The purpose of this research is to examine the Supreme Court decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 107 U.S. 3141 (1937) as an important Constitutional case. The plan of the research will be to set forth the type of action and the political and historical context in which the case arose, and then to discuss the process and rationale by which the Supreme Court came to decide the case as it did.
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish was important for several reasons. First, it truncated by rendering superfluous Franklin Delano Roosevelt's attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court with justices who, as he thought, would be more congenial to his radical restructuring of the federal government under the New Deal. Second, and related to the first reason, it marked a discernible political shift on the Court itself, from one that, where the swing vote on majority opinions were concerned, was programmatically hostile to the legal theoretical underpinnings of the New Deal, to one that exhibited much legal and Constitutional tolerance toward the overt federal sponsorship of welfare, opportunity, and caretaker programs that had in earlier periods of American history been sponsored by the private sector. Third, and perhaps more important for the long term, it declared new policy in the realm of government jurisdiction over certain salient aspects of private-sector activity.
On its face, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish was a minimum-wage case. At the time the case began, the guarantee of a minimum wage as an American institution was not firmly in place. Indeed, Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923) and Morehead v. New York, ex-. rel, Tipaldo, 298 U.S. 587 (1936) had both struck down state minimum-wage laws as unconstitutional.
The basis for striking down these minimum-wage laws in Adkins was the assertion that government declaration for minimum wage unduly interfered with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, in denying businesses the oppor...