| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | There was a law prohibiting NY employers from requiring bakers to work over 60 hours/week. Lochner is charged with violating it. |
| Posture: | Unknown. |
| Issue: | Is this restriction on freedom of contract reasonable? |
| Holding: | No-- this is interfering with liberty of contract. It protects neither the safety, morals, nor welfare of the public. |
| Rule: | There is no reasonable ground for interfering with the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor for bakers. |
| Reasoning: | If we declare this statute to be valid, there is no length to which legislation of this sort might not go. Masters and employees must be free to contract with one another. |
| Dicta: | Dissent: laboring that long might actually be dangerous; it's not
the court's place to say whether this was a sensible limit,
but it certainly might implicate safety.
Another dissent (Holmes): The constitution doesn enshrine any particular economic theory, whether paternalism or laisses faire. General principles do not decide concrete things. 14A does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. |