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The ''Lochner'' era is a period in American legal history in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court’s own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies,"〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=SORRELL v. IMS HEALTH INC. )〕 by using its intrepretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights. The era takes its name from a 1905 case, ''Lochner v. New York''. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in ''Allgeyer v. Louisiana'' (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of ''West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish'' (1937), which overturned an earlier ''Lochner''-era decision.〔Jacobs, p. 47.〕 The Supreme Court during the ''Lochner'' era has been described as "play() a judicially activist but politically conservative role." The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including laws on minimum wage, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.〔 Originating in the late 19th century, the ''Lochner'' era carried into the mid-1930s, when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress' regulatory efforts in the New Deal. Since the 1930s, ''Lochner'' has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era".〔 Robert Bork called ''Lochner'' "the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power".〔http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/09/08/george-will-enlists-in-campaign-to-repeal-20th/182806〕 In his confirmation hearings to become Chief Justice, John Roberts said, "You go to a case like the ''Lochner'' case, you can read that opinion today and it's quite clear that they're not interpreting the law, they're making the law," concluding that the ''Lochner'' court substituted its own judgment for the legislature's findings.〔http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/politics/politicsspecial1/13text-roberts.html?pagewanted=15&_r=0〕 ==Origins== The causes of the ''Lochner'' era have been the subject of debate. Matthew J. Lindsay, writing in the ''Harvard Law Review'', recounts the longstanding and widely accepted view in the decades since the New Deal:〔 According to progressive scholars, American judges steeped in laissez-faire economic theory, who identified with the nation’s capitalist class and harbored contempt for any effort to redistribute wealth or otherwise meddle with the private marketplace, acted on their own economic and political biases to strike down legislation that threatened to burden corporations or disturb the existing economic hierarchy. In order to mask this fit of legally unjustified, intellectually dishonest judicial activism, the progressive interpretation runs, judges invented novel economic “rights” — most notably “substantive due process” and “liberty of contract” — that they engrafted upon the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Cass R. Sunstein, in an influential essay from 1987, describes the ''Lochner'' era as the result of a Court which believed market ordering under common law to be part of nature rather than a legal construct and sought to preserve natural distribution of wealth against redistributive regulations: The Lochner Court required government neutrality and was skeptical of government “intervention”; it defined both notions in terms of whether the state had threatened to alter the common law distribution of entitlements and wealth, which was taken to be a part of nature rather than a legal construct. Once the common law system came to be seen as a product of legal rules, the baseline from which constitutional decisions were made had to shift. When the Lochner framework was abandoned in West Coast Hotel, the common law system itself appeared to be a subsidy to employers. The West Coast Hotel Court thus adopted an alternative baseline and rejected Lochner era understandings of neutrality and action. However, there is historical evidence that established baking companies in New York had formed an explicitly racist union and were attempting to shut off competition from new immigrant bakers who were willing to work longer hours. The law struck down in Lochner may well have been a prime example of a special, privileged interest using government power for anticompetitive reasons.〔Paulsen, Calabresi, McConnell, & Bray, The Constitution of the United States, Textbook, Thomson Reuters (2010)〕 Howard Gillman, in the book ''The Constitution Besieged: The Rise & Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence'', argues that the decisions of the era can be understood as adhering to a constitutional tradition rooted in the Founding Fathers' conception of appropriate and inappropriate policymaking in a commercial republic. A central tenet of this tradition was that government should not exhibit favoritism or hostility toward market competitors (referred to as "class legislation", which Gillman equates with the modern notion of special interests), and that it should exercise its police power in a neutral manner so as not to benefit one class over another. This would make for a faction free republic, with the underlying assumption that the American economy could provide for all citizens and social dependency as had been observed in Europe could be avoided. These ideas, according to Gillman, had been inherited by the Lochnerian judges, whose jurisprudence reflected a good faith attempt to preserve a tradition that was increasingly being undermined by changing industrial relations in the United States. This view has been criticized by David E. Bernstein, who claims that Gillman overstates the importance of class legislation on the jurisprudence. Bernstein has also criticized Sunstein's thesis, arguing in part that the notion of a common law baseline runs counter to numerous decisions in which the Court upheld statutory replacements of common law rules, notably in the field of workers' compensation.〔 Bernstein's view is that the ''Lochner'' era demonstrates "the Justices' belief that Americans had fundamental unenumerated constitutional rights" which were protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.〔 In discovering these rights, "()he Justices had a generally historicist outlook, seeking to discover the content of fundamental rights through an understanding of which rights had created and advanced liberty among the Anglo-American people."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lochner era」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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