64 SALMON GEAR LIMITATION 



the pre- 1935 days. In the eadier, rather brief period of extreme 

 protection to business activity, the court had struck down various 

 state regulatory laws such as those regulating hours of work in a 

 bakery, ^^ those outlawing "yellow-dog" contracts (in which the em- 

 ployee agreed upon taking his job that he would not join a labor 

 union ),^^ and those fixing minimum wages for women. ^^ With the 

 change in the court in the mid-thirties, however, such regulations 

 generally came to be upheld. ^"^ 



Currently, all that due process seems to require for legislative 

 regulation of economic activity is that there be a legitimate purpose 

 and a rational means for accomplishing that purpose. This, it will 

 be noted, is strikingly like the test for validity under the Equal Pro- 

 tection Clause, the only difference being that in the latter, the ele- 

 ment of classification is present. 



The clearest and leading case is West Coast Hotel Co. v. Par- 

 rish,-^ a 1937 case challenging the Washington state law providing 

 for minimum wages for women. The Washington State Supreme 

 Court had sustained the statute; then on appeal to the United States 

 Supreme Court that court affirmed the decision. In an attack on due 

 process grounds, the employer argued that an earlier case, Adkins v. 

 Children's Hospital,^^ should control. In that 1923 case the court 

 struck down, as violating the liberty of contract found to exist in the 

 Due Process Clause, a minimum wage law for women in Washington, 

 D.C., saying, in part: 



"The feature of this statute which, perhaps more than any other, puts 

 upon it the stamp of invalidity is that it exacts from the employer an arbi- 

 trary payment for a purpose and upon a basis having no causal connection 

 with his business, or the contract or the work the employee engages to do. 

 The declared basis . . . is . . . the extraneous circumstance that the em- 

 ployee needs to get a prescribed sum of money to insure her subsistence, 

 health and morals . . . Certainly the employer by paying a fair equivalent 

 for the service rendered, though not sufficient to support the employee, has 

 neither caused nor contributed to her poverty. On the contrary, to the 

 extent of what he pays he has relieved it. In principle, there can be no 

 difference between the case of selling labor and the case of selling goods. "^^ 



21. Lochner V. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905). 



22. Coppagev. Kansas, 236 U. S. 1 (1915). 



23. Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U. S. 525 (1923). 



24. See the discussion in the text, infra, n. 25. 



25. 300 U.S. 379 (1937). 



26. 261 U.S. 525 (1923). 



27. Id. at 558. 



