Morehead v. New York Ex Rel. Tipaldo
The Court struck down New York's minimum wage law for women, ruling that it could not be meaningfully distinguished from a Washington, D.C. minimum wage law the Court had already declared unconstitutional in 1923. A laundry manager jailed for violating a wage order was ordered released.
The decision reaffirmed that the Constitution's due process guarantee protects a broad freedom to set wages by private agreement, meaning states generally could not force employers to pay women workers a legally set minimum. The ruling provoked a sharp dissent and became one of the last major decisions of its kind before the Court reversed course the following year.
How it got here: A New York trial court dismissed Tipaldo's habeas petition, but the New York Court of Appeals reversed, ruling the wage law unconstitutional and ordering his release; the State asked the Supreme Court to review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Joseph Tipaldo managed a Brooklyn laundry and was jailed after being accused of violating a New York industrial commissioner's order setting minimum wages for the laundry's women employees. He challenged the 1933 state law behind that order, arguing it improperly let the government dictate wages between private employers and their women workers, violating constitutional protections for making contracts freely.
The question before the Court
Could New York require laundries and other businesses to pay women workers a state-set minimum wage, or did that violate the same constitutional freedom to make contracts that had already doomed a similar law in Washington, D.C.?
Why it matters
The ruling meant women workers in New York and states with similar laws lost a legal floor under their wages, leaving them to negotiate pay individually with employers. It also signaled to other states that minimum wage laws for women were constitutionally vulnerable, chilling further wage-protection legislation until the Court reversed itself a year later.
What changes now
The ruling freed Joseph Tipaldo and invalidated New York's minimum wage law for women. Because the decision rested on the Adkins precedent, it left states largely powerless to set minimum wages for women until the following year, when the Supreme Court in a separate case overturned that entire line of precedent and upheld a similar state minimum wage law, ending the approach taken here.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly declined to consider whether its 1923 Adkins decision should be overruled, since the petitioner had not asked for that broader question to be reconsidered. The ruling addressed only wages for adult women in this law; it did not decide the validity of wage rules for men, or for boys and girls under 21 also covered by the statute.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Hughes
Chief Justice Hughes argued the New York law was materially different from the D.C. law struck down in Adkins because it required wages to match the fair value of services rendered, not just cover living costs. He found nothing in the Constitution barring states from protecting women from exploitative wages set through a careful, fact-based administrative process, and would have upheld the law.
Dissent — Justice Stone
“There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their services for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.”Stone's objection that 'freedom of contract' ignores the real economic pressures workers face.
Justice Stone agreed with Hughes but went further, arguing the Court should not rest on distinguishing the statutes at all. He contended the Fourteenth Amendment does not enshrine any particular economic theory and that regulating wages is no different in principle from other economic regulations the Court had upheld, so Adkins itself should not control.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began from Adkins v. Children's Hospital, its 1923 ruling that Congress could not set minimum wages for women in Washington, D.C. because doing so violated the constitutionally protected liberty to make contracts, treating that decision as controlling unless the New York law was truly different.
- Because the New York Court of Appeals had already interpreted the state law to require wages tied partly to the cost of living necessary for health -- the same standard struck down in Adkins -- the Court held itself bound by that state-court interpretation and could not read the statute any other way.
- The Court held that adding a second wage element, requiring pay to also reflect the fair value of services, did not cure the constitutional problem, because the cost-of-living element alone was enough to make the law resemble the invalid District of Columbia statute.
- The Court reasoned that if a state cannot regulate wages at all consistent with the freedom to make contracts, then no amount of careful procedure or fair rate-setting can create a power the Constitution withholds in the first place.
- Applying this reasoning, the Court concluded that New York's law suffered from the same basic defect as the D.C. law -- it let the government override private wage agreements between employers and adult women workers -- and therefore could not stand.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Adkins v. Children's Hospital (261 U.S. 525)
The Court treated Adkins as controlling and applied its ban on minimum wage laws to strike down New York's statute.
Reaffirms Murphy v. Sardell (269 U.S. 530)
Cited as an earlier case applying Adkins to strike down a state minimum wage law for women.
Reaffirms Donham v. West-Nelson Mfg. Co. (273 U.S. 657)
Cited as another case applying Adkins to invalidate a state women's minimum wage law.