Lochner v. New York (1905)

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states:

[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . .

Does this due process include liberty of contract, or the freedom of individuals and groups to form contracts without government restrictions?

The Case

Lochner v. New York held that “liberty of contract” was indeed included 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.”

The Impact

The impact of the case was profound and issued in the “Lochner Era.”

http://youtu.be/Z8poi7HNXSQ

In the Lochner era, the Supreme Court issued several controversial decisions invalidating federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression.

The Lochner era ended with a case, West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937). The case upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington, and began a period in which the Supreme Court took an expansive view of the government’s power to regulate commercial activities.