Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
He thanks David Tannenhaus and the referees of Law and History Review for their insightful and constructive comments. He is particularly indebted to Barry Cushman, Robert Mayer, and Susan Mezey, whose incisive analyses and suggestions were invaluable in sharpening the article's central argument.
The Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), invalidating an act limiting working hours for bakers as a violation of contractual freedom, has come to symbolize an era in constitutional law.1The period covers the years from the end of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era. Its chief characteristic, according to its critics, is the judiciary's hostility to progressive labor legislation. Statutes intended to protect vulnerable classes from the ravages of industrialization were routinely defeated in the courts. Progressives pioneered an interpretation in which Lochner became a leading "anticanonical" case, wrongly deploying the doctrine of substantive due process to shield inherited distributions of wealth and power. The time is long past when scholars characterized the era as a product of judges' reactionary commitments to laissez-faire or, worse, to Social Darwinism, following Justice Holmes's quip, dissenting in Lochner, that "the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics."2Contemporary scholars have reconstructed the period's jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice grounded in the Founding. The most widely accepted explanation, developed by Gillman's influential study, is that substantive due process embodied a principle of neutrality requiring courts to distinguish the authentic public aims of legislation from illegitimate attempts to advantage some classes at others' expense. 3An alternative explanation is that judges, drawing on the theory of natural rights, developed the doctrine of substantive due process to limit government's discretion to encumber prepolitical rights to private property and liberty of contract.4
These analyses are not mutually exclusive.5They share the view that an ideology of free labor, first articulated by the leading orators of the nascent Republican Party, informed judges' reluctance to authorize statutes intruding upon the employment contract.6The promise of free labor rested on the assumption that "a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the...