 A particularly vivid example of this last consequence is arguably found in Lochner v New York, a notorious case in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that a New York State law requiring that bakery employees work no more than ten hours per day and sixty hours per week violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which asserts that no State may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of  law.”.[26]  The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court held, entails “the right and liberty of the individual to contract” for a longer work week. The Lochner decision gave rise to what is commonly called “the Lochner era”, a period stretching roughly from 1905 till 1937 in which the Supreme Court struck down numerous Federal and State statutes aimed at improving the working conditions of employees. As such, it may well have been a period during which the United States Constitution, in the hands of an elitist Court, served only to “legitimize” overt political suppression. According to hard critics, the Lochner era is but one small piece of a much larger picture.