The Lochner Era

Blogs are out of fashion these days but a few remain active, including that of Matthew Saroff whom I have followed for some time. One of his recent posts brought to my attention the Lochner Era, a legal period I didn't know about. 

The Wikipedia article explains.

The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 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".[1] The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights.[2][3] 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.[4]

The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".[5] 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.[5] The Lochner era ended when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress's regulatory efforts in the New Deal. 

I'm too old and tired to furnish more than an acerbic remark or two about The Lochner Era, but all indications are that the current makeup of the US Supreme Court appears well on the way to a return to a Libertarian wet dream called The Lochner Era. 

In case you missed it above, go to this Vox link, now almost seven years old, and read what Andrew Prokof said about Rand Paul and the Lochner Era.