In 1918, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Act, creating a Minimum Wage Board empowered to investigate industries and set minimum wages for women and minors sufficient to meet the "necessary cost of living" and maintain workers in health and morals. The Board could hold hearings, take evidence, and issue wage orders by occupation and industry; violations were enforceable through criminal sanctions and injunctions. Pursuant to the Act, the Board fixed minimum weekly wages for women in several industries, including hospitals and hotels. Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia and a female employee who wished to work for less than the prescribed minimum sued to enjoin enforcement, arguing that the statute deprived employers and adult women employees of liberty of contract without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment. After proceedings in the local courts for the District, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal to determine the constitutionality of the Act as applied to adult women workers.
Does the District of Columbia's minimum-wage law for women, which authorizes a board to fix minimum wages based on cost of living and welfare, violate the liberty of contract protected by the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause?
The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment protects liberty of contract, subject to reasonable regulation in the exercise of the police power to safeguard the public health, safety, morals, or welfare. While regulations addressing health and safety (such as maximum-hours laws) may be permissible, a law that fixes wages purely to attain a general living standard—without a direct, sufficient relation to health or safety in the particular employment—impermissibly interferes with the parties' freedom of contract.
Yes. The D.C. minimum-wage law for adult women unconstitutionally interferes with liberty of contract and violates the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause; it is therefore unenforceable.
1) Liberty of contract under the Fifth Amendment: The Court, per Justice Sutherland, reaffirmed that "liberty" in the Due Process Clause includes the freedom of employers and employees to make contracts regarding wages. Although liberty of contract is not absolute and may yield to reasonable exercises of the police power, restrictions must bear a substantial and direct relation to recognized ends such as health and safety. The Act departed from that principle by compelling payment of a wage based not on the value of the employee's services or the conditions of the particular work, but on a generalized estimate of the cost of living. 2) Distinguishing hours/safety laws from wage-fixing: The majority underscored a difference between maximum-hours or safety regulations (upheld in cases like Muller v. Oregon and Bunting v. Oregon) and wage fixation. Hours and safety rules target concrete workplace hazards and thus directly protect health. A minimum wage, by contrast, mandates a specific price term in every employment contract regardless of the worker's capacity, the nature of the work, or the employer's circumstances. Because it does not directly address a demonstrable workplace harm, it represents a more intrusive and unjustified interference with private bargaining. 3) Gender-specific protection post-Nineteenth Amendment: The statute applied only to women and minors, but the case involved adult women. The Court reasoned that justifications for special legal protections for women were weakened by social changes and by the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. With political equality and greater economic participation, adult women could not be categorically presumed to require paternalistic wage protections that would deny them and their employers the liberty to agree to lower wages. 4) Legislative ends and means: Although alleviating low wages and promoting general welfare were laudable, the Court concluded that the Act's means—compulsory wage floors for adult women—were not sufficiently related to the health and safety of the specific employment relationship. The statute effectively sought to redistribute income to meet a living standard, a goal the majority deemed beyond the permissible scope of economic regulation under the Due Process Clause at the time. 5) Dissenting views: Chief Justice Taft and Justice Holmes (joined by Justice Sanford) dissented. Taft argued there is no principled distinction between regulating hours and setting minimum wages when the legislative purpose is to protect workers' health and welfare; substandard wages may be as harmful as overlong hours. Holmes, consistent with his Lochner dissent, stressed deference: the Constitution does not enact a particular economic theory, and legislatures may conclude that minimum wages are necessary to protect vulnerable workers. The majority rejected these positions, adhering instead to a robust conception of liberty of contract. 6) Disposition and scope: The Court invalidated the law as applied to adult women. While acknowledging that different considerations might apply to minors, the statute's scheme for women and minors was not severed in this litigation, and the orders at issue could not be enforced.
Adkins represents the high-water mark of freedom-of-contract jurisprudence and the Court's skepticism of broad, redistributive economic regulation during the Lochner era. It is doctrinally vital because it: (a) crystallized the distinction the Court drew between permissible health-and-safety regulations and impermissible price/wage controls; (b) framed women's labor protections against a backdrop of evolving views on gender equality, with the Nineteenth Amendment cited to diminish rationales for protective legislation; and (c) set up the eventual repudiation of this approach. In 1937, West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish expressly overruled Adkins, marking the end of the Lochner era and inaugurating modern, highly deferential rational-basis review for economic regulation. For law students, Adkins is a touchstone for understanding substantive due process, the shifting deference owed to legislatures, and the interplay between constitutional equality narratives and labor protections.
Adkins v. Children's Hospital stands as a decisive statement of Lochner-era constitutionalism. By striking down a minimum-wage law for adult women in the District of Columbia, the Court privileged liberty of contract over legislative judgments about economic welfare and workers' livelihoods, distinguishing wage-fixing from more traditional health and safety regulations. The opinion also leveraged an equality-inflected argument—citing the Nineteenth Amendment—to narrow the rationale for gender-specific protections.