Lochner v. New York is the 1905 Supreme Court decision that struck down a New York law capping bakery workers’ hours at 10 per day and 60 per week, holding by a 5–4 vote that the limit violated a “liberty of contract” the Court read into the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.1Justia. Lochner v. New York The ruling gave its name to a roughly thirty-year stretch in which the justices used that doctrine to invalidate labor and economic regulations at both the state and federal level. The Court eventually abandoned the approach, but the case is still cited whenever someone accuses judges of writing their own economic or policy views into constitutional law.
The Bakeshop Act and How the Case Reached the Court
New York’s Bakeshop Act of 1897 regulated sanitary conditions inside bakeries and capped employee work hours at 10 per day and 60 per week.1Justia. Lochner v. New York Joseph Lochner, who ran a small bakery in Utica, was charged twice for letting an employee work past those limits. He accepted the first conviction and a $25 fine. The second brought a $50 fine and up to 50 days in the Oneida County jail, and he fought it.2Legal Information Institute (LII). Joseph Lochner, Plff. in Err., v. People of the State of New York
New York’s appellate courts upheld the Bakeshop Act as a valid exercise of the state’s power to protect worker health. Lochner then took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on a single constitutional question: did the hour limits violate the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause?
What the Court Decided
The doctrinal groundwork was already in place. In Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), the Court had held that “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment went beyond physical freedom and included the right to earn a living, pursue a vocation, and enter contracts to do so.3Justia. Allgeyer v. Louisiana That reading, later labeled substantive due process, meant an economic regulation had to be a genuine exercise of the state’s police power over public health, safety, or morals.
Justice Rufus W. Peckham, writing for the five-justice majority, found the Bakeshop Act failed that test. He called it “an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract.”4C-SPAN. Lochner v. New York – Peckham Opinion States had broad authority to protect health, Peckham acknowledged, but he did not think baking was dangerous enough to warrant the restriction. He treated the statute as a labor regulation wearing health language, and warned that accepting it would let virtually any trade be regulated the same way.
The move that has drawn criticism ever since is that Peckham substituted the Court’s own view of baking conditions for the New York legislature’s. Whether judges should be making that call, rather than deferring to elected lawmakers on contested factual questions, became the central fault line of the case.
The Dissents That Outlived the Ruling
Two dissents attacked the majority from different directions, and both are quoted more often today than Peckham’s opinion.
Holmes on Judicial Restraint
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote only a few paragraphs. His most famous line: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”5Constitution Center. Lochner v. New York (1905) – Excerpt: Dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Spencer was a nineteenth-century advocate of minimal government and unfettered competition; Holmes was saying the majority had smuggled laissez-faire economics into the Constitution. The Constitution, he argued, was “not intended to embody a particular economic theory.” Legislatures should be free to experiment, and a rational connection to a legitimate goal should be enough to sustain a law.
Harlan on the Health Evidence
Justice John Marshall Harlan, joined by Justices White and Day, challenged the majority’s facts rather than its philosophy. He cited Professor Hirt’s treatise on occupational diseases, describing bakers laboring long hours in overheated rooms, inhaling flour dust that inflamed their lungs and eyes, and developing rheumatism and swollen legs from prolonged standing. Bakers, he wrote, were “palefaced and of more delicate health than the workers of other crafts,” and seldom lived past 50. A New York Bureau of Labor Statistics report confirmed conditions that interfered with basic nutrition.6C-SPAN. Lochner v. New York – Harlan Dissent
Harlan’s point was that even under the majority’s own test, this much health evidence should have carried the law. The majority hadn’t just applied a standard and found the statute wanting; it had discounted the record the legislature relied on.
The Lochner Era: Three Decades of Judicial Veto
Lochner became a template. Over the next thirty years, the Court used liberty of contract to invalidate a range of labor and economic laws.
In Coppage v. Kansas (1915), the Court struck down a state ban on “yellow-dog contracts,” which required workers to promise not to join a union as a condition of employment.7Justia. Coppage v. Kansas The right to contract about employment, the majority held, was part of Fourteenth Amendment liberty.
In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Court turned to federal power. Congress had prohibited the interstate shipment of goods produced by child labor, and the Court struck the statute down, holding that manufacturing was local and outside Congress’s Commerce Clause reach.8Justia. Hammer v. Dagenhart The practical result was a regulatory gap: Congress lacked the power, and states feared that stricter standards would push employers into more permissive neighbors.
In Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), the Court invalidated a federal minimum wage law for women in the District of Columbia, calling it “simply and exclusively a price-fixing law.”9U.S. Reports (Library of Congress). Adkins v. Children’s Hospital The opinion drew a line between regulating hours (permissible) and fixing wages (unconstitutional).
The doctrine was not applied consistently. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Court unanimously upheld a state law limiting women’s work hours to 10 per day, resting on paternalistic assumptions about women’s physical constitution and maternal role that the justices treated as grounds for protection they would not extend to men.10Justia. Muller v. Oregon The same Court that would not let New York protect bakers had no trouble letting Oregon protect women, so long as the rationale matched the justices’ own social views.
How the Doctrine Collapsed
The Lochner framework eroded over a decade of economic crisis and political confrontation.
The first crack came in Nebbia v. New York (1934), which upheld a state law setting minimum milk prices during the Great Depression. A state, the Court said, “is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare.”11U.S. Reports (Library of Congress). Nebbia v. New York The language repudiated aggressive judicial review of economic policy without saying so explicitly.
The decisive break came in 1937 in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. The Court upheld a Washington state minimum wage law for women, directly overruling Adkins and rejecting the expansive liberty of contract doctrine.12Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for a 5–4 majority that a state could restrict contract freedom when doing so served the public welfare. The timing gave the case its fame beyond legal circles: President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just proposed expanding the Supreme Court to as many as 15 justices, and Justice Owen Roberts, who had previously voted to strike down economic regulations, switched sides. The shift became known as “the switch in time that saved nine.”
Four years later, in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. (1941), a unanimous Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act and explicitly overruled Hammer v. Dagenhart, calling it “a departure from the principles which have prevailed in the interpretation of the Commerce Clause both before and since the decision.”13U.S. Reports (Library of Congress). United States v. Darby The authority of both state and federal governments to set minimum wages, maximum hours, and workplace standards was settled.
Why the Case Still Matters
By 1955, the transformation was complete. In Williamson v. Lee Optical Co., the Court said that “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.”14U.S. Reports (Library of Congress). Williamson v. Lee Optical Co. Economic regulations today receive rational basis review: courts uphold the law unless it is demonstrably arbitrary or irrational, and the challenger carries the burden.15Constitution Annotated. Overview of Economic Substantive Due Process Federal and state laws on minimum wages, overtime, workplace safety, and anti-discrimination face almost no substantive due process challenge.
The case survives as an accusation. “Lochnerizing” has become shorthand for judges reading their own policy preferences into the Constitution, and both sides of the political spectrum use it. Conservative critics compared Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut to Lochner, arguing that unenumerated privacy rights were the same kind of overreach as unenumerated economic rights. Liberal critics have turned the charge on decisions expanding gun rights or corporate speech protections.
The deeper puzzle is that the Court abandoned Lochner’s approach to economic regulation without abandoning substantive due process itself. Economic laws get near-automatic deference. Laws burdening personal liberties like privacy, bodily autonomy, and family relationships face much tougher scrutiny. Whether that split is principled or arbitrary remains one of the liveliest debates in constitutional law, and Lochner sits at the center of it because it poses a question no generation of lawyers has fully answered: when judges strike down a law, how do you tell the difference between enforcing the Constitution and enforcing their own beliefs?