The Lochner Court is the name historians and lawyers give to the United States Supreme Court from roughly 1897 to 1937, when a majority of justices read the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting a broad “liberty of contract” and used that reading to strike down labor laws, minimum wage statutes, and other economic regulations. The era takes its name from Lochner v. New York (1905), which invalidated a state law capping bakery workers’ hours. It ended in 1937, when the Court reversed course and began deferring to legislatures on economic policy. That reversal still shapes how courts review economic regulation today.
The Constitutional Theory Behind the Era
The Fourteenth Amendment forbids any state from depriving a person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” For most of the nineteenth century, courts read “due process” as a procedural guarantee: government had to follow fair steps before taking something from you. The Lochner era grew out of a much broader reading, one that treated “liberty” as including economic freedoms no legislature could override, even if every procedural rule was followed.
The first clear statement came in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897). Louisiana had tried to stop its residents from buying insurance from out-of-state companies that lacked a state license. The Court struck the law down, holding that the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment went beyond freedom from physical restraint. It included the right to earn a living in any lawful calling and “to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential” to that end.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578 (1897) That sentence opened the door to four decades of aggressive judicial review of economic legislation.
Scholars call this approach substantive due process. Instead of asking whether government followed fair procedures, courts asked whether a law’s content interfered too much with economic freedom. If a judge decided the connection between a regulation and some public benefit like health or safety was too weak, the law fell, no matter how many legislators had voted for it.2Legal Information Institute. Lochner Era In practice, unelected judges gained a veto over economic policy choices made by elected officials.
Lochner v. New York
The case that gave the era its name reached the Court in 1905. New York had passed a labor law capping bakery workers at sixty hours per week and ten hours per day. Joseph Lochner, a bakery owner in Utica, was fined for letting an employee work beyond those limits. He challenged the law all the way up.
By five to four, the Court struck the statute down. The reasoning was direct: an employer and an employee each have a constitutional right to agree on whatever working arrangement they want, and the state can interfere only when a regulation has a clear connection to public health or safety. The majority accepted that baking was physically demanding but concluded that New York had not shown the hour limits were genuinely necessary to protect bakers’ health rather than simply imposing the legislature’s preferences on private bargains.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)
Liberty of contract rested on an assumption both sides recognized at the time: that a bakery worker and a bakery owner had equal bargaining power. If either could walk away, any deal they reached must reflect mutual choice, and government had no business second-guessing it. That a worker with a family to feed might accept dangerous conditions out of desperation did not factor into the majority’s analysis.
The dissents have outlived the majority. Justice John Marshall Harlan argued that the Court should have asked whether a rational legislature could reasonably believe long hours harmed bakers, and pointed to medical evidence that it did. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a shorter dissent that became one of the most quoted passages in American constitutional law, accusing the majority of smuggling its economic preferences into the Constitution. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics,” Holmes wrote, naming the laissez-faire philosophy of the day. A constitution, he added, “is made for people of fundamentally differing views.”3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) Three decades later, Holmes’s position would essentially become the Court’s.
How Far the Doctrine Reached
Lochner was not a one-off. The same logic spread across labor law, price regulation, and federal power over the next thirty years.
Union Membership
In Adair v. United States (1908), the Court struck down a federal law that made it a crime for railroads to fire workers for joining a union. The majority reasoned that an employer has the same right to set hiring conditions as a worker has to set the terms on which he sells his labor. The law failed on two grounds: Fifth Amendment due process and an insufficient connection to interstate commerce.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908)
Seven years later, Coppage v. Kansas (1915) extended the same reasoning to state law. Kansas had made it illegal for employers to require workers to sign “yellow-dog contracts” promising not to join a union as a condition of employment. The Court struck down the statute as a violation of Fourteenth Amendment due process, holding that an employer’s right to set the terms of employment was constitutionally equal to the worker’s right to refuse them.5Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915) Employers across the country could now legally force workers to choose between their job and their union.
Child Labor
In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Court invalidated a federal law that barred interstate shipment of goods produced by children under fourteen, or by children under sixteen who worked more than eight hours a day. Rather than frame the issue as liberty of contract, the majority drew a line between “commerce” and “manufacturing.” Because making goods was local, Congress could not reach it through the commerce power, even if the goods later crossed state lines.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918) The ruling blocked national child labor standards for decades.
Minimum Wages
In Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), the Court struck down a federal law setting minimum wages for women and children in the District of Columbia. The majority held that employer and employee had “equal right to obtain from each other the best terms they can by private bargaining.” The opinion also argued that because the Nineteenth Amendment had given women the vote, they no longer needed special economic protections.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923) The decision froze federal minimum wage legislation for the next fourteen years.
Price Regulation
Liberty of contract reached beyond employment. In Tyson & Brother v. Banton (1927), the Court struck down a New York law regulating the resale price of theater tickets. Government could fix prices, the majority held, only for businesses “affected with a public interest,” meaning essentially those operating under a public franchise or like a utility. A theater remained a private business, and the legislature’s own declaration that an industry served the public interest was “not conclusive upon the judiciary.”8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Tyson and Bro. v. Banton, 273 U.S. 418 (1927) The Court, not legislatures, decided which industries could be regulated.
Where the Court Drew Back
The Lochner-era Court did not strike down everything. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), decided just three years after Lochner, the Court unanimously upheld an Oregon law limiting women’s workdays to ten hours. The reasoning was not that legislatures deserved more respect but that women were different. The Court wrote that “woman’s physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage” that justified gender-specific regulation, and that “healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring.”9Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908) The exception rested on paternalism rather than any shift in constitutional theory.
How the Era Ended
The first major crack appeared in Nebbia v. New York (1934). During the Great Depression, New York had set minimum milk prices to prevent ruinous price wars among dairy farmers. A grocer convicted of selling below the set price challenged the law. The Court upheld the regulation, five to four. Justice Owen Roberts wrote that “neither property rights nor contract rights are absolute,” because government “cannot exist if the citizen may at will use his property to the detriment of his fellows, or exercise his freedom of contract to work them harm.” The Constitution required only that a law not be “unreasonable, arbitrary or capricious” and that its means have “a real and substantial relation to the object sought to be attained.”10Library of Congress. Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934) Roberts added that with “the wisdom of the policy adopted, with the adequacy or practicability of the law enacted to forward it, the courts are both incompetent and unauthorized to deal.” Nebbia did not formally overrule any prior case, but it gutted the intellectual foundation of the framework.
The decisive break came three years later in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937). Elsie Parrish, a hotel chambermaid in Wenatchee, Washington, sued her employer for the difference between what she was paid and the state’s minimum wage for women. The hotel argued the law was unconstitutional under Adkins. The Court upheld the Washington statute and explicitly overruled Adkins. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that the Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract, and that the liberty it protects is not an unlimited right to exploit workers.11Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
The timing was not accidental. President Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated by the Court’s repeated invalidation of New Deal legislation, had proposed adding up to six new justices, one for every sitting justice over seventy.12Federal Judicial Center. FDR’s Court-Packing Plan The plan never became law, but Justice Roberts’s vote to uphold the minimum wage in West Coast Hotel drained much of its political urgency. Historians call this the “switch in time that saved nine.”
What Replaced the Lochner Framework
With liberty of contract abandoned, the Court needed a new standard for economic legislation. Under what is now called rational basis review, a law is presumed constitutional as long as it is rationally related to any legitimate government purpose. The government need not prove the law wise, effective, or best; a challenger must show there is no conceivable rational basis for it, which is almost impossible to do.13Legal Information Institute. Rational Basis Test
The Court formalized the two-track approach in United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), a case about whether Congress could ban interstate shipment of “filled milk.” The holding upheld the law and was itself unremarkable. Footnote Four of Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s opinion was not. Stone suggested that while courts should give enormous deference to economic regulation, they might apply “more searching judicial inquiry” when legislation targets political processes like voting or free speech, or when prejudice against “discrete and insular minorities” distorts the democratic process.14Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144 (1938) That footnote became the blueprint for the tiered scrutiny framework that still governs constitutional law: deferential review for economic rules, strict scrutiny for laws burdening fundamental rights or targeting minority groups. The entire structure was in part designed to prevent another Lochner era.
Why the Term Still Gets Used
“Lochnerizing” remains one of the sharpest accusations in constitutional debate. When critics charge that judges are substituting their own policy views for those of elected officials, the Lochner era is the cautionary tale they invoke. The label has been used from both directions: against conservative justices who struck down campaign finance laws, and against liberal justices who expanded privacy rights. More recently, some scholars have drawn comparisons between the Lochner era and the Court’s major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to speak with unusual clarity before federal agencies can issue economically significant regulations. Supporters say the doctrine enforces democratic accountability. Critics argue it echoes Lochner’s core move of judges overriding the political branches through judicially created limits that appear nowhere in the constitutional text.