Lochner revival collapses the economy, public health, and workers’ rights.
Colby & Smith 15 [Thomas Colby, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, The George Washington University Law School, Peter J. Smith, Professor of Law, The George Washington University Law School, “THE RETURN OF LOCHNER” 2015, https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol100/iss3/1/, Cornell Law Review. Accessed 23 July 2023]//jstumpff
In one fell swoop, then, the Lochner Court delivered a near-death blow to the entire Progressive legislative enterprise of enacting labor laws, public health laws, and workplace safety regulations. And it did so, according to the conventional narrative, solely on the basis of its own allegedly common-sense, but in fact woefully uninformed, opinions—opinions that were shaped by class biases and laissez-faire politics, and that flew in the face of actual data and informed legislative judgment.82 For more than thirty years, the recalcitrant and activist Lochner-era Court stood in the way of overwhelmingly popular and economically necessary Progressive legislation, perhaps contributing to or worsening the Great Depression.83 And when the Court stood on the brink of striking down the entire New Deal, an exasperated President Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court with Progressive judges, prompting a constitutional crisis that ended only when the Court backed down in the famous “switch in time that saved Nine” in 1937 and finally brought an end to the Lochner era.