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The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence
The Constitution Besieged The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence Author:Howard Gillman The Constitution Besieged offers a compelling reinterpretation of one of the most notorious periods in American constitutional history. In the decades following the Civil War, federal and state judges struck down as unconstitutional a great deal of innovative social and economic legislation. Scholars have traditionally viewed this as the work of... more » a conservative judiciary more interested in promoting laissez-faire economics than in interpreting the Constitution. Gillman challenges this scholarly orthodoxy by showing how these judges were in fact observing a long-standing constitutional prohibition against "class legislation." « less