Saturday, July 25, 2009
Lochner v. NY
This week the case of Lochner v New York was mentioned in class, this was a landmark case for the Supreme Court regarding contract liberty. The case was about limiting the number of hours a baker could work and wanting to work sixty hours in a week. Essentially, the problem was determining whether law should determine how long one can or is allowed to work in a given week, and if someone wanted to baking for sixty hours a week than why shouldn't be allowed to? The Supreme Court upheld the labor regulations and stated that the New York law was not a restriction of the fourteenth amendment. I distinguished that this was brought up during the Hart discussion because of his focus on content and tort law. In discussing the differences in which laws are moral or not and whether or not morality should be applied to laws and such legal decision making. Discussing Lochner v New York, showed now real moral grounds for why a law should restrict the number of hours a baker can work, simply it was regulatory for safety purposes. Furthermore, we began to discuss which laws are put into place for a societal purpose or just simply for more functional reasons. Parking laws and permits are laws that do not have any functional basis and do not apply to established precedent. I feel like there is no rational basis for these types of law, aside from just being functionally regulatory, they seem to not have a strong basis.
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I do disagree with that particular law but not all types of laws like this. You seem to put laws into two categories, those being ones put in place for societal purposes and others that are just simply for more functional reasons. Yet the two tend to coincide, and isn’t that what the law ought to do. The laws constructed for societal purposes, should be to bring order and structure to the society and isn’t that accomplished by instituting functional type laws?
ReplyDeleteIf you ask me, I personally believe, or like to believe, that all law is functional. I mean if you look at the limitations on bakers hours, to me it's functioning as a way to protect employees from being overworked to meet certain quotas. It's less of a question of why shouldn't we allow people to work longer hours if they wanted to. So I find myself agreeing with J.Haynes on the idea that these two ideas of the law tend to coincide. I feel there are certain laws put into place for the betterment of society, as they should be, and I also find that all laws whether or not meant to better society are functional.
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