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Page Number: 51

12 

OBERGEFELL v. HODGES 

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting 

opinions of individuals are allowed to control” the Consti-
tution’s  meaning,  “we  have  no  longer  a  Constitution;  we 
are  under  the  government  of  individual  men,  who  for  the 
time being have power to declare what the Constitution is,
according  to  their  own  views  of  what  it  ought  to  mean.” 
Id., at 621.
  Dred Scott’s holding was overruled on the battlefields of
the  Civil  War  and  by  constitutional  amendment  after
Appomattox,  but  its  approach  to  the  Due  Process  Clause
reappeared.  In a series of early 20th-century cases, most 
prominently  Lochner  v.  New  York,  this  Court  invalidated 
state  statutes  that  presented  “meddlesome  interferences 
with the rights of the individual,” and “undue interference
with liberty of person and freedom of contract.”  198 U. S., 
at 60, 61.  In Lochner itself, the Court struck down a New 
York  law  setting  maximum  hours  for  bakery  employees, 
because  there  was  “in  our  judgment,  no  reasonable  foun-
dation for holding this to be necessary or appropriate as a
health law.”  Id., at 58. 

The  dissenting  Justices  in  Lochner  explained  that  the
New York law could be viewed as a reasonable response to
legislative  concern  about  the  health  of  bakery  employees,
an issue on which there was at least “room for debate and 
for an honest difference of opinion.”  Id., at 72 (opinion of 
Harlan,  J.).    The  majority’s  contrary  conclusion  required
adopting as constitutional law “an economic theory which 
a large part of the country does not entertain.”  Id., at 75 
(opinion of Holmes, J.).  As Justice Holmes memorably put
it,  “The  Fourteenth  Amendment  does  not  enact  Mr.  Her-
bert  Spencer’s  Social  Statics,”  a  leading  work  on  the  phi-
losophy  of  Social  Darwinism.    Ibid.   The  Constitution  “is 
not intended to embody a particular economic theory . . . . 
It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and 
the  accident  of  our  finding  certain  opinions  natural  and 
familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude
our judgment upon the question whether statutes embody-