Justice Rufus Wheeler Peckham sat on the United States Supreme Court from January 1896 until his death in October 1909, and his name survives in constitutional law mainly through a handful of major Supreme Court cases: Lochner v. New York, Allgeyer v. Louisiana, Ex parte Young, and the early Sherman Act decisions in United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association and Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. v. United States. He also joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson. Together these rulings made him the leading judicial voice of what became known as the “liberty of contract” doctrine, while also shaping antitrust enforcement and federal court jurisdiction in ways that still matter.
Lochner v. New York (1905)
The case that defined Peckham’s legacy, and later gave its name to an entire era of constitutional law, arose from New York’s Bakeshop Act. The statute limited bakery employees to ten hours a day and sixty hours a week. Joseph Lochner, a bakery owner in Utica, was fined for letting an employee exceed those limits.1Justia. Lochner v. New York – 198 U.S. 45
Writing for a 5–4 majority, Peckham struck the law down. He reasoned that baking was not an inherently dangerous profession like mining or smelting, and that the hour limits had no real connection to worker health. Without that connection, the law was simply the government dictating terms of private employment contracts, exactly the kind of interference the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited. The state’s police power, Peckham wrote, could not serve as a pretext for meddling in labor agreements between competent adults.2Historical Society of the New York Courts. Rufus W. Peckham, Jr.
Two dissents gained stature over time. Justice John Marshall Harlan, writing for three dissenters, argued the majority had ignored substantial evidence that baking was in fact grueling and unhealthy, and that when reasonable people could disagree about whether a profession was dangerous, the Court should defer to the legislature.1Justia. Lochner v. New York – 198 U.S. 45 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a separate dissent that became one of the most quoted passages in American legal history: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.” Holmes accused the majority of reading laissez-faire capitalism into the Constitution and argued the Court had no business striking down laws simply because a majority of justices disagreed with the policy behind them.
Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897)
Peckham built the foundation for Lochner eight years earlier in Allgeyer v. Louisiana. The case involved a Louisiana law that prohibited residents from buying insurance from companies not licensed to do business in the state. Writing for a unanimous Court, Peckham struck the law down. He held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty extended beyond freedom from wrongful imprisonment to the right to pursue a livelihood and enter into contracts.3Justia. Allgeyer v. Louisiana – 165 U.S. 578 A state could not prevent a citizen from making a contract outside its borders, even if the insured property was located within the state. The decision gave constitutional footing to the idea that economic freedom was a protected right and turned the Court away from the narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that had prevailed since the Slaughter-House Cases.
Antitrust Rulings Under the Sherman Act
Peckham’s commitment to free markets did not translate into opposition to all government intervention in commerce. In antitrust cases he read the Sherman Act broadly, striking down private agreements that strangled competition. The same justice who rejected labor regulation as government overreach used federal power forcefully against business cartels.
United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association (1897)
Peckham wrote the majority opinion striking down a rate-fixing agreement among eighteen western railroads. The railroads argued their agreement was reasonable and actually kept prices low for consumers. Peckham rejected the defense entirely, holding that the Sherman Act prohibited all contracts in restraint of interstate trade “without exception or limitation,” regardless of whether the restraint seemed reasonable.4Justia. United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Ass’n – 166 U.S. 290 Competition itself should set the rate. The government did not need to prove intent; the restraint was enough if it was the agreement’s necessary effect.
Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. v. United States (1899)
Two years later, Peckham refined the approach in a case involving cast-iron pipe manufacturers who had divided up the market among themselves and rigged bids on public contracts. He drew a line between agreements that affected interstate commerce only incidentally and those whose “direct, immediate and intended effect” was to raise prices. The latter violated the Sherman Act.5Justia. Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. v. United States – 175 U.S. 211 The ruling reinforced Congress’s power to reach combinations whose natural result was the elimination of competition across state lines, while preserving the principle that purely local commerce remained outside federal jurisdiction.
Ex Parte Young (1908)
If Lochner is Peckham’s most controversial opinion, Ex parte Young may be his most enduring. The case began when Minnesota established maximum rates for railroad passengers and freight, backing the rates with severe fines and the threat of imprisonment for railroad executives who refused to comply. Shareholders sued in federal court, arguing the rates were so low they amounted to an unconstitutional taking. Minnesota’s attorney general, Edward T. Young, was held in contempt for attempting to enforce the rate laws despite a federal court injunction.6Legal Information Institute. Ex Parte Young, 209 U.S. 123
The question was whether the Eleventh Amendment, which generally bars lawsuits against states in federal court, shielded Young from the injunction. Peckham, writing for the majority, said no. He created a legal fiction that remains central to federal litigation: when a state official enforces an unconstitutional law, that official is “stripped of his official character” and acts as a private individual, not as a representative of the state. The suit therefore runs against the person, not the state, and the Eleventh Amendment does not apply.7Justia. Ex parte Young – 209 U.S. 123
Without this doctrine, anyone harmed by an unconstitutional state law would have to violate the law first and raise the constitutional challenge as a defense in an enforcement action, an “unnecessarily onerous” path, as Peckham put it, that could mean risking imprisonment to vindicate a federal right. The Ex parte Young fiction gave federal courts the power to issue injunctions stopping enforcement before anyone had to take that risk. It remains one of the most frequently invoked doctrines in federal civil rights litigation.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Peckham joined the Court just months before one of its most infamous decisions. In Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in May 1896, the Court ruled 7–1 that Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, requiring racial segregation on railroad cars, did not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments. Peckham voted with the majority, joining Justice Henry Billings Brown’s opinion holding that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutionally permissible.8Ballotpedia. Plessy v. Ferguson Only Justice Harlan dissented. Plessy remained the law until Brown v. Board of Education overturned it in 1954. Peckham left no separate writing in the case, so the extent of his personal reasoning is unknown.
Background and Appointment
Peckham was born in Albany, New York in 1838 into a legal family. His father served on the New York Court of Appeals. The younger Peckham studied law in his father’s office and was admitted to the New York bar in 1859.9Justia. Justice Rufus Wheeler Peckham He later won election to the New York Supreme Court and then to the New York Court of Appeals, where his conservative property-rights philosophy solidified.
President Grover Cleveland nominated him to the United States Supreme Court on December 3, 1895. The Senate confirmed him by voice vote six days later, and he took the judicial oath on January 6, 1896.10Federal Judicial Center. Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges – Rufus Wheeler Peckham Peckham brought with him a deeply held belief that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty” protected not just freedom from physical restraint but also the right of individuals to earn a living, enter into agreements, and conduct business without unnecessary government interference. When a regulation lacked a clear connection to public health or safety, he viewed it as an arbitrary exercise of government power.
Legacy
Peckham died on October 24, 1909, in Altamont, New York, while still serving on the Court.10Federal Judicial Center. Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges – Rufus Wheeler Peckham He was 70 and had served for nearly fourteen years.
His reputation is inseparable from the “Lochner era,” the period roughly spanning 1897 to 1937 during which the Supreme Court regularly struck down economic regulations on liberty-of-contract grounds. That era ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), in which the Court upheld a state minimum wage law and abandoned the expansive view of freedom to contract that Peckham had championed.11Oyez. West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish Holmes’s Lochner dissent eventually carried the day, three decades after it was written.
Modern legal scholars generally treat Lochner as a cautionary tale about judges imposing economic ideology through constitutional interpretation. Peckham’s record, though, is more complicated than that single case suggests. His antitrust opinions wielded federal power aggressively against monopolistic behavior, and the Ex parte Young doctrine he authored remains an indispensable tool for enforcing constitutional rights against state governments. The justice who believed government should leave private contracts alone also built the framework that lets citizens haul state officials into federal court when those officials violate the Constitution.