Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1908

Muller v. Oregon

208 U.S. 412 | 28 S. Ct. 324 | 52 L. Ed. 551 | 1908 U.S. LEXIS 1452

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Takeaway

In short, Muller upheld sex-specific maximum-hour laws by distinguishing Lochner and allowing states to protect women’s health, though its reasoning rested on gender assumptions later rejected in equal-protection doctrine.

Background

Oregon’s 1903 law prohibited the employment of women for more than ten hours in a single day in mechanical establishments, factories, and laundries. Curt Muller owned Portland’s Grand Laundry. The State charged that his agent required Mrs. E. Gotcher to work more than ten hours on September 4, 1905.

A jury found Muller guilty, and he was fined $10. The Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the conviction. Muller sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment by interfering with liberty of contract, denying equal protection through sex-based classification, and exceeding Oregon’s police power.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Oregon’s ten-hour limit for women working in laundries unconstitutionally deprived women and their employers of liberty of contract without due process of law.

Holding

No. The hour limitation was a valid exercise of Oregon’s police power and did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court recognized that liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment includes a general right to make employment contracts. But that liberty is not absolute. States may restrict contracting when a regulation reasonably serves interests within the police power, including health and welfare.

Muller relied heavily on Lochner v. New York, which had invalidated a maximum-hours law for male bakery workers. The Court declined to treat Lochner as controlling because, in its view, the health implications of long hours of labor differed for women and men.

The Court relied on legislative experience, foreign and domestic labor laws, and the extensive factual materials assembled in Louis Brandeis’s brief. Those materials supported what the Court characterized as a widespread and long-standing belief that extended work, particularly prolonged standing, could be harmful to women’s health.

The Court reasoned that women’s physical characteristics and maternal functions could place them at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence. It further treated women’s health as a public concern because it believed healthy mothers were important to the welfare of future generations. On that basis, the Court held that Oregon could limit women’s work hours in laundries.

Issue #2

Whether Oregon denied equal protection by applying the ten-hour limitation to women but not to similarly situated men.

Holding

No. The Court held that women could constitutionally be treated as a distinct class for purposes of this labor regulation.

Reasoning

The Court acknowledged that Oregon law generally gave women, married and unmarried, contractual and personal rights equal to those of men. Formal equality in contractual capacity, however, did not prevent the State from recognizing sex-based differences relevant to health and working conditions.

According to the Court, differences in physical structure, physical strength, capacity for prolonged labor, and maternal functions justified a legislative distinction between women and men. The Court therefore concluded that a protective regulation for women was permissible even though an equivalent restriction for male workers might not be.

The Court also reasoned that the law was intended not merely for individual women’s benefit but for the public welfare as the Court understood it. Because the classification rested, in the Court’s view, on real differences connected to the regulation’s health purpose, it was not unconstitutional class legislation.