Lochner Era

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 required equal access to inns, theaters, and railroads regardless of race. Five consolidated prosecut...

San Francisco required wooden laundries to obtain operating permits, yet denied permits to virtually every Chinese applicant while...

Southern Pacific Railroad challenged county property tax assessments on fences along its rights of way. Before oral argument, Chie...

Congress enacted a modest peacetime income tax in 1894, and shareholders sued banks to stop payment. By a 5-4 vote, the Court held...

The 1894 Pullman Strike paralyzed rail traffic nationwide, and the government obtained an injunction against the American Railway ...

Homer Plessy, seven-eighths white, was arrested for sitting in a whites-only railcar under Louisiana law in a deliberate test case...

J.P. Morgan and James Hill created the Northern Securities Company to merge the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads, eli...

The government sued to dissolve John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, which controlled roughly ninety percent of American oil ...

New York limited bakery employees to ten hours a day and sixty hours a week, citing health hazards. Justice Peckham, for a 5-4 maj...

Oregon convicted a laundry owner of employing a woman more than ten hours in a day. Louis Brandeis, later a justice, filed a famou...

Charles Schenck, a socialist party official, circulated leaflets urging draftees to resist World War I conscription. Justice Holme...

Jacob Abrams and four co-defendants printed leaflets attacking American intervention in Russia and urging workers to strike. The C...

Benjamin Gitlow, a socialist assemblyman, was convicted for publishing a manifesto advocating revolutionary socialism. The Court a...

Oregon's Compulsory Education Act, backed by the Ku Klux Klan and anti-Catholic sentiment, would have closed private and parochial...

Virginia sterilized Carrie Buck, a young woman labeled feebleminded, under a eugenics statute. Her lawyer, colluding with the stat...

Minnesota's public nuisance law allowed courts to shut down scandal-mongering newspapers. The Saturday Press, an anti-Semitic week...

Nine Black teenagers were hastily tried and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women on an Alabama train, with a la...

New York set minimum milk prices to combat destructive price wars during the Depression, and store owner Leo Nebbia was convicted ...

The AAA paid farmers to reduce production, funded by a tax on food processors. The Court held the scheme unconstitutional, reasoni...

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrant parents who could not themselves naturalize under the Chinese ...

The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate shipment of goods produced in factories that employed young children or worked ...

The Schechter brothers ran a kosher poultry slaughterhouse in Brooklyn and were convicted of violating the Live Poultry Code issue...