The court will expansively interpret the plan as supporting the freedom of contract to revitalize Lochnerist principles.

Now, in the wake of the court’s momentous rulings overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and restricting the reach of administrative agencies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the foundation has been laid for, if not an outright resurrection of Lochner, at least a serious reappraisal.

Such a notion may seem far-fetched. After all, Lochner is cited eight times in the various Dobbs opinions — each time as an example of the kind of decision that should be reversed or ignored because it substituted the court’s judgment for that of a duly elected legislature.

But, with settled law suddenly seeming anything but, it’s important to consider what might be coming.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and a liberal constitutional scholar, said that, based on the logic of Dobbs, “there’s no principled way to hold back the tide that would return us to the law of the late 1800s on matters of privacy, reproduction, sexual intimacy and L.G.B.T.Q. equality.” Although Lochner itself is probably “too radioactive” for this court to embrace outright, the court’s overall hostility to government regulation of business and its celebration of individual freedom are clearly in the ascendant. Professor Tribe warned that the effect could be to “return our jurisprudence to a preindustrial, agrarian world. It’s all but unthinkable.” The consequences, he added, could be “horrendous.”

With six conservative justices, the court seems receptive to a renewed deference to the moribund notion of freedom of contract, a goal that some libertarian and conservative lawyers and scholars have long cherished.

The dominance on the court of “originalism,” the doctrine that interprets the constitution and its amendments as they would have been understood at the time they were written, also bodes well for the principles of Lochner. As David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, contends in his 2012 book, “Rehabilitating Lochner,” proponents of a freedom of contract were “originalists, trying to adhere to what they saw as the constitutional underpinnings of the 14th Amendment’s framers.”

The case for Lochner is plainly embedded in the Dobbs decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution had to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Unlike a right to abortion, freedom of contract is widely believed to meet that definition.

Since the Declaration of Independence was adopted 246 years ago, the freedom to work and to make contracts has been seen as part of the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The founders drew on the work of the English philosopher John Locke, who identified “life, liberty and property” as inalienable rights and considered ownership of the self a form of property. The 14th Amendment echoes Locke’s language: “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

In fact, the notion that citizens had a basic right to enter into contracts, especially regarding their trade or employment, was so pervasive by the time the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 that Lochner barely discussed it. The opinion simply asserted that those bakery workers in New York had a right to make a contract as “part of the liberty of the individual protected by the 14th Amendment.”

The right to enter into contracts, even in Lochner, was not all-encompassing. The legitimate exercise of the state’s police powers trumped a right of contract. People couldn’t enter into illegal arrangements, and the state was free to protect the health and safety of workers. Lochner explicitly upheld regulations protecting miners, whose work was inherently unsafe. But the court found nothing inherently dangerous about baking.

Still, many subsequent government regulations that are now taken for granted infringed on this freedom of contract. In 1923, for instance, the court struck down a minimum wage. (Libertarians have long argued that a minimum wage is both bad economic policy and an infringement on individual liberty, especially harmful to those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.) In the post-Lochner era, that decision was reversed.

Lochner was understandably anathema to organized labor. While its logic would have protected the rights of workers to enter into collective bargaining agreements among themselves, it would never have countenanced efforts by government to favor unions or to require workers to pay union dues whether or not they joined a union.