Liberty of Contract

For book club today we discussed David Mayer's Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right. I enjoyed it a lot. It's short and lawyerly, and it's dry, as legal arguments often are.

As with his book on the Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, part of the interest for me was exploring how the constitution was viewed in the past, by very bright people whose theories were often quite different than those you usually hear today.

In Liberty of Contract, Mayer takes part in an ongoing scholarly re-examination of a period in the Supreme Court's history when it held that such liberty was an individual right.

Synthesizing the new scholarship and presenting a coherent and comprehensive overview of liberty-of-contract jurisprudence, this book argues that the orthodox view of the so-called Lochner era is fundamentally flawed in a number of respects. Indeed, the orthodox view is wrong in virtually all of its assumptions, which were based on myths originally propounded by Progressive-Era scholars that have been perpetuated by modern scholars who similarly defend the policies of the modern regulatory state.

Proponents of the regulatory state
don't give "liberty of contract" much weight.