Adkins v. Children's Hospital

Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923).During the early twentieth century, Progressives sought to ameliorate the consequences of industrialization by enacting minimum wage laws. Conservatives and business groups challenged these laws in the courts. In Adkins, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of five to three, struck down a 1918 congressional statute setting a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia. The 1918 law, the Court held, violated the liberty of contract protected by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Writing for the Court, Justice George Sutherland emphasized that under the Constitution, freedom of contract was the general rule and restraint the exception. Minimum wage laws, he argued, foisted on employers a welfare function that properly belonged to society as a whole. Moreover, Sutherland insisted, in light of the Nineteenth Amendment, women could not be more restricted in the exercise of contractual freedom than men.

Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote dissenting opinions. Taft maintained that legislators could regulate the hours of work or minimum wages of women under the government's police powers. Holmes expressed doubt about the constitutional basis for the liberty‐of‐contract doctrine.

The Adkins decision stands as a classic expression of the Court's commitment to contractual freedom. It made clear the Court's determination to keep wages and prices free of regulatory interference. During the New Deal Era of the 1930s, however, the Supreme Court moderated its long‐standing commitment to economic liberty and freedom of contract. Adkins was overruled in West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish (1937), in which the justices, on a five–four vote, sustained a Washington State minimum wage law.
See also Bill of Rights; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Hadley Arkes , The Return of George Sutherland: Restoring a Jurisprudence of Natural Rights, 1994.
James W. Ely Jr. , The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights, 2d ed., 1998.

James W. Ely Jr.