Which U.S. Supreme Court case in 1908 upheld Oregon’s maximum-hours law for women?

Muller v. Oregon upheld Oregon’s maximum-hours law for women in 1908.

The case concerned an Oregon statute limiting women’s work in laundries and mechanical establishments to ten hours per day. Laundry owner Curt Muller was fined after requiring an employee to work beyond the statutory limit. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law.

The decision followed Lochner-era arguments about freedom of contract but treated women differently, relying on contemporary ideas about women’s physical structure and social role. Louis Brandeis’s brief famously used only a few pages of legal argument and many pages of social and medical evidence, a format later called a “Brandeis brief.”

Muller is not a minimum-wage case. It concerned maximum working hours. It is also distinct from Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, which struck down a minimum-wage law for women in 1923.