West Coast Hotel has both a legal and a political significance. On the legal side, it marked a sharp turn away from Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo (1936), which saw the Court invalidate an almost identical state minimum wage law the previous year. It also represented an overwhelming counterweight to the idea of substantive due process, essentially using the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to assert new rights, at least in economic matters. From this point on, the justices would no longer be as deferential to ideas that limited the ability of governments to regulate economic activity, like the freedom of contract.