With the proposals of the Sub–Committee in hand, the Advisory Committee had to now decide whether it wished to throw its support behind a due process guarantee. One look at the above proposal made it evident that the Sub-Committee was largely inspired by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which recommended due process guarantee protecting ‘life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘property.’
By the 1940s, the 14th Amendment, and particularly the due process guarantee, had become enormously controversial in the US. It all started with the decision of the US Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York (1905) which wrested from the 14th Amendment, the idea that courts can recognise new rights and confer due process protection on them. The decision in Lochner announced that the 14th Amendment guaranteed a liberty to contract, as a result of which laws which violated this newly recognised right were declared unconstitutional. The juristic thought that Lochner came to embody was that socio-economic laws would be declared unconstitutional on the anvil of the due process guarantee.
In the face of an economic crisis brought on by the Great Depression of 1929, President Franklin D Roosevelt, in February 1937, threatened to pack the court with additional justices; justices who would uphold laws, if the US Supreme Court did not break away from the Lochner line of thinking. His threat is believed to have worked, because one of the justices, Justice Owen Roberts, switched his voting pattern, thus creating a majority on the US Supreme Court which began to uphold socio-economic laws. Justice Roberts’ change of heart to avert Roosevelt’s ‘Court Packing Plan’ is famously called ‘The Switch in Time that Saved Nine.’ The battle appeared to have ended by the 1940s with the decision of the US Supreme Court in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) and United States v. Darby(1941), which seemingly abandoned Lochner.
Source: Barandbench
