What is "Lochner" all about?

I talk about the Lochner era sometimes as though everyone else knows what I'm talking about. It occurs to me that perhaps I'm making an unwarranted assumption, so today's post will more or less clarify what that means.

First off, Lochner v. N.Y. was a 1905 Supreme Court case. In a nutshell, the state of New York had passed a law stating that no baker could work more than 6 days per week, 10 hours per day, or something similar to that. Mind you, this was in an era where the bakers worked in large industrial bakeries, often 12 hours/day 7 days/week. The State of New York decided that, for a variety of reasons, they wanted to limit how much a person could be required to work. Maybe they thought it was good public policy to allow workers to spend time with their families; go to church; etc. Maybe they thought it would help their economy by forcing the bakeries to hire more bakers. Maybe they thought it would be better for safety. Regardless, the State of New York made that decision.

Someone named Lochner decided to challenge the law's constitutionality on the grounds that it violated his right to contract and deprived him of his fundamental economic liberty. Recall that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the passage of laws that impair the obligations of contracts. (Art. I, Sec. 10). Recall also that the 5th and 14th Amendments guarantee due process under the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately sided with Lochner and invalidated New York's' law. As such, it set a precedent that, more or less, all workplace safety and labor regulations would be determined to be unconstitutional. The Lochner era that followed is widely considered to have lasted into the New Deal, when it was overturned.

There are many of us, myself very much included, who believe that this nation is slowly but surely heading down that path again, where workplace protections and laws designed to even the bargaining power between workers and employers are deemed to be unconstitutional infringements on the corporations' rights to due process under the law. Of course, the modern conservatives on the court (every bit the activists as the Lochner era conservatives) use the 1st Amendment instead of the contracts clause and the 5th/14th. You can see the seeds of that in the recent Janus decision: right to free speech means that you have the right not to associate with a union that is compelled by law to represent your interests.

When I say that Justice Gorsuch is a dangerous, activist, retrograde judge, I have reasons. When I say the same about Clarence Thomas, I have reasons.