Treatment of Women and African Americans

The courts were caught in the middle among the demands of private property and the concerns over the need to curb the excesses and ab substance ab roles of unchecked capitalism. The irresponsible Court grudgingly acknowledged in cases much(prenominal) as Munn v. Illinois (1877) and the Granger railroad cases of the 1880s the police business leader of the expresss to regulate economic activity within their borders, especially their index finger to regulate railroad and other natural monopolies. More often, it employ the Commerce article and the substantive Due Process Clause of the fourteenth Amendment to uphold the rights of private property and self-direction of contract, void in important cases like Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897) and Lochner v. New York (1905) state regulatory legislation.

Legal formalists such as Christopher Langdell envisaged the legal organization as a tightly organized rational and non-political man which tended to be static and relied heavily on precedent. Constitutional educatee Cooley said, "There is no rule or principle cognize to our system under which private property can be taken from one man and transferred to another for the private use and benefit of such other person, whether by general justices or by special enactment" (341). Legal progressives, such as Roscoe Pound, rejected what they labelled Mechanical Jurisprudence, which they believed served the interests of the status quo. They wanted to use the law to effect social change. Holm

Legal progressivism was almost entirely a white upper-middle-class movement with support among white labor leaders and women's groups. The Supreme Court's real reasons for many of its decisions involving African-Americans was its belief that society was not officious for vigorous enforcement of the 14th Amendment to redress racial discrimination. This comes through clear in the following excerpts from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson: the 14th Amendment was not "intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two travels upon name unsatisfactory to either" (544).

And, "in determining the question of rationalness it [a state] is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and high-priced order" (Plessy 550). The Court went on to say that, "if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot set them upon the same plane" (Plessy 552).

. . . Our Constitution is color-blind . . . In prise of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law" (Plessy 559).

Minorities did not fare well during the era of legal formalism. Although near social legislation was passed and sustained by the courts, the women's rights movement succeeded to the uttermost it did in promoting laws, such as the legislation in operating theater limiting the numbers of hours women could work, which was upheld in the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon (1908), by emphasizing the dependence of women and the detrimental effects of industrialization on them. Women's rights advocates and legal progressives joined forces, apply the tools of sociology such as the so-called Brandeis brief. They exploded the fiction of liberty of contract which "not only enhanced judges' authority at the expense of lawmakers' . . . but also ignored the real inequali
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