Lochner / classical-liberal tradition
economic substantive due process, 1897–1937

The Lochner Court (1897-1937) developed a constitutional framework treating economic liberty as a substantive due-process right: courts should strike down progressive economic regulation that interfered with freedom of contract, property rights, and the unenumerated liberties classical liberalism treated as foundational. Justices Stephen Field, Rufus Peckham, and George Sutherland (one of the 'Four Horsemen') exemplified the tradition; the framework was abandoned after 1937 but has had a sustained revival in legal-academic conservatism since the 1980s. Paxton's record substantially aligns with the Lochner framework on economic deregulation, anti-ESG litigation, opposition to labor regulation, and the property-rights orientation; he loses points because Lochner-era framework was also skeptical of state-power expansion for cultural-conservative ends, which Paxton's Ten Commandments mandate and use of AG power for moral regulation embody. Talarico's economic policy agenda — $15 minimum wage, corporate tax increases, stock buyback tax, antitrust expansion — is the precise pattern the Lochner framework was built to limit. The narrow P+1 reflects that Lochner conservatism really would prefer Paxton's substantive economic policy while remaining troubled by his institutional-process record — the kind of mixed verdict that maps to how some classical-liberal commentators have actually written about Paxton.