Judgment
The Court opinion, by Justice Sutherland, held that previous decisions (Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908) and Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U.S. 426 (1917)) did not overrule the holding in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), protecting freedom of contract. The Muller cases, Sutherland noted, addressed maximum hours; this case addressed a minimum wage. The maximum hour laws left the parties free to negotiate about wages, unlike this law. Moreover, the minimum wage artificially restricts the employer’s side of the negotiation. The Court argued that if legislatures were permitted to set minimum wage laws, they would be permitted to set maximum wage laws.
Sutherland's majority opinion also cites the changes that had occurred in the years since Muller, and in particular the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. He notes that Muller and other cases had emphasized differences between men and women as justifying special protection for women. But " view of the great--not to say revolutionary--changes which have taken place since, in the contractual, political, and civil status of women, culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment, it is not unreasonable to say that these differences have now come almost, if not quite, to the vanishing point."
Chief Justice Taft, dissenting, argued that there was no distinction between minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws, considering that these essentially both add up to restrictions on the contract. He noted that Lochner’s limitations had appeared to be overruled in Muller and Bunting.
Justice Holmes, also dissenting, noted that there were plenty of other constraints on contract (e.g. blue laws, usury laws, etc.). He cited the reasonable person standard he had put forth in Lochner: if a reasonable person could see a power in the Constitution, the Court ought to defer to legislation using that power.
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