The case was decided in the era prior to the Great Depression, when the Supreme Court invalidated laws that imposed restrictions on contracts, especially those of employment.

[Since] it is self-evident that... some persons must have more property than others, it is... impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights.He concluded that a state in the exercise of its police power did not have the right to redress imbalances of bargaining power and that requiring a man to give up the right to be in a union as a condition of employment does "not to ask him to give up any part of his constitutional freedom."

Justice Holmes wrote a dissent in which he called again for Lochner to be overruled and stated that the Constitution does not specifically prohibit a law like the one Kansas had and so it should be upheld: I think the judgment should be affirmed.

If that belief, whether right or wrong, may be held by a reasonable man, it seems to me that it may be enforced by law in order to establish the equality of position between the parties in which liberty of contract begins.

I still entertain the opinions expressed by me in Massachusetts.Justice Day's dissent would have affirmed the liberty of contract against arbitrary legislative restraints but deferred more to the legislature on the question of whether the law upheld the public welfare.