Supreme Court Strikes Down Federal Minimum Wage Law for Women in Adkins Decision

The Supreme Court rules 5-3 in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital that a 1918 federal law establishing a minimum wage board for women and minors in the District of Columbia violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “liberty of contract.” Justice George Sutherland, writing for the majority, holds that employer and employee have a constitutional right to contract on whatever terms they please without government interference, and that minimum wage laws constitute unjustified intrusion on this freedom. The decision strikes down protections designed to prevent women from being forced into poverty wages “detrimental to their health and morals,” invalidating a law that had enabled worker Willie Lyons to challenge her $35 monthly salary as inadequate.

Sutherland’s opinion distinguishes minimum wage laws from maximum hours laws previously upheld by the Court, arguing that wage regulations restrict both sides of the negotiation while hours limits leave wages to be freely bargained. The majority invokes the Nineteenth Amendment’s recent grant of voting rights to women as evidence that gender-based protective legislation is no longer constitutionally permissible—perversely using women’s suffrage to deny them economic protections. Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edward Sanford dissent, with Holmes arguing that legislatures must have power to address recognized evils and questioning why labor contracts should be uniquely exempt from regulation when “laws exist to forbid people from doing things they want to do.”

The Adkins decision entrenches the “freedom of contract” doctrine and substantive due process interpretation that defines the Lochner Era, during which the Supreme Court systematically invalidates progressive economic legislation. The ruling’s immediate impact is the invalidation of minimum wage laws in multiple states throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, leaving millions of workers—especially women—vulnerable to exploitation through starvation wages. The decision stands for 14 years until West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) overturns it, marking a fundamental shift in the Court’s approach to economic regulation. Adkins exemplifies judicial capture in service of laissez-faire ideology, with the Court prioritizing abstract liberty of contract over the material reality of unequal bargaining power between employers and desperate workers.