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Lochner era
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Lochner era
The Lochner era was a period in American legal history from around 1900 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies". The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights. The era takes its name from Lochner v. New York (1905), but may also be seen to beginning with Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897). The end is usually defined as coinciding with the overturning of a Lochner-era decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937).
The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role". The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries. The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.
Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history. Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power". In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.
The causes of the Lochner era have been the subject of debate. Matthew J. Lindsay, writing in the Harvard Law Review, recounts the view of Progressive commentators in the decades since the New Deal:
According to progressive scholars, American judges steeped in laissez-faire economic theory, who identified with the nation's capitalist class and harbored contempt for any effort to redistribute wealth or otherwise meddle with the private marketplace, acted on their own economic and political biases to strike down legislation that threatened to burden corporations or disturb the existing economic hierarchy. In order to mask this fit of legally unjustified, intellectually dishonest judicial activism, the progressive interpretation runs, judges invented novel economic "rights" – most notably "substantive due process" and "liberty of contract" – that they engrafted upon the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Citing more recent scholarship since the 1970s, Lindsay advances a more modern interpretation of the Lochner era:
The Lochner era is best understood not as a politically motivated binge of judicial activism, but rather as a sincere and principled, if sometimes anachronistic, “effort to maintain one of the central distinctions in nineteenth-century constitutional law — the distinction between valid economic regulation” calculated to serve the general good and invalid “class” legislation designed to extend special privileges to a favored class of beneficiaries.
Cass R. Sunstein, in an influential essay from 1987, describes the Lochner era as the result of a Court which believed market ordering under common law to be part of nature rather than a legal construct and sought to preserve natural distribution of wealth against redistributive regulations:
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Lochner era
The Lochner era was a period in American legal history from around 1900 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies". The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights. The era takes its name from Lochner v. New York (1905), but may also be seen to beginning with Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897). The end is usually defined as coinciding with the overturning of a Lochner-era decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937).
The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role". The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including minimum wage laws, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries. The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal.
Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history. Robert Bork called Lochner "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power". In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said: "You go to a case like the Lochner case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law." He added that the Lochner court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.
The causes of the Lochner era have been the subject of debate. Matthew J. Lindsay, writing in the Harvard Law Review, recounts the view of Progressive commentators in the decades since the New Deal:
According to progressive scholars, American judges steeped in laissez-faire economic theory, who identified with the nation's capitalist class and harbored contempt for any effort to redistribute wealth or otherwise meddle with the private marketplace, acted on their own economic and political biases to strike down legislation that threatened to burden corporations or disturb the existing economic hierarchy. In order to mask this fit of legally unjustified, intellectually dishonest judicial activism, the progressive interpretation runs, judges invented novel economic "rights" – most notably "substantive due process" and "liberty of contract" – that they engrafted upon the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Citing more recent scholarship since the 1970s, Lindsay advances a more modern interpretation of the Lochner era:
The Lochner era is best understood not as a politically motivated binge of judicial activism, but rather as a sincere and principled, if sometimes anachronistic, “effort to maintain one of the central distinctions in nineteenth-century constitutional law — the distinction between valid economic regulation” calculated to serve the general good and invalid “class” legislation designed to extend special privileges to a favored class of beneficiaries.
Cass R. Sunstein, in an influential essay from 1987, describes the Lochner era as the result of a Court which believed market ordering under common law to be part of nature rather than a legal construct and sought to preserve natural distribution of wealth against redistributive regulations: