Lochner v. New York

The Court struck down a maximum working hours law for bakers as an unconstitutional interference with liberty of contract.

Overview

New York limited bakery employees to ten hours a day and sixty hours a week, citing health hazards. Justice Peckham, for a 5-4 majority, held the law was a labor regulation in name only, unrelated to health and safety, and violated the due process right of employers and workers to contract freely. Justice Holmes's dissent famously accused the majority of deciding the case on an economic theory most of the country had rejected. Lochner lent its name to an era in which the Court invalidated roughly two hundred social and economic regulations before abandoning the approach in the late 1930s.