Lochner v. New York

Lochner v. New York (1905).In 1895, New York State passed a law limiting the hours of work for employees in bakeries to ten hours per day and sixty hours per week. Spearheaded by the bakers’ union and tenement‐house reformers, this statute reflected the labor movement's long struggle to achieve shorter work hours. In 1902, the Utica bakeshop owner Joseph Lochner was fined for violating the new law. Appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, Lochner claimed that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that no person shall be denied life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Voting 5–4, the Court in 1905 voided Lochner's conviction and ruled the bakeshop law unconstitutional. Justice Rufus Peckham's majority opinion reasoned that among the liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment was “liberty of contract,” including the right of the employee and employer voluntarily to contract about the hours of work. A state might interfere with that liberty, Peckham admitted, but only if its regulation fell under the legitimate police powers of the states. Peckham defined the police power narrowly, saying that the bakeshop law was not a reasonable use of the state's power to protect the bakers’ health.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dissented vigorously. Attacking the majority's underlying premise, he argued that the majority had based its decision on laissez‐faire economic theory rather than on the Constitution, substituting its own judgment for that of the state legislature.

Lochner became the symbol of laissez‐faire constitutionalism and judicial activism. For more than thirty years, critics complained that the Court had erected an insurmountable barrier to economic reform. The “Lochner Era” came to an end in 1937, when West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish rejected the liberty‐of‐contract doctrine.
See also Conservatism; Economic Regulation; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Progressive Era; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Paul Kens , Judicial Power and Reform Politics: The Anatomy of Lochner v. New York, 1990.
Howard Gillman , The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Power Jurisprudence, 1993.

Paul Kens