Lochner in Rehab

Reading Joseph Tartakovsky’s review of David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner (“Rights Revisited,” July 4), I got the sense that both gentlemen embrace the proposition that the 1905 Lochner decision was “a defensible application of a long-standing natural-rights tradition of individual liberty” and “that the logic of ‘liberty of contract’ is really the logic of unenumerated rights . . . whose existence we deduce from proper understandings of liberty.”

First of all, the Lochner decision — in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law limiting how many hours bakery employees might work, and held “liberty of contract” to be a …