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

WEST COAST HOTEL CO. V. PARRISH

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.

further readings

Maltz, Earl M. 1995."The Impact of the Constitutional Revolution of 1937 on the Dormant Commerce Clause—A Case Study in the Decline of State Autonomy." Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 19 (fall).

Stunstein, Carl. 1987. "Lochner's Legacy." Columbia Law Review 87 (June).

cross-references

Lochner v. New York; New Deal.

West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish (1937), Supreme Court case reversing a series of anti–New Deal decisions and upholding the constitutionality of legislation regulating the economy.The case involved a 1913 Washington State statute establishing a minimum wage of $14.50 for a forty‐eight‐hour week. A chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who had been paid $12 weekly by the West Coast Hotel in Seattle, Washington, sued her employer for the difference. The case was argued before the Supreme Court in December 1936. Parrish's attorneys asked the Court to overrule precedents, such as Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), that had held minimum‐wage laws unconstitutional. In his 5–4 majority opinion, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes dismissed the notion of freedom of contract, holding that under their constitutional police powers, states had the authority to regulate wages and hours in the public interest. Despite a spirited dissent by Justice George Sutherland on behalf of the conservative justices, a thirty‐year era of conservative, antireform judicial activism—going back to Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a New York law regulating the maximum hours of bakery workers—had come to an end. Not for many decades would the Supreme Court again overturn either a federal or a state law regulating the economy.

The West Coast Hotel decision has sometimes been seen as the Court's efforts to forestall President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1937 “court packing” plan. The chronology of the case, however, makes clear that although the decision was not announced until late March 1937, after FDR had publicized his scheme, the justices’ vote on the case antedated Roosevelt's announcement.
See also Economic Regulation; Laissez‐faire; Muller v. Oregon; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Charles A. Leonard , A Search for a Judicial Philosophy: Mr. Justice Roberts and the Constitutional Revolution of 1937, 1971.
Judith Bauer , The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women's Labor Legislation, 1978.

Melvin I. Urofsky

WEST COAST HOTEL COMPANY V. PARRISH

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.

George W. Goble / a. r.

See also Adkins v. Children's Hospital ; Due Process of Law ; Lochner v. New York ; Minimum-Wage Legislation ; Wages and Hours of Labor, Regulation of ; Women in Public Life, Business, and Professions .