Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1905

Lochner v. New York

198 U.S. 45 | 25 S. Ct. 539 | 49 L. Ed. 937 | 1905 U.S. LEXIS 1153

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Takeaway

In short, this case struck down a bakery-hours law by treating liberty of contract as a protected component of Fourteenth Amendment liberty and finding the asserted health rationale too weak; it became the defining symbol of the Lochner era of aggressive judicial review of economic regulation.

Background

New York’s 1897 Labor Law prohibited bakery and confectionery employees from working more than ten hours in a day or sixty hours in a week, subject to a limited provision allowing shorter work on the last day of the week. Joseph Lochner, a bakery owner, was convicted for permitting an employee to work more than sixty hours in one week.

The New York courts sustained the statute as a valid health measure. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed Lochner’s conviction, although the state judges disagreed over whether bakery work was sufficiently unhealthy to justify an hours restriction. Lochner sought review in the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty includes a liberty of contract between employers and employees.

Holding

Yes. The liberty protected by the Due Process Clause includes the general right to make employment contracts, including contracts for the purchase and sale of labor.

Reasoning

The Court treated the ability to pursue a lawful occupation and to agree on the terms of labor as part of the individual liberty protected against state deprivation without due process of law. That protection applied to both sides of the employment relationship: an employee’s right to sell labor and an employer’s right to buy it.

The Court emphasized, however, that liberty of contract was not absolute. A state may prohibit or regulate contracts through a legitimate exercise of its police power to protect health, safety, morals, or the general welfare. The constitutional question was therefore whether New York’s hours limit was a genuine and reasonable health regulation rather than an arbitrary restriction on private agreements.

Issue #2

Whether New York’s ten-hour-per-day and sixty-hour-per-week limit for bakery employees was a valid exercise of the state police power to protect health.

Holding

No. The hours limit was an unreasonable and arbitrary interference with liberty of contract and therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

Reasoning

The Court distinguished decisions sustaining workplace regulations in hazardous industries. In Holden v. Hardy, for example, the Court had upheld an eight-hour law for miners and smelter workers because those occupations involved distinctive and serious dangers to workers’ health. Bakery work, in the majority’s view, did not present comparable risks.

The statute could not be sustained simply as a labor regulation. The Court considered bakers to be competent adults, capable of protecting their own interests and bargaining over their hours. Because the law governed a private business relationship between persons who were sui juris, it needed a substantial health justification.

The Court found no reasonable foundation for concluding that limiting bakers to ten hours a day or sixty hours a week was necessary to protect either public health or bakers’ health. Although any occupation may involve some health risks, the Court reasoned that accepting such a remote connection would allow legislatures to regulate working hours in virtually every occupation.

Nor did the Court accept the argument that shorter hours would make bread cleaner or safer. In the majority’s view, the connection between the number of hours a baker worked and the healthfulness of the bread produced was too indirect and speculative to justify restricting employment contracts.

New York had already imposed direct sanitary regulations on bakeries, including requirements concerning inspection, washrooms, drainage, plumbing, floors, ceilings, and cleanliness. Those measures directly addressed workplace conditions. The additional hours restriction, the Court held, was not sufficiently related to health and instead operated as an unconstitutional interference with private labor agreements.

Dissents

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan, joined by Justices White and Day, agreed that liberty of contract receives constitutional protection but stressed that it is subject to reasonable regulations enacted for the common good. A state’s police power includes the protection of health, safety, and welfare, and legislatures necessarily have substantial discretion in deciding what measures those interests require.

Under Harlan’s approach, a court should invalidate a health regulation only when it is plainly and palpably beyond legislative power—when it has no real or substantial relation to health or is plainly arbitrary. Doubt about a statute’s validity should be resolved in favor of the legislature, not against it.

Harlan concluded that the bakery-hours limit easily satisfied that deferential standard. Bakery work could involve heat, flour dust, poor air, night work, physical exertion, and long hours. Evidence and common experience supplied reasonable grounds for believing that work beyond sixty hours per week could harm bakers’ health.

The majority, in Harlan’s view, improperly substituted its own assessment of workplace health and economic policy for the legislature’s judgment. Because the law was at least reasonably related to protecting workers’ health, the Court should have upheld Lochner’s conviction and left New York to manage its domestic health policy.

Justice Holmes

Reasoning

Justice Holmes argued that the majority’s decision rested on an economic theory—laissez-faire freedom of contract—that many Americans did not share. The Constitution, he maintained, does not adopt a particular economic philosophy or forbid legislation merely because judges regard it as unwise or paternalistic.

States had long regulated individual conduct and contractual freedom through laws such as Sunday laws, usury laws, compulsory-school laws, lottery prohibitions, and regulations of work in mines. Those examples showed that the Fourteenth Amendment did not create a broad constitutional right to resist ordinary economic and social regulation.

For Holmes, the relevant question was narrow: whether a rational and fair person necessarily would conclude that the bakery-hours law violated a fundamental principle deeply rooted in American legal tradition. Because reasonable people could regard the law as a health measure or as an initial step toward broader regulation of working hours, the statute did not cross that demanding line.

Holmes therefore would have deferred to New York’s legislative judgment. His dissent rejected the majority’s use of substantive due process to constitutionalize its own views about the proper limits of labor regulation.