Lochner V. New York

I haven't actually compiled a list of all the nonfiction books under 300 pages that I have read, but I do not doubt that Kens's "Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial" was by far the greatest short nonfiction book I have ever read. In fewer than 200 pages Kens discusses New York machine politics, the Supreme Court, the court appeals process, the important political, legal, and economic personalities of the Industrial Revolution, judicial and legal theories, the Fourteenth Amendment, the due process clause, economic regulation in American history, and the specifics of the case at hand with a level of detail necessary to do justice to each topic in a lucid manner. I'm not a lawyer or legal scholar, so I'm not savvy enough to comment on the accuracy of Kens's book, but I think he does a fantastic job. The Industrial Revolution and the many good and bad effects of that powerful force can never be overstated, and the Lochner case, so it seems, brought many of the powerful arguments revolving around the Industrial Revolution to a pinpoint. Thankfully, over a century after that decision was announced to the nation (and not with much excitement at the time), we have Kens to thank for understanding it all. The only complaint I have with this book is the lack of citations. There should be in-text parenthetical sourcing or footnotes. Kens notes that in an earlier, and I'm guessing more scholarly, treatment he has all the citations necessary, but that's still not acceptable for this version. Thankfully there is a fairly thorough bibliographic essay at the end.

Lochner v. New York was a 1905 Supreme Court case where an anodyne state law regulating working hours in bakeries was ruled uncontitutional because it breached the "freedom" of workers and employers to form employment contracts on any terms the market allowed. The notion of liberty of contract had no constitutional basis -- it was invented by conservative social theorists after the Civil War -- but it had been smuggled into American jurisprudence by activist judges in the guise of enforcing the 14th amendment. It was a godsend to business groups that wanted to beat back state efforts to regulate working hours and minimum wages. The libertarian ideas animating Lochner were already losing popularity by 1905, but the court continued to police state regulation of business for more than thirty years, hampering social reform and causing huge damage to the credibility of the judiciary. As an example of sheer judicial assertion, Lochner was the Roe v. Wade of its day. This book is short, clearly written, and alive to the ironies (and hypocrisies) of judicial activism, where one's view tends to depend on whether the activism in question is conservative or progressive. My only complaint is that parts of the book meander off the main subject and seem to have been stitched together from research the author did for other projects. For example, there's way too much material on New York state politics, and the long discussion of the libertarianism of Justice Stephen Field, although fascinating, is a bit misplaced, since Field was long dead by the time Lochner was decided! That said, history buffs and law students will get a lot out of this book.

This is a great book. I like long books, but this one is short and sweet. Moves the story along, and explores the fascinating background to Lochner (including the history of the baking industry and the conflicts of interest -- to give but one example, the attorney for anti-union Lochner was in fact not an attorney and in fact was a union organizer in the past.Also discusses the Negative Rights (Substantive Due Process in law) doctrine and has a great bibliography.The author is clearly a world expert in this field and I wish the book could have been longer. The author does not appear to be heavily biased either for or against Positive Rights (read Big) government.Bibliography and timeline at the end of the book is great too.Outstanding.

As a junior political science major at UNC, I have had to read a lot of books similar to Kens's. These books focus on a particular case, be it the Skokie trial, the Tinker armband case, the Chadha legislative veto case or the Bakke affirmative action case. Anthony Lewis's Gideon's Trumpet book seems to be the first of this kind.Kens' book is by far the best of its type that I have read. The other books of this genre I've read in this genre deal too much with the proceedings of a case. For instance, Mr. Chadha had this legal problem, he got this lawyer, they went through this legal proceeding, they had to refine their arguments, they went to the next appellate court, blah blah blah. Frankly these kinds of details are boring, and give little if any insight into the importance of a given case.Kens's has a different approach. Instead of going into great detail about why Mr. Lochner picked a given lawyer, Kens goes into great detail of the impetuses for the passage of the law that Mr. Lochner was challenging. He talks about the social and political climate of the times, tying in influential theories of the day like Social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics. Kens clearly places the case of Lochner v. New York in its historical framework. This, it seems, is a superior method for studying an important case like this one.I would strongly urge this book to any professor teaching a constitional law/history class. I would also strongly recommend it to a student looking for a good introduction to the study of substantive due process.