Majority and dissenting opinions

In its ruling, the Supreme Court ignored the question of class legislation, holding instead that the Bakeshop Act (particularly its hours provision) was an unconstitutional infringement of freedom of contract (the freedom of employees to sell their labour to employers), which the court had recognized in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897) as part of the liberty protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (The due process clause prohibits the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”) Writing for the majority (5–4), Justice Rufus Peckham argued that the curtailment of contractual freedom imposed by the act could be sustained only if it served to protect public health or the health of workers at risk, which it clearly did not do. “Clean and wholesome bread,” he asserted, “does not depend on whether the baker works but ten hours a day or only sixty hours per week.” Citing Holden v. Hardy (1898)—in which the court had upheld an hours law that applied to workers in dangerous occupations, including mining—Peckham then asked whether any proof existed to show that baking was a dangerous or unhealthful trade, and he concluded that none did (here he clearly relied on the appendix submitted by Lochner’s lawyers, though he did not cite it directly). Since the hours law failed to qualify as a health measure, it could not be maintained as a valid exercise of the police power, according to Peckham.

Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the main dissent, which was joined by Justices Edward White and William Day. The police power, Harlan wrote, extends at least “to the protection of the lives, the health, and the safety of the public against the injurious exercise by any citizen of his own rights,” and the Fourteenth Amendment had never been intended to interfere with this power. Liberty of contract certainly did exist, but it had to be subordinate to the police power.

Although Harlan’s dissent was well crafted, for the most part it has been overshadowed by the brief but memorable dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The majority opinion, he charged, was based on “an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.” The state’s right to interfere with liberty of contract was well established in history, he argued, pointing to such examples as laws against usury or Sunday work. Furthermore, a constitution is not supposed to embody a particular economic theory, be it paternalism or laissez-faire. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics” (1851), a famous argument for laissez-faire, Holmes wrote. The whole idea of liberty, he continued, is perverted whenever it is “held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion,” except when everyone could agree that a particular statute infringed upon fundamental principles, which was not the case here. He concluded that a reasonable person would find the hours provisions to be legitimately related to health and that therefore the law should be upheld.

While bakery owners and other businessmen applauded the court’s decision, organized labour denounced it as reactionary, confirming their view of the judiciary as a handmaiden of capitalist entrepreneurs and an enemy of working people. Lochner was destined to become a symbol of judicial interference with the democratic process, and Holmes’s dissent became a rallying cry for the Progressive movement in the United States.