Lochner Era etc essays

Lochner Era etc essays Paul Kens, in his book Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial, makes the case that Lochner, and the Lochner era of the Supreme Court, forms the foundation of ideological battles between economics and personal liberty and rights. The court found, in that case, that the state of New York had violated due process and the "right of contract between employers and employees." (Kens, 1998) That was part and parcel of a concept of the legal system Kens said was employed to good effect as far as creating an economic powerhouse. The most important function of the American legal system in the nineteenth century was to foster the growth of an ever-expanding national economy. The federal judiciary in the late nineteenth century participated in this project by using the powers that the 14th Amendment gave it to protect the economic rights of American citizens. The most important of these rights was the right to enter freely into contracts. Freedom of contract allowed Americans to use efficiently the various factors of production to create an industrial economy that was the most productive in the world by the middle of the twentieth century. The successful creation of this economic juggernaut validates the turn-of-the-century court's decision to use the 14th Amendment to protect economic rights at the expense of other civil and individual rights. (Kens, 1998) The editors of the series in which this Kens' book appears also noted, however, that the case raised a "host of significant questions regarding the impetus of state legislatures to enter the workplace" (Kens, 1998) and institute regulations of various sorts, quandaries which continue The philosophies underlying the Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v....