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Lochner

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Institution
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Full-Text Articles in Law

Ordered Liberty After Dobbs, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming Jan 2023

Ordered Liberty After Dobbs, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the implications of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for the future of substantive due process (SDP) liberties protecting personal autonomy, bodily integrity, familial relationships (including marriage), sexuality, and reproduction. We situate Dobbs in the context of prior battles on the Supreme Court over the proper interpretive approach to deciding what basic liberties the Due Process Clause (DPC) protects. As a framing device, we refer to two competing approaches as “the party of [Justice] Harlan or Casey” versus “the party of Glucksberg.” In Dobbs, the dissent co-authored by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan represents the party of …


Charting A Course Past Spokeo And Transunion, Elizabeth Earle Beske Jan 2022

Charting A Course Past Spokeo And Transunion, Elizabeth Earle Beske

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez has dramatically upended standing doctrine, apparently out of concern that any other move will invite congressional manipulation and give rise to even greater evils. The Court has done so at considerable cost. TransUnion’s concreteness inquiry leaves lower courts at sea, inviting them to substitute their own policy preferences for legislative will in frustration of the separation of powers. It curtails the deferential review of economic legislation the Court has employed since the New Deal. It circumscribes Congress’s ability to act proactively to respond to novel challenges. Bearing these costs, we …


Law School News: Distinguished Research Professor: John Chung 05-24-2020, Michael M. Bowden May 2020

Law School News: Distinguished Research Professor: John Chung 05-24-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.


After All These Years, Lochner Was Not Crazy—It Was Good, Randy E. Barnett Jul 2018

After All These Years, Lochner Was Not Crazy—It Was Good, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For this year’s Rosenkranz Debate, we have been asked to debate the question: Lochner v. New York: Still Crazy After All These Years? It is my job to defend the “negative” position. My burden is not to establish that Lochner was correctly decided, but merely that it was not “crazy.” I intend to meet that burden and exceed it. I intend to show how Lochner v. New York was not at all crazy; in fact, it was a reasonable and good decision.


The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen Jan 2018

The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the Roberts Court has handed down a series of rulings that demonstrate the degree to which the First Amendment can be used to thwart economic and social welfare regulation – generating widespread accusations that the Court has created a "new Lochner." This introduction to the Columbia Law Review's Symposium on Free Expression in an Age of Inequality takes up three questions raised by these developments: Why has First Amendment law become such a prominent site for struggles over socioeconomic inequality? Does the First Amendment tradition contain egalitarian elements that could be recovered? And what might a …


Wealth Inequality As Explained By Quantitative Easing And Law's Inertia, John J. Chung Jan 2017

Wealth Inequality As Explained By Quantitative Easing And Law's Inertia, John J. Chung

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Deregulatory First Amendment At Work, Charlotte Garden Jul 2016

The Deregulatory First Amendment At Work, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

It has been more than seventy years since Justice Hugo Black wrote that First Amendment rights were “essential to the poorly financed causes of little people.” Since then, the well-financed causes of the powerful have discovered the First Amendment as well, deploying it to crowd out the little people in electoral politics and undo their legislative successes in the courts. The seeds for this project were planted in the 1970s — the decade in which Justice Lewis Powell joined the Court, and in which the Court decided both Buckley v. Valeo and Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens …


Three Supreme Court “Failures” And A Story Of Supreme Court Success, Corinna Barrett Lain Jan 2016

Three Supreme Court “Failures” And A Story Of Supreme Court Success, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Plessy v. Ferguson. Buck v. Bell. Korematsu v. United States. Together, these three decisions legitimated ‘separate but equal,’ sanctioned the forced sterilization of thousands, and ratified the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II. By Erwin Chemerinsky’s measure in The Case Against the Supreme Court, all three are Supreme Court failures—cases in which the Court should have protected vulnerable minorities, but failed to do so. Considered in historical context, however, a dramatically different impression of these cases, and the Supreme Court that decided them, emerges. In two of the cases—Plessy and Buck—the Court’s ruling reflected the …


Constitutional Economics, Luke P. Norris Jan 2016

Constitutional Economics, Luke P. Norris

Law Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the conventional narrative about the decline of Lochnerism and the rise of mid-century substantive due process jurisprudence is incomplete. That narrative focuses initially on how the premises underlying Lochner’s conception of economic freedom were rejected. The Article instead focuses on how the labor movement articulated an alternative conception of freedom that was adopted by Congress, the Executive, and the Supreme Court. While Lochnerism was premised on a negative view of freedom, the labor movement articulated a positive view of freedom and analogized it to republican freedom of association in the political sphere. By reframing the terms …


The Early Years Of First Amendment Lochnerism, Jeremy K. Kessler Jan 2016

The Early Years Of First Amendment Lochnerism, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative "conscience clauses" are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early twentieth century. Yet the worry that aggressive judicial enforcement of the First Amendment might erode democratic regulation of the economy and enhance the economic power of private actors has a long history. As this Article demonstrates, anxieties …


Interpretation, Jamal Greene Jan 2015

Interpretation, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Interpretation is the means by which the Constitution and its clauses are brought to bear on actual cases and controversies. Although much of the Constitution appears self-explanatory, as with its requirement that the president be at least thirty-five years old, much is subject to reasonable disagreement. The approaches to interpretation that form this chapter’s subject are the main tools scholars and judges have developed to resolve that disagreement. Those tools encompass five domains of argumentation, broadly conceived: text, history, structure, precedent, and consequences. As a general matter, interpretation that draws on resources wholly outside these five domains — via an …


Valid Rule Due Process Challenges: Bond V. United States And Erie’S Constitutional Source, Kermit Roosevelt Iii Jan 2013

Valid Rule Due Process Challenges: Bond V. United States And Erie’S Constitutional Source, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

This article begins by asking what constitutional provision is violated by the enforcement of law without a lawmaker. Taking a positivist view—i.e., that law does not exist without a lawmaker—it concludes that the problem of law without a lawmaker collapses into the problem of coercion without law. Coercion without law violates the Due Process Clause in an obvious way: it is deprivation of something “without … law.” The article then explores the existence of this form of substantive due process in American law, arguing that we find it in three somewhat surprising places: Lochner-era substantive due process; modern federalism …


The Borrower's Tale: A History Of Poor Debtors In Lochner Era New York City, Anne Fleming Nov 2012

The Borrower's Tale: A History Of Poor Debtors In Lochner Era New York City, Anne Fleming

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This study adds to the recent scholarship on Progressivism in practice—fine-grained, place-based studies of reform at the local level—but focuses closely on the relationships among reformers, industry, and the law that an earlier generation of historians studied at the national level and outlined in broad brushstrokes. This study also builds upon the creditor-centered work of historians such as Mark H. Haller and John V. Alviti, but moves beyond their reliance upon distinctions and categories, such as those separating profit making credit providers from philanthropic credit providers, which were less important to borrowers than they have been for historians. In focusing …


Exile On Main Street: Competing Traditions And Due Process Dissent, Colin Starger Jul 2012

Exile On Main Street: Competing Traditions And Due Process Dissent, Colin Starger

All Faculty Scholarship

Everybody loves great dissents. Professors teach them, students learn from them, and journalists quote them. Yet legal scholars have long puzzled over how dissents actually impact the development of doctrine. Recent work by notable empirical scholars proposes to measure the influence of dissents by reference to their subsequent citation in case law. This Article challenges the theoretical basis for this empirical approach and argues that it fails to account for the profound influence that uncited dissents have exerted in law. To overcome this gap in the empirical approach, this Article proposes an alternative method that permits analysis of contextual and …


Class Action Defendants' New Lochnerism,, Mark Moller Jan 2012

Class Action Defendants' New Lochnerism,, Mark Moller

College of Law Faculty

In the much-watched Dukes v. Walmart, Walmart has advanced a deceptively compelling claim: Due process, Walmart says, guarantees it the right to mount a “full defense” based on “any relevant rebuttal evidence [Walmart] choose[s], including evidence that there was no discrimination against one or more members of the class.” Because Walmart cannot possibly present rebuttal evidence against each of the 1.5 million gender discrimination claims that form the Dukes class, the class action, Walmart concludes, is unconstitutional. The argument is not original to Walmart - it is a staple of the class action defense bar. What should originalists make of …


What The New Deal Settled, Jamal Greene Jan 2012

What The New Deal Settled, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Not since George H.W. Bush banned it from the menu of Air Force One did broccoli receive as much attention as during the legal and political debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("ACA"). Opponents of the ACA have forcefully and repeatedly argued that if Congress has the power to require Americans to purchase health insurance as a means of reducing health care costs, then it likewise has the power to require Americans to eat broccoli. Broccoli is mentioned twelve times across the four Supreme Court opinions issued in the ACA decision – that's eleven more appearances than …


Lochner V. New York (1905) And Kennedy V. Louisiana (2008): Judicial Reliance On Adversary Argument, Douglas E. Abrams Oct 2011

Lochner V. New York (1905) And Kennedy V. Louisiana (2008): Judicial Reliance On Adversary Argument, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist called Lochner v. New York (1905) “one of the most ill-starred decisions that [the Supreme Court ever rendered.” The Justices’ deliberations preceding the 5-4 decision demonstrate the courts’ reliance on advocacy in the adversary system of civil and criminal justice. The stark imbalance between the state’s “incredibly sketchy” brief and Joseph Lochner’s sterling submission may have determined Lochner’s outcome, and thus may have changed the course of constitutional history, by leading two Justices to join the majority on the central question of whether New York’s maximum-hours law for bakery workers was a reasonable public health …


The Anticanon, Jamal Greene Jan 2011

The Anticanon, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Argument from the "anticanon," the set of cases whose central propositions all legitimate decisions must refute, has become a persistent but curious feature of American constitutional law. These cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States, are consistently cited in Supreme Court opinions, in constitutional law casebooks, and at confirmation hearings as prime examples of weak constitutional analysis. Upon reflection, however, anticanonical cases do not involve unusually bad reasoning, nor are they uniquely morally repugnant. Rather, these cases are held out as examples for reasons external to …


The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum Jan 2009

The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's Wittgensteinian insights into constitutional argument and law. The author examines the way that we interact with canonical texts as we construct arguments in the forms that Bobbitt has described. The author contends that these texts serve as metonyms for larger sets of associated principles and values, and that their invocation usually is not meant to point to the literal meaning of the text itself. This conception helps explain how a canonical text's meaning in constitutional argument can evolve over time, and hopefully offers the creative practitioner some insight into the kinds of arguments that …


Due Process And Punitive Damages: An Economic Approach, Keith N. Hylton Apr 2008

Due Process And Punitive Damages: An Economic Approach, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper sets out a public choice (rent-seeking) theory of the Due Process Clause, which implies that the function of the clause is to prevent takings through the legislative or common law process. This view of the clause's function supports a preference for expanding rather than contracting the set of entitlements protected by the clause. The Supreme Court's application of due process reasoning in the punitive damages case law is in some respects consistent and in other respects inconsistent with this theory. For the most part, the Court has failed to develop a set of doctrines that would enable lower …


Copyright Lochnerism, Raymond Shih Ray Ku Jan 2006

Copyright Lochnerism, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

Part I of this essay outlines the conflict between copyright and the First amendment as well as, the complementary argument for reconciling copyright and free speech, as it has been formulated by scholars and the Supreme Court. Part II discusses what I have referred to as the Framers' copyright and the extent to which arguments based upon the Framers' intent in this area may reconcile copyright and free speech. Lastly, Part III argues that reliance upon the complementary argument to deny any role for heightened First Amendment review in copyright cases is subject to two interrelated criticisms of Lochner. By …


Some Varieties And Vicissitudes Of Lochnerism, Barry Cushman Jan 2005

Some Varieties And Vicissitudes Of Lochnerism, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article is a contribution to the Lochner Centennial Symposium at Boston University School of Law. Until recently, a consensus appeared to be emerging among constitutional historians concerning how best to interpret Lochner-era decisions involving Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment challenges to state and federal economic regulation. After decades during which the Court's jurisprudence had been characterized as the product of a reactionary judiciary's commitments to Social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics, more recent scholars had come to see the Court's police powers decisions as animated by what Professor Howard Gillman has called the principle of neutrality. On this view, the Court's …


Holmes On The Lochner Court, Gerald F. Leonard Jan 2005

Holmes On The Lochner Court, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

For this symposium on Lochner, I examined the jurisprudence of the man commonly thought to be the Lochner majority's fiercest foe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes wrote the famous dissent in Lochner and other cases of the era. But as Barry Cushman notes in his contribution to this symposium, Holmes joined many a Lochner-era majority in striking down any number of economic regulations. Holmes's Fourteenth Amendment opinions suggest: 1) that, while Holmes advocated a somewhat more pointed rule of deference to legislatures than did most of his colleagues, his language in this respect was far less radical than is …


Introduction, David J. Seipp Jan 2005

Introduction, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

Have we come to bury Lochner, or to praise it? Lochner v. New York,' decided 100 years ago, gave its name to an era in which judges struck down popular statutes that regulated hours, wages, and conditions of work, on grounds that such labor regulations violated a constitutional liberty of contract. After 1937, Lochnerism and Lochnerizing were more or less uniformly condemned by judges and law professors alike. Recently, some scholars have tried to resurrect the Lochner approach, presumably as a way to render much of the twentieth-century regulatory state unconstitutional.


Fidelity, Basic Liberties, And The Specter Of Lochner, James E. Fleming Dec 1999

Fidelity, Basic Liberties, And The Specter Of Lochner, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

I want to begin by frankly acknowledging that the group of scholars participating in the conference is more conservative than the crowd with whom I usually travel. Accordingly, at the outset, I want to say something ingratiating. Then, I will say something provocative. Here is the ingratiating part: economic liberties and property rights, like personal liberties, are fundamental rights secured by our Constitution. In fact, economic liberties and property rights are so fundamental in our constitutional scheme, and so sacred in our constitutional culture, that there is neither need nor good argument for aggressive judicial protection of them. Rather, such …


Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman Jan 1999

Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

Owen Roberts was accused of a variety of things in 1937, but “fidelity” was not among them. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and Professor Felix Frankfurter were among many who accused Roberts of performing, as Frankfurter put it, a jurisprudential “somersault” “incapable of being attributed to a single factor relevant to the professed judicial process.” To Frankfurter, it was “all painful beyond words,” and gave him “a sickening feeling which is aroused when moral standards are adulterated in a convent.” Yet when Roberts announced his retirement from the Court eight years later, Chief Justice Stone, along with now-Justices Frankfurter and Robert …


Historical Framework For Reviving Constitutional Protection For Property And Contract Rights , James L. Kainen Jan 1993

Historical Framework For Reviving Constitutional Protection For Property And Contract Rights , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

Post-New Deal constitutionalism is in search of a theory that justifies judicial intervention on behalf of individual rights while simultaneously avoiding the charge of "Lochnerism."' The dominant historical view dismisses post-bellum substantive due process as an anomalous development in the American constitutional tradition. Under this approach, Lochner represents unbounded protection for economic rights that permitted the judiciary to read laissez faire, pro-business policy preferences into the constitutional text. Today's revisionists have mounted a substantial challenge to the dismissive views of traditionalists. Indeed, some claim Lochner reached the right result, but for the wrong reason. The revisionists characterize substantive due process …