Lochner v. New York
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that a New York State statute that prescribed maximum working hours for bakers violated the bakers' right to freedom of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The decision has since been effectively overturned.
The case began in 1899 when Joseph Lochner, a German immigrant who owned a bakery in Utica, New York, was charged with violating New York's Bakeshop Act of 1895. The Bakeshop Act had made it a crime for New York bakeries to employ bakers for more than 10 hours per day or 60 hours per week. He was convicted and ultimately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. A five-justice majority of the Supreme Court held that the law violated the Due Process Clause, stating that the law constituted an "unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract". Four dissenting justices rejected that view, and the dissent of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in particular, became one of the most famous opinions in U.S. history.
Lochner is one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history and gave the name to what is known as the Lochner era. During that time, the Supreme Court issued several decisions invalidating federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. The period ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by Washington State.
Background
In 1895, the New York State Legislature passed a law called the "Bakeshop Act" that made it a crime for any bakery in New York to employ a worker for more than 10 hours per day or more than 60 hours per week. Four years later, in 1899, New York authorities indicted Joseph Lochner, a German immigrant who owned a bakery in Utica, New York, on a charge of violating the Bakeshop Act by permitting an employee to work more than 60 hours in one week. Unlike other bakeries, which used two separate shifts for evening and morning work, Lochner's bakery employed only a single crew of bakers. His bakers would arrive in the evening and prepare the bread dough, then sleep for several hours in an on-site dormitory before waking up in the early morning and baking the loaves of bread. Lochner counted the time his bakers spent sleeping in the dormitory as working hours and paid them for it.At Lochner's trial, his lawyer argued that the right to contract freely to be one of the rights encompassed by substantive due process. Lochner's case was argued by Henry Weismann, who had been one of the foremost advocates of the Bakeshop Act when he was Secretary of the Journeymen Bakers' Union. In his brief, Weismann decried the idea that "the treasured freedom of the individual... should be swept away under the guise of the police power of the State." He denied New York's argument that the Bakeshop Act was a necessary health measure by claiming that the "average bakery of the present day is well ventilated, comfortable both summer and winter, and always sweet smelling." Weismann's brief contained an appendix providing statistics showing that bakers' mortality rates were comparable to that of white-collar professionals.
Weismann's arguments were unsuccessful. The trial court found Lochner guilty and fined him $50. Lochner appealed to the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, which affirmed his conviction, then appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which also affirmed it. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Supreme Court decision
On April 17, 1905, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 decision in favor of Lochner that struck down the New York Bakeshop Act's limits on bakers' working hours as unconstitutional.Opinion of the Court
Five justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice Rufus Peckham. The Court began with the question of whether the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to freedom of contract. Citing its 1897 decision Allgeyer v. Louisiana, in which it had struck down a Louisiana law that banned buying shipping insurance from companies in other states on grounds that it violated the freedom to make contracts to carry out a trade or profession, the Court held that freedom of contract was a basic right covered by the protections for "life, liberty, and property" in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.The Court explained that by "circumstances which exclude the right", it meant when a state passed a law under the "police power"the inherent authority of U.S. state governments to pass laws governing "health, safety, and morals". The Court said that because the Due Process Clause protected freedom of contract, state laws could only interfere with it if they were valid exercises of the police power. To guarantee this freedom, the Court said American courts had to scrutinize state laws regulating economic freedom, such as New York's bakery law, to ensure they served valid police-power purposes.
Applying these legal principles to the facts of the case, the Court first determined that the job of a baker was not dangerous enough to need special government protection. The Court distinguished New York's law for bakers from a Utah law for miners the Court had upheld against a Due Process challenge in its 1898 decision Holden v. Hardy, saying that, unlike mining, baking was not an unusually dangerous activity. The Court also determined that the Bakeshop Act had no relation to public health. Reasoning that the New York Legislature could not rationally have enacted the law for health reasons, the Court concluded that the Act was really a "labor law" that could not be justified under the police power.
The Court concluded that New York had failed to prove that the Bakeshop Act's maximum-hours provision had any close connection to public health. It said that if it were to conclude otherwise, then state governments would have unlimited power over citizens' lives.
Lastly, the Court said that state laws ostensibly enacted for police-power purposes were often really intended to redistribute wealth or to help a certain group at the expense of others.
Having determined that Bakeshop Act had no relation to public health and that the baking profession was not unusually dangerous, the Court concluded that "the limit of the police power has been reached and passed in this case", and it struck down the act as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.
Dissents
Harlan
Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justices Edward Douglass White and William R. Day.Harlan contended that the liberty to contract is subject to regulation imposed by a state acting within the scope of its police powers. He offered the following rule for determining whether such statutes are unconstitutional:
Harlan asserted that the burden of proof should rest with the party seeking to have such a statute deemed unconstitutional.
Harlan argued that the Court gave insufficient weight to the state's argument that the law was a valid health measure addressing a legitimate state interest. He contended that it was "plain that this statute was enacted to protect the physical well-being of those who work in bakery and confectionery establishments." Responding to the majority's assertion that the profession of a baker was not an unhealthy one, he quoted at length from academic studies describing the respiratory ailments and other risks that bakers faced. He argued that the Supreme Court should have deferred to the New York Legislature's judgment that long working hours threatened the health of bakery employees: "If the end which the legislature seeks to accomplish be one to which its power extends, and if the means employed to that end, although not the wisest or best, are yet not plainly and palpably unauthorized by law, then the court cannot interfere."
Holmes
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. also dissented from the Court's opinion and wrote a three-paragraph dissent that has become one of the most famous in U.S. Supreme Court history. Holmes began by accusing the majority of deciding Lochner's case by following laissez-faire economics rather than legal principles.Holmes pointed out that there were many American laws restricting citizens' freedom of contract that had never been found unconstitutional. As "ancient examples", Holmes pointed to usury laws, which set caps on interest rates for loans of money, and Sunday laws, which outlawed certain economic activities on Sundays in order to promote Christian observance of the Sabbath. Holmes analogized the majority's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the writings of Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British sociologist who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and whose ideas later became associated with social Darwinism.
Holmes wrote that, in his view, a duly enacted state law could only be unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause's guarantee of liberty if it could rationally be said to "infringe fundamental principles" in the American tradition, and he maintained that the Bakeshop Act clearly did not do so.
Significance and legacy
The Supreme Court's due process jurisprudence over the next three decades was inconsistent, but it took a narrow view of states' police powers in several major labor cases after Lochner. For example, in Coppage v. Kansas, the Court struck down statutes forbidding "yellow-dog contracts." Similarly, in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, the Supreme Court held that minimum wage laws violated the due process clause, but Chief Justice William Howard Taft strongly dissented and suggested that the Court instead should have overruled Lochner. The doctrine of substantive due process was coupled with a narrow interpretation of congressional power under the Commerce Clause. Justices James McReynolds, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter, and Pierce Butler emerged during the 1920s and the 1930s as the foremost defenders of traditional limitations on government power on the Supreme Court and so were collectively dubbed by supporters of the New Deal the "Four Horsemen of Reaction." All four of them believed in laissez-faire economics.In 1934, the Supreme Court decided in Nebbia v. New York that there is no constitutional fundamental right to freedom of contract. In 1937, the Supreme Court decided West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, which expressly overruled Adkins and implicitly signaled the end of the Lochner era by repudiating the idea that freedom of contract should be unrestricted.
Although the Supreme Court did not explicitly overrule Lochner, it agreed to give more deference to the decisions of state legislatures. The Supreme Court sounded the death knell for economic substantive due process several years later in Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma by unanimously declaring, "The day is gone when this Court uses the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought."