913 Wash. Laws 174

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington, overturning an earlier decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923).

The Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Hughes, ruled that the Constitution permitted the restriction of liberty of contract by state law where such restriction protected the community, health and safety or vulnerable groups, as in the case of Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908), where the Court had found in favor of the regulation of women's working hours.

Muller, however, was one of the few exceptions of decades of Court invalidation of economic regulation, exemplified in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). West Coast Hotel represents the end of that trend, and came about through a sudden and seemingly inexplicable shift in the voting habits of Justice Roberts. Coming as it did right when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pushing his "court packing" scheme to weaken the votes of the older anti-New Deal justices, Roberts' move was notoriously referred to as "the switch in time that saved nine," even though Roberts decision was handed in before Roosevelt actually had made his plan public.

Justice Sutherland's dissent contained a thinly veiled admonition to Roberts for switching sides, as well as an insistence that the Constitution does not change by events alone (namely, the Great Depression). The dissent also adhered to the previously dominant perspective that the majority repudiated here: that freedom of contract was the rule with few exceptions, and that the shift of the burden for the poor onto employers was an arbitrary and naked exercise of power.

Although the majority's view on economic regulation remains the law of the land today, the expansion of Commerce Clause jurisprudence signaled by West Coast Hotel was reined in slightly by United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), and United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000).

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court Cases

External links

• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com

Further reading

John Ryskamp, The Eminent Domain Revolt: Changing Perceptions in a New Constitutional Epoch, New York: Algora Publishing, 2006.

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