Congress had intended the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that states did not interfere in the exercise of civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Through substantive due process, judges sought to use the amendment to enshrine freedom of contract, open competition, and laissez-faire in the Constitution even though none of these things had been part of the document. The courts made the amendment a means for ruling on the constitutionality of regulatory legislation that applied to business and labor by evaluating their substantive effect. Any attempt to limit competition was an attempt at
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