Substantive due process is a principle in United States constitutional law that allows courts to establish and protect substantive laws and certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if they are unenumerated elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. Courts have asserted that such protections stem from the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "liberty... without due process of law." Substantive due process demarcates the line between acts that courts deem subject to government regulation or legislation and those they consider beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve that function continues to be a matter of scholarly and judicial discussion and dissent.
Substantive due process is to be distinguished from procedural due process. The distinction arises from the words "of law" in the phrase "due process of law". Procedural due process protects individuals from the coercive power of government by ensuring that adjudication processes, under valid laws, are fair and impartial. Such protections, for example, include sufficient and timely notice of why a party is required to appear before a court or other governmental body, the right to an impartial trier of fact and trier of law, and the right to give testimony and present relevant evidence at hearings. In contrast, substantive due process protects individuals against majoritarian policy enactments that exceed the limits of governmental authority: courts may find that a majority's enactment is not law and cannot be enforced as such, even if the processes of enactment and enforcement were actually fair.
The term was first used explicitly in 1930s legal casebooks as a categorical distinction of selected due process cases, and by 1952 Supreme Court opinions had mentioned it twice. The term "substantive due process" itself is commonly used in two ways: to identify a particular line of case law and to signify a particular political attitude toward judicial review under the two due process clauses.
Much substantive due process litigation involves legal challenges to the validity of unenumerated rights and seeks particular outcomes instead of merely contesting procedures and their effects. In successful cases, the Supreme Court recognizes a constitutionally based liberty and considers laws that seek to limit that liberty to be unenforceable or limited in scope. Critics of substantive due process decisions usually assert that such decisions should be left to the purview of more politically-accountable branches of government.
Conceptual basics The courts have viewed the Due Process Clause and sometimes other clauses of the Constitution as embracing the fundamental rights that are "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty".Palko v. Connecticut, The rights have not been clearly identified and the Supreme Court's authority to enforce the unenumerated rights is unclear. Some of the rights have been said to be "deeply rooted" in American history and tradition; that phrase was used for rights related to the institution of the family.Moore v. City of East Cleveland, , 503 (opinion of Powell J.)
The courts have largely abandoned the Lochner era approach (c. 1897–1937), when substantive due process was used to strike down minimum wage and labor laws to protect freedom of contract. Since then, the Supreme Court has decided that the Constitution protects numerous other freedoms, even if they are not in the text. If the federal courts' doctrine of substantive due process did not protect them, they could nevertheless be protected in other ways; for example, other provisions of the state or federal constitutions or legislaturesNew York Bill of Rights (1787) protect some rights.
Today, the Supreme Court provides special protection for three types of rights under substantive due process in the Fourteenth Amendment – an approach which originated in United States v. Carolene Products Co., , footnote 4: Rights enumerated in and derived from the first eight amendments to the Constitution The right to participate in the political process, such as the rights of voting, association, and free speech The rights of "discrete and insular minorities"
The Supreme Court usually looks first to see whether the right is a fundamental right by examining whether it is deeply rooted in American history and traditions. If the right is not a fundamental right, the court applies a rational basis test: if the violation of the right can be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose, the law is then held valid. If the court establishes that the right being violated is a fundamental right, it applies strict scrutiny and asks whether the law is necessary to achieve a compelling state interest and whether the law is narrowly tailored to address that interest.
History of jurisprudence Early in American judicial history, various jurists attempted to form theories of natural rights and natural justice to limit the power of government, especially on property and the rights of persons. Opposing "vested rights" were other jurists, who argued that the written constitution was the supreme law of the State and that judicial review could look only to that document, not to the "unwritten law" of "natural rights". Opponents also argued that the "police power" of government allowed legislatures to regulate the holding of property in the public interest, subject only to specific prohibitions of the written constitution.
Early origins The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery.
The "vested rights" jurists saw the "law of the land" and "due process" clauses of state constitutions as restrictions on the substantive content of legislation. They were sometimes successful in arguing that certain government infringements were prohibited, regardless of procedure. For example, in 1856, the New York Court of Appeals held in Wynehamer v. New York that "without 'due process of law', no act of legislation can deprive a man of his property, and that in civil cases an act of the legislature alone is wholly inoperative to take from a man his property".Wynehamer v. New York, 13 N.Y. 378, 418 (N.Y. 1856) However, in 1887 the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently rejected the rationale of Wynehamer.Mugler v. Kansas, , at 657, 669. Other antebellum cases on due process include Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., which dealt with procedural due process,Murray v. Hoboken Land, but the Supreme Court subsequently characterized the rationale of Murray, in the case of Hurtado v. California, as not providing "an indispensable test" of due process.Hurtado v. California,
Another important pre-Civil War milestone in the history of due process was Daniel Webster's argument to the Supreme Court as counsel in Dartmouth College v. Woodward that the Due Process Clause forbids bills of attainder and various other types of depriving legislation.Dartmouth College v. Woodward, : "The meaning [of the phrase 'law of the land'] is, that every citizen shall hold his life, liberty, property and immunities, under the protection of the general rules which govern society. Everything which may pass under the form of an enactment, is not, therefore, to be considered the law of the land. If this were so, acts of attainder, bills of pains and penalties, acts of confiscation, acts reversing judgments, and acts directly transferring one man's estate to another, legislative judgments, decrees and forfeitures, in all possible forms, would be the law of the land." Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declined in the case to address that aspect of Webster's argument, the New Hampshire Supreme Court having already rejected it.Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1 N.H. 111, 129 (1817): "[H]ow a privilege can be protected from the operation of a law of the land, by a clause in the [state] constitution, declaring that it shall not be taken away, but by the law of the land, is not very easily understood."
Roger Taney, in his Dred Scott opinion, pronounced without elaboration that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because an "act of Congress that deprived a citizen of his liberty or property merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law". In the case, neither Taney nor the dissenting Benjamin Robbins Curtis mentioned or relied upon the Court's previous discussion of due process in Murray, and Curtis disagreed with Taney about what "due process" meant.
Lochner era
Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause prompted substantive due process interpretations to be urged on the Supreme Court as a limitation on state legislation. Initially, however, the Supreme Court rejected substantive due process as it came to be understood, including in the seminal Slaughter-House Cases. Beginning in the 1870s through the late 1880s, the Supreme Court hinted in dicta that various state statutes challenged under a different constitutional provision may have been invalidated under the due process clause. The first case to invalidate a state government economic regulation under this theory was Allgeyer v. Louisiana in 1897 which interpreted the word "liberty" in the due process clause to mean economic liberty. The Supreme Court would go on to impose on both federal and state legislation a firm judicial hand on property and economics right until the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The Court typically invalidated statutes during the Lochner era (named after Lochner v. New York) by declaring the statutes in violation of the right to contract. The Court invalidated state laws prohibiting employers from insisting, as a condition of employment, that their employees agree not to join a union. The Court also declared a state minimum wage law for women unconstitutional. Because many of the first applications protected the rights of corporations and employers to be free of governmental regulation, some scholars believe that substantive due process developed as a consequence of the Court's desire to accommodate 19th-century railroads and trusts.
Later development The end of the Lochner era came in 1937 with the Supreme Court's holding in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. In that case, the Court upheld the state of Washington's "Minimum Wages for Women" act, reasoning that the Constitution permitted the restriction of liberty of contract by state law where such restriction protected the community, health and safety, or vulnerable groups.
Although economic due process restrictions on legislation were largely abandoned by the courts, substantive due process rights continue to be successfully asserted today in non-economic legislation that affects intimate issues like bodily integrity, marriage, religion, childbirth, child-rearing, and sexuality.