Significance: A landmark for cases involving social reform, this decision established the Supreme Court’s recognition of social and economic conditions (in this case, women’s health) as a factor in making laws.
Background: In 1903 Oregon passed a law limiting workdays to 10 hours for female workers in laundries and factories. In 1905 the foreman of Curt Muller’s Grand Laundry in Portland forced Mrs. Elmer Gotcher to work more than 10 hours in one shift. As owner of the laundry, Muller was found guilty by a local court of violating Oregon’s law. Muller appealed, claiming a violation of freedom of contract. The Supreme Court had upheld a similar claim that year, in Lochner v. New York. When this case came to the Supreme Court, however, the National Consumers’ League hired lawyer Louis Brandeis to present Oregon’s argument. Brandeis recalled that the Court had defended the state’s police power to protect its citizens’ health, safety, and welfare. In his legal brief, Brandeis provided 95 pages of quotes from medical and factory studies demonstrating that women’s health was negatively affected by working long hours.
Decision: This case was argued on January 15, 1908, and decided on February 24, 1908, by a vote of 9 to 0. Justice David Brewer spoke for the unanimous Court in upholding the Oregon law. The Court agreed that women’s well-being was in the state’s public interest and that the 10-hour law was a valid way to protect that well-being.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “It is undoubtedly true, as more than once declared by this Court, that the general right to contract in relation to one’s business is part of the liberty of the individual, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution; yet it is equally well settled that this liberty is not absolute and extending to all contracts, and that a State may, without conflicting with the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, restrict in many respects the individual’s power of contract.”
