In 1895, New York enacted the Bakeshop Act, a comprehensive statute regulating bakeries. Among other sanitation and safety provisions, Section 110 imposed a maximum-hours rule: no baker could be permitted to work more than ten hours in any one day or sixty hours in any one week. Joseph Lochner, who owned a bakery in Utica, was indicted for violating Section 110 by allowing an employee to work beyond the weekly limit. He was convicted (as a second offense) and fined $50. Lochner argued that the hours limitation infringed the liberty of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause and was not a valid exercise of the state police power. The New York courts, including the New York Court of Appeals, upheld the statute and Lochner's conviction. Lochner sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that, unlike regulations directly related to health and safety, the hours cap was an arbitrary interference with private employment contracts in a relatively healthy occupation.
Does New York's statutory limit on bakery employees' working hours violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause by unconstitutionally interfering with the liberty of contract, because it is not a valid exercise of the state's police power to protect health, safety, or welfare?
Under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, individuals possess a substantive liberty of contract interest. While a state may, pursuant to its police power, enact laws regulating health, safety, morals, and the general welfare, a statute that interferes with liberty of contract must bear a real and substantial relation to a legitimate police-power objective and be a fair, reasonable, and appropriate exercise of that power. If the law is an unnecessary, unreasonable, or arbitrary interference with the right to contract and is not genuinely aimed at protecting health or safety, it violates the Due Process Clause.
No. The New York maximum-hours law for bakers is unconstitutional because it is not a valid health or safety regulation but an arbitrary interference with the liberty of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Majority (Justice Peckham): The Court recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment protects liberty of contract, citing Allgeyer v. Louisiana, but also acknowledged that the state may regulate pursuant to its police power to protect health, safety, morals, and welfare. The decisive inquiry is whether the statute bears a real and substantial relation to those ends. The majority concluded that the baking trade, unlike mining or smelting (upheld in Holden v. Hardy), is not so dangerous or unhealthy as to justify a categorical maximum-hours restriction. The statute appeared less a health law and more a labor regulation aimed at equalizing bargaining power. Because the hours limit was not shown to be necessary or appropriately tailored to protect bakers' health, and because other sanitation provisions in the Bakeshop Act already addressed genuine health concerns, the hours cap was deemed an arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on liberty of contract. Dissent (Justice Harlan, joined by Justices White and Day): The dissent argued for deference to legislative judgments where there is any rational basis to believe the law promotes health or safety. Citing legislative facts and medical reports about the conditions of bakeries, Harlan contended that long hours in cramped, dusty, and poorly ventilated bake shops posed real health risks, and that the statute bore a reasonable relation to reducing those risks. Under a deferential standard, the law should be upheld. Dissent (Justice Holmes): Holmes criticized the majority for constitutionalizing a preference for laissez-faire economics: "The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." He argued that unless a statute violates a specific constitutional prohibition or lacks any rational justification, courts should defer to democratic choices about economic policy. Holmes emphasized that many accepted laws (e.g., Sunday closing laws, usury laws) limit contracts; the existence of such laws shows that the Constitution permits reasonable regulation of economic life.
Lochner defined and epitomized the early twentieth-century substantive due process approach to economic regulation, under which courts scrutinized whether a law genuinely advanced health, safety, or welfare and invalidated laws seen as paternalistic or redistributive. The decision inaugurated the "Lochner era," during which the Court often invalidated wage, hour, and labor regulations as infringements on liberty of contract. Beginning with cases like Nebbia v. New York (1934) and culminating in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) and United States v. Carolene Products (1938), the Court abandoned Lochner's heightened skepticism of economic regulation in favor of deferential rational-basis review. Lochner remains central for understanding modern substantive due process: the repudiation of its approach to economic legislation coexists with the continued recognition of substantive due process in personal rights cases, and the term "Lochnerizing" is used to criticize courts perceived as substituting their policy preferences for legislative judgment.
Lochner v. New York stands as a defining case in the constitutional history of substantive due process and the judiciary's engagement with economic regulation. The Court's invalidation of New York's bakery-hours law, grounded in a robust conception of liberty of contract and a skeptical view of the law's health justification, shaped decades of constitutional adjudication and spurred sharp scholarly and judicial reactions.