Kommentarer til: En ny Lochner æra?

Af: Jacob Mchangama

Jacob Mchangama — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 10:24:40 +0000

Jeg har læst Barnetts artikel vedrørende Lochner. Men se hans kommentarer af juli i år, I Reason online, hvor han nævner Justice Rufus Peckhams opinion i Lochner som sin favorit opinion. Barnett skrev:”But Justice Rufus Peckham (18381909) authored the opinion in Lochner v. New York (1905), one of the few decisions in which the Supreme Court exhibited skepticism about a claim of governmental power and protected a liberty not included in the Bill of Rights. By placing the burden on the state to justify its restriction on the liberty of contract in the form of a maximum hours law for bake shop employees (but not owners), Peckham in effect employed a presumption of liberty, which I think should be used to protect all liberties.”

Af: Lubbert G

Lubbert G — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:53:57 +0000

Lad alle de kommentatorer og nyhedstænkere, der ikke har prøvet at være rugbrødsbagere 60 timer om ugen, samles i håbey om, at den amerikanske højesteret også i dette århundreder vil tale og tygge med samme mund.Ellers må vi spise kage.

Af: Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard

Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 02:35:32 +0000

Min–og flere andres–mentor og guru indenfor amerikansk retsfilosofi, Randy Barnett, har for nogen tid siden kommenteret netop Lochner i en artikel (“Foreword: What’s So Wicked About Lochner?”, NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-9.). Her er hans sammendrag:”In this brief Foreword to a forthcoming symposium on Lochner v. New York, I ask the question, What’s So Wicked About Lochner? Modern Progressives cannot complain about its protection of so-called substantive due process, since they favor just that. Nor can they claim that Lochner violates the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, since these legal analysts by and large reject originalism altogether. This leaves only today’s judicial conservatives to adhere to a purified Roosevelt New Deal jurisprudence of disdain for Lochner. My answer is that Lochner is objectionable precisely because its reliance on the Due Process Clause perpetuated the serious misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment established by the 5-4 decision in The Slaughter-House Cases. While Lochner’s use of a presumption in favor of the liberty of citizens is basically sound – however well it may have been applied in the actual case – its reliance on the Due Process Clause, rather than on the Privileges or Immunities Clause, undermined the legitimacy of its method. I then offer the outline of an approach to Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment that gives a distinct meaning to each of its four Constitution-altering clauses.” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=721507)