As the United States Supreme Court ends its current term with several monumental decisions, it is fitting to remember Utican Joseph Lochner, who refused to follow a New York State statute in 1899 regarding the number of hours one could work in a bakery.

Little did he know that this refusal would set into motion a complete change in labor laws in the United States.

On May 2, 1895, New York Gov. Levi P. Morton, former vice president under President Benjamin Harrison, signed into law a limit on the number of hours employees in bakeries could work in a day and a week. The new “Bakeshop Act,” passed by the state legislature unanimously (119-0), limited employees to 10 hours per day, 60 hours total per week in a time when itinerant workers could/would sometimes work up to 100 total hours in a week.

The law was championed by progressives seeking social reforms and who felt that extended hours worked in a bakery subjected laborers to respiratory ailments. The Bakers’ Union, under the leadership of Henry Weismann, backed the law at its onset.

At 84 South St. in East Utica, a Bavarian immigrant and baker chose to ignore the law, not once but twice. In 1899, Joseph Lochner of Lochner’s Home Bakery, allowed one of his employees to work more than 60 hours in one week. He was arrested and fined $25 (approximately $715 in 2018). Two years later, Lochner was arrested again for being in violation of the same law. This time, the Oneida County Court fined him $50 ($1,430 in 2018) after a trial in February 1902 that found him guilty.

Lochner decided to appeal the conviction under the premise that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution allowed workers to be protected from the denial of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. More specifically, Lochner and his lawyers argued that the Bakeshop Act violated both the liberty of contract section of the 14th Amendment and a worker’s right to make a contract with an employer freely.

The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court affirmed the Oneida County Court’s decision on May 18, 1902, in a 3-2 decision. Still unsatisfied, Lochner appealed the Appellate Court’s decisions to the New York State Court of Appeals. Its decision on January 2, 1904, also sided with the other two lower courts with a 4-3 affirmation that Lochner was in violation of the statute. He was not to be stopped, though, on his quest for justice. He appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Arguments in front of the Supreme Court took place on February 23-24, 1905. In a unique twist, former Bakers’ Union boss Weismann, who left the employ of the Union, represented and argued on behalf of Lochner and his assertion that the New York State law was a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court’s decision was rendered on April 17, 1905. In a 5-4 decision, the Court overturned Lochner’s conviction.

Justice Rufus Peckham, in writing the majority opinion, stated that the limitation of hours did indeed violate the due process clause which contained a “freedom of contract” section. They further stated that the state law was an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with (a person’s) … right and liberty … to contract.”

Peckham even went so far as to discredit the law by writing that baking was never considered to be an unhealthy trade and therefore not a legitimate use of the police power of a state. The law was unconstitutional as a result according to the majority of the justices. As a result of this decision, the so-called “Lochner Era” in American labor began.

The Lochner case made it tougher for legislatures to limit the hours worked by employees. Despite this, organized labor pressed on and in 1912 was able to collectively bargain for a ten-hour work day. In the famous Supreme Court ruling Muller v. Oregon (1908), limits were placed on the number of hours women could work. This was followed in 1917 by Bunting v. Oregon where all adult males, women and children working in most industries were only allowed to work 10 hours per day.

Until 1937, the grand effect of this decision made the Supreme Court the ultimate watchdog on all state regulations. Several things taken for granted today faced uphill battles during this “era,” including minimum wage laws, child labor laws, and banking regulations.

Critics of the decision, including Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, felt that the Supreme Court overstepped its constitutional power to interpret the law and became policy makers in deciding this case.

Holmes was also unhappy about how the decision sided with one theory of the operation of the government at the expense of all others. Holmes’ dissenting opinion is one of the most famous in the annals of the court. He scathingly stated, “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.”

Even President Theodore Roosevelt slammed the Supreme Court for the decision because it put up major roadblocks to a host of societal reforms. Many would lament that the Lochner decision was a symbol of the judicial misuse of power and unrestricted judicial activism.