Due Process Clause Of The 14th Amendment

The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, at least when it first began, had a procedural understanding in the Court. The Court identified the clause to protect intrusions of liberty by the States without the proper process of law (fair trial, jury of peers, etc.) The Court, in the transitional era, developed a new understanding of the Due Process clause. The question asked was no longer about the presence of the process, but about the validity of the law at its core. This new understanding, the Substantive understanding of Due Process, argued that States could not legislate on certain issues because the laws that they were making were, inherently, unfair or unjust. The Court, which previously permitted such intrusions in so far as the process of law was maintained, began to overturn laws that the Court felt were contrary to natural law (this later developed into overturning laws that the Court understood to contradict the ideas of justice, dignity, and individuality).
These activists, in the name of the Laissez-faire capitalist principle of natural law, overturned laws that violated this principle. This led to the rise of economic substantive due process, which was marked by the Court overturning cases it felt violated the Laissez-faire principle of Natural Law. One such case was Lochner v. New York, in which the Court said that the state of New York could not limit the hours a baker worked in a bakery. Such a ruling utilized the Substantive understanding of the 14th Amendment Due Process clause to determine that the New York law was inherently unfair/unjust; therefore, no matter if the proper process of law was followed in implementing it, it was unconstitutional because it violated the Laissez-faire principle of capitalism which was found in Natural