Today’s economic history: Oliver Wendell Holmes in Lochner
: Dissent: Lochner v. People of State of New York: “I regret sincerely that I am unable to agree with the judgment…. This case is decided upon an economic theory…
…which a large part of the country does not entertain. If it were a question whether I agreed with that theory, I should desire to study it further…. But I do not conceive that to be my duty…. It is settled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we as legislators might think as injudicious, or if you like as tyrannical, as this, and which, equally with this, interfere with the liberty to contract. Sunday laws and usury laws are ancient examples. A more modern one is the prohibition of lotteries. The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.
The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. The other day we sustained the Massachusetts vaccination law, and state statutes and decisions cutting down the liberty to contract by way of combination are familiar to this court. Two years ago we upheld the prohibition of sales of stock on margins, or for future delivery, in the Constitution of California. Some of these laws embody convictions or prejudices which judges are likely to share. Some may not. But a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States….
I think that the word ‘liberty,’ in the 14th Amendment, is perverted… unless it can be said that a rational and fair man necessarily would admit that the statute… would infringe fundamental principles… of our people and our law…. No such sweeping condemnation can be passed upon the statute before us. A reasonable man might think it a proper measure on the score of health. Men whom I certainly could not pronounce unreasonable would uphold it as a first installment of a general regulation of the hours of work. Whether in the latter aspect it would be open to the charge of inequality I think it unnecessary to discuss.