New York Law Journal Reviews Rehabilitating Lochner

The review starts:

The book “Rehabilitating Lochner” is about a U.S. Supreme Court decision that generations of lawyers and law students have been taught to scorn as the imposition of obsolete economic dogma disguised as constitutional principle….Comes now Professor David E. Bernstein of George Mason University School of Law, who seeks to set the record straight by bestowing respectability on the Lochner case. Not every reader will agree with every step in his reasoning, but it is difficult not to respect his scholarship and conscientious facility of expression.

And concludes:

Not all [readers] will find unchallengeable every point that the author makes. Yet all, or so this reviewer predicts, will broaden their understanding of our national charter and what the Supreme Court has done with it in the past century or so.

One aside: the reviewer wonders why I spend a chapter discussing the background of Lochner, focusing on the special interest politics designed to lead to a law that would favor large corporate bakeries over struggling mom and pop operations. I was reminded of why just today, while I was reading a Yale Law Journal article published just a year ago. The author describes Lochner, among other cases, as “remembered for … its indifference to inequalities of bargaining power between industrial workers and employers.” As Glenn Reynolds pointed out in his review of my book, over time “an opinion that stopped a joint effort by large corporate interests and big unions to squash small businesses was somehow turned into the centerpiece of a narrative about the Supreme Court upholding big business at the expense of the little guy.” And that seemed like a story worth telling.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes