Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal

Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. By David E. Bernstein. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xiv, 191 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8223-2583-7.)

Ever since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, its meaning has been highly contested. For example, did the amendment prohibit governmental regulation of economic activity? Although the Supreme Court's decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) refused to apply the Fourteenth Amendment to local economic regulations that did not explicitly discriminate against African Americans, four justices would have done so. In 1905, the Supreme Court adopted the dissenters' point of view. Lochner v. New York invalidated a law that prohibited bakeries from employing bakers for more than sixty hours a week. From 1905 until 1937, the Supreme Court remained "relatively sympathetic to plaintiffs who challenged government regulations, especially occupational regulations, as violations of the implicit constitutional right to...