Perspective: The newly conservative court may target the decision that allows for a minimum wage
. Both times, the court deemed the minimum-wage laws under consideration a violation of the “liberty of contract,” which it found to be explicitly protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments. The justices argued that the Constitution guaranteed workers and their employers the freedom to make contracts for hours and wages on their own terms, not terms imposed by the state.
In reality, however, this “freedom” stacked the deck against workers, forcing them to accept lower wages. Elsie Parrish — the plaintiff in— was one of the millions of American workers who bore the brunt of this reality. She could best be described as not at “liberty” to complain about the wages she received as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Wash.During the Great Depression, she was lucky to have a job.
Since then, very few justices have made suggestions even remotely connected to the idea of revisiting’s conclusion about the minimum wage. Justice David Souter did express alarm in a dissent in 1995 that some members of the court at the time might have such an interest. Yet, over the next 20 years Souter’s concern seemed unfounded, because justices rarely even cited, and no member of the court wrote an opinion whose language could be fairly interpreted as criticizing the seminal decision.