Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923)
[You can read the edited text of the decision here.]
I. Facts of the case
A 1918 act of Congress established the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Board, which set
minimum wages — note the plural — for workers depending on occupation, age and sex. A
Children's Hospital, to protect its cheap army of woman workers, sued the Adkins, who
represented the Board.
II. Legal issue

Liberty of contract
Do the Due Process Clauses of Amendments V and XIV — the former of which is operative here
because of jurisdiction — protect the rights of women and employers to contract freely without the
interposition of a minimum wage?

Sex discrimination
Muller v. Oregon (1908) unanimously argued that women, in their contractual relations to men,
were in a state of dependence; and that womens' capacities as mothers made their well-being a
matter of public interest, and hence an appropriate object of state police power. (Normally,
leveling the just and natural economic inequalities of society was an inappropriate state interest to
Lochner's true believers. But because classical liberalism and its social Darwinist sequel claim to
be "scientific," the law — blind to other empirical finds — nonetheless can consider the natural, a
priori inferiority of women in economic regulation).
If we accept Muller as valid precedent, are we still allowed to make "exceptions" in economic law
for women, given their political advances — especially Amendment XIX? If so, is a minimum
wage law an invalid form of sex paternalism compared to the valid work-week restriction?
III. Holding
The Court votes, 5-3, to void the law.
IV. Reasoning
Justice Sutherland, for the court


In striking down the minimum wage law, the Court is not acting inconsistently with Muller.
Here, the issue is wages, which amount to the essence of contracts. To modify wages through
legislative fiat is to violate a more profound liberty interest than to modify maximum hours.
Maximum workweek laws may seem, in kind, identical to wage laws. But workweek laws
do not discriminate against capital (it restricts both parties equally); wage laws do (restricting the
employer's bargaining power).

Amendment XIX changes how we analyze labor laws from 1908, anyhow. The wage law
amounts to
simply and exclusively a price-fixing law, confined to adult women ... who are legally as capable
of contracting for themselves as men.
This equality proceeds from the "revolutionary" advent of female suffrage, which presumably
negates the effects of all civil restrictions on women. (Now, the laws of majoritarianism make
discriminatory divorce laws, e.g., untenable).
V. Concurrences and Dissents
Justice Holmes, dissenting.



Muller was decided not on legal forms, but on biology. Holmes: "[I] need more than the
Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are not differences between men and women,
or that legislation cannot take those differences into account" (475).
Given later precedent, (Bunting v. Oregon) Lochner "would be allowed a deserved
repose" (475). The character of labor contracts can determine life or death; of course legislatures
at all levels can modify them, and anyone who disagrees is behind the times.
Plenty of non-economic regulation — blue laws restricting liquor sales on Sunday, for
instance — violate the putative liberty of contract. So does public education. Let's face it: the
profound legal anti-perfectionism of Enlightenment liberalism is as Utopian as it is irrelevant to
Constitutional law.
Justice Taft, dissenting.


Wages are but a component of a contract. Hours, too, are a no less a component.
Further, there is a downward pressure on wages that legislatures are rightfully cognizant of; they
thus employ minimum wages to prevent employers from "racing to the bottom" and hiring scabs.
Same argument as Holmes; fewer witticisms.
VI. Significance
The Woman's Movement's mixed reaction to the decision highlights cleavages (difference vs.
liberal feminism in particular) that remain to this day. Sutherland's view espouses that formal
equality for women — something the doomed Equal Rights Amendment, which he helped draft,
aims at — is necessary and sufficient for the substantive equality for women. The formalist
orientation of liberalism, in both its laissez-faire and statist forms, has led many feminists to
renounce the label.
The famous West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), upholding a Washington (state) minimum wage
law for women, overturned Adkins by diluting the Court's standard for adjudicating economic law
to the point of toothlessness. This was the end of liberty of contract jurisprudence for good, as
well as fundamental rights jurisprudence for the time being.