Lochner V. New York 1905

Lochernzing is defined as a method to strike down economic legislation under the guise of enforcing the Due Process Clause, and it has been used by the Supreme Court even before it received its name. The term Lochnerizing come from the decision of the case Lochner v. New York 1905, when the Court decided to strike down New York’s sixty-hour limit for work based off of the right to have “freedom of contract”. This is right was said by the Court to have been implicitly implied by the 14th amendment. With this decision the Supreme Court overturned almost 200 Federal Court decisions in regards to economic legislation. However, the term has now been extended, to mean any instance in which the members of the Court come to their decisions on the constitutionality of legislation, without any Constitutional backing.
Lochnerizing throughout the history of the Court, has had both positive, and negative consequences via the actions of substantive due process, and the poor decisions of cases like San Antonio School district. Nevertheless before one can question as to whether it is a good thing to have Lochnerizing, it must first be asked whether or not it matters. The Supreme Court is a branch of government whose sole job is to interpret the constitution according to Federalist 78. However, when looking at the Constitution it is clear that the document was written in such vague terms. This vagueness allows for the Constitution to be a living document as Chief Justice Hughes once said,