In 1895, the state of New York enacted a law, the Bakeshop Act, that regulated conditions in the state’s many small bakeries and limited the workweek to sixty hours. When Joseph Lochner, the owner of a bakeshop in Utica, was convicted and fined for allowing an employee to work more than sixty hours, he appealed his conviction to the New York appeals courts, which upheld the constitutionality of the law and Lochner’s conviction. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he argued that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that he could not be deprived of his liberty of contract without due process. The Court ruled in Lochner’s favor by a 5–4 vote. Justice Rufus W. Peckham wrote the majority opinion, ruling that the right to buy and sell labor without government interference was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.