Ultimate Civics
a project of Earth Island Institute
Lochner v. New York (198 U. S. 45, 1905)
Liberty of Contract, Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment,
and Limits on the States’ Police Power
Issues
1. When a State passes laws that limit the right to labor or the right of contract, who shall prevail –
the power of the State to legislate or the right of the individual to liberty of person and freedom of
contract?
What’s at Stake? Guarantee of Rights
Individual rights: With respect to this case, the right to make a business contract is part of the individual
liberties protected by the 14th Amendment: “no State can deprive any person of life, liberty or property
without due process of law.” Is the right to purchase or sell labor part of the liberty protected by this
amendment?
State rights: In general, the right of the states to legislate; that is, to make laws necessary to protect the
safety, health, morals and general welfare of the public, is protected by the 10th Amendment: “The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This sovereign right of the States is known as its
“police powers.”
During the Industrial Revolution, the time period of this case, the new manufacturing processes, with
their inherent machinery, chemicals, iron, unsanitary conditions, long work hours and more,
significantly increased the dangers to worker safety, public health, and even adjacent property. States
expanded use of their police power to make laws to protect worker safety, public health and wellbeing,
and the environment. Business owners saw the increased state regulations as threats to their profits and
interference with their personal liberty. Courts had to decide whether these types of state laws were a
fair, reasonable and appropriate exercise of police power, or if they were an unreasonable, unnecessary
and arbitrary interference with the individual’s right to personal liberty.
Facts of the Case
In 1895, the New York Legislature unanimously enacted the Bakeshop Act, which prohibited
individuals from working in bakeries for more than ten hours per day or sixty hours per week and also
regulated sanitary conditions in bakeries (such as adequate ventilation, proper drainage, minimum room
size and proper construction to allow for cleaning, proper washrooms for employees, prohibition of
sleeping in the bakery, etc.).
In 1899 and again in 1901, bakery owner Joseph Lochner was indicted on a charge that he unlawfully
permitted an employee to work more than sixty hours in one week. Lochner was fined for both offenses,
and he appealed his second conviction. When New York courts upheld the conviction, Lochner appealed
to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the right to freely contract was protected by 14th Amendment’s
due process clause.
Vocabulary
√ Due process: the rule that a legal case must be done in a way that protects the rights of all the people
involved
√ Judicial activism: judicial rulings that strike down or substantially revise laws passed by lawmakers;
the view that Supreme Court and other judges can and should creatively (re)interpret the Constitution
and laws in order to serve the judges' own visions regarding the needs of contemporary society; a
subversion of the separation of powers principle founded by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
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√ Laissez-faire economics: free market economics; the freedom of private business to organize and
operate for profit in a competitive system without interference by government beyond regulation
necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance
√ Police power: the authority conferred upon the states by the 10th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution and which the states delegate to their political subdivisions to enact measures to preserve
and protect the safety, health, welfare and morals of the community; the basic right of governments to
make laws and regulations for the benefit of their communities in such areas as zoning, land use, fire and
building codes, gambling, discrimination, parking, crime, licensing of professionals, liquor, motor
vehicles, bicycles, nuisances, schooling and sanitation.
√ Welfare: the health, wellbeing, happiness, security, protection, prosperity, success and fortunes of a
person or group
Arguments (excerpts from case brief and syllabus)
Plaintiff:
The New York law was a valid health measure addressing a legitimate state interest and enacted to
protect the physical wellbeing of those who work in bakery and confectionery establishments. Also,
restricting the hours of labor in the case of bakers was valid because “it tended to cleanliness on the part
of the workers, as a man was more apt to be cleanly when not overworked, and, if cleanly, then his
‘output’ was also more likely to be so.”
Defendant:
The limitation of the hours of labor does not come within the police power on the grounds that bakers
are not wards of the state – they can assert their own rights without interference from the State; that
the interest of the public is not in the slightest degree affected by such an act; that clean and wholesome
bread does not depend upon whether the baker works but ten hours per day or only sixty hours a week.
However, other sections of the New York law may be wise and valid regulations, as they provide for the
cleanliness and healthiness of the bakery’s workplace conditions.
Decision
The Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, held that the New York law restricting hours of employment in a
bakery was invalid, because the regulation interfered with the right of contract between the employer
and employee and did not constitute a legitimate exercise of the state’s police powers. The majority
found that the limitation of hours of labor, under New York law, had no direct relation to the health of
the employee (the baker) or public health as to justify the section of law as really a health law: “Statutes
of [this]… nature, limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their
living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual…” Lockner’s conviction was
reversed.
Dissent
Justices Harlan, White, and Day:
State police “power extends at least to the protection of the lives, the health, and the safety of the public
against the injurious exercise by any citizen of his own rights… The liberty secured by the
Constitution… to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person
to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to
which every person is necessarily subject for the common good…
“The responsibility therefore rests upon legislators, not upon the courts. No evils … could be more farreaching than those that might come to our system of government if the judiciary, abandoning the
sphere assigned to it by the fundamental law, should enter the domain of legislation and… annul
statutes [laws] that had received the sanction of the people's representatives… The public interests
imperatively demand that legislative enactments should be recognized and enforced by the courts as
embodying the will of the people unless they are…, beyond all question, in violation of the fundamental
law of the Constitution.”
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Justice Holmes:
Holmes accused the majority of judicial activism, pointedly claiming that the case was "decided upon an
economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain." He wrote: “But a constitution is
not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of
the citizen to the State or of laissez faire [free market]. It is made for people of fundamentally differing
views… I think that the word liberty in the 14th Amendment is perverted when it is held to prevent the
natural outcome of a dominant opinion…”
Consequences of the Case
Lochner is one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history. In what became
known as the Lochner era from 1890 to 1937, the Supreme Court enshrined the liberty of contract. It
used a broad interpretation of due process to protect economic rights in favor of laissez-faire (free
market) economic policy. The court’s controversial decisions invalidated about 200 federal and state
economic statutes, usually under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, statutes that sought to
regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression.
During the quarter-century that followed Lochner, the Supreme Court also began to use the Due Process
Clause of the 14th Amendment to protect personal (as opposed to purely property) rights, including
freedom of speech and the right to send one's child to private school (which was the beginning of the
line of cases that found a right to privacy in the Constitution). The Lochner era ended after President
Roosevelt, fed up with the Supreme Court invalidating New Deal policies, threatened to "pack" the
court with new appointees. The Supreme Court then began to take an expansive view of the
government's power to regulate economic activities.
Sources
√ Definitions
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/
http://www.merriam-webster.com
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
√ Cornell Legal Information Institute
Syllabus, Opinion (Peckham), Dissent (Harlan), Dissent (Holmes)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0198_0045_ZS.html
√ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York
√ Lochner era: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/lochner_era