s not involving interstate commerce, in that case the regulation of rates charged by grain storage warehouses in Illinois, because they affected the public interest.
By the middle 1880s, legal realists, such as later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, took the Court to task for going overboard in its defense of private property. He criticized the tendency of the Court to substitute its own judge-made biases to strike down experimental state legislative attempts to regulate areas such as minimum wages and the use of child labor. He rejected the notion that any system of legal thought was infallible or that the legal process was entirely rational. According to him, "the felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men have been governed" (Holmes The Common 1881 720-721).
From the standpoint of blacks, women, workers, farmers and m
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