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".
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The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v Louisiana, and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co.
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Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role".
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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.
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Since the 1930s, Lochner has been widely discredited as a product of a "bygone era" in legal history.
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Lochner era is best understood not as a politically motivated binge of judicial activism, but rather as a sincere and principled, if sometimes anachronistic, “effort to maintain one of the central distinctions in nineteenth-century constitutional law — the distinction between valid economic regulation” calculated to serve the general good and invalid “class” legislation designed to extend special privileges to a favored class of beneficiaries.
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Lochner era 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.
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Constitutional jurisprudence of the Lochner era is marked by the use of substantive due process to invalidate legislation held to infringe on economic liberties, particularly the freedom of contract.
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The Court's interpretation of the due process clause during the Lochner era has been dubbed in contemporary scholarship as "economic substantive due process".
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Lochner era argued in part that the statute was unconstitutional under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Lochner era is usually considered to have ended with the overturning of Adkins v Children's Hospital in the 1937 case of West Coast Hotel Co.
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Cushman contends, then, that the true cause for the demise of the Lochner era was not short-term political considerations by the Court, but an evolving judicial perspective on the validity of governmental regulation.
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Lochner era has been criticized from the left for judicial activism, routinely overturning the will of Congress, and for the Court's failure to allow the political process to redress increasingly unequal distributions of wealth and power.
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Lochner era has found support among some libertarian scholars who defend the Court for securing property rights and economic freedom.
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Lochner era has notably been spotlighted by a number of non-American legal authorities as a cautionary tale of judicial overreaching, including Arthur Chask n, Antonio Lamer and Aharon Barak.
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