Page "Charles Evans Hughes" Paragraph 26

In a third set of pre-1916 cases, Hughes addressed the laissez-faire doctrine of " liberty of contract.

" Using this legal principle, many judges in Britain and the United States had voided, as an infringement of an individual's property rights, legislation that regulated common law bargains made in the marketplace between employers and their workers.

But in a seminal article of 1881, " Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract ," the Oxford political philosopher Thomas Hill Green disputed this reasoning.

Green pointed out that the British Factory Acts had already limited the liberty of industrial capitalists and that legislation requiring compulsory schooling had circumscribed the freedom of parents.

Extending the logic of these measures, Green adumbrated a positive and collectivist definition of liberty, a concept of " public freedom " that justified legislative oversight of economic life, especially land ownership and use.

He likewise proposed legislative intervention into the terms of private bargains, to " provide against contracts being made which, from the helplessness of one of the parties to them, instead of being a security for freedom, become an instrument of disguised repression.

" Picking up this line of argument and declaring " a great departure from the principles of free contract ," Gladstone created an Irish Land Court with complete control over rents and other landlord-tenant issues.

Two decades later, Churchill and other New Liberals regularly invoked Green's arguments in parliamentary debates over English legislation.