The (Rail)Road toLochner: Reproduction Cost and the Gilded Age Controversy Over Rate Regulation
研究美国最高法院在铁路费率监管争议中如何选择重置成本法计算铁路价值，从而在工业转型期仍坚守古典政治经济学原则，最终导向洛克纳案和放任自由时代。
The controversy over railroad rates regulation was a fundamental component of the jurisprudential trajectory that culminated in Lochner v. New York (1905) and the so-called laissez-faire era of U.S. constitutional law. Constitutional protection of property required that regulation preserve the value of the regulated business. This article builds on Siegel (1984) to argue that, by selecting, as in Smyth v. Ames (1898), reproduction cost as the correct technique to calculate the value of a railway, the US Supreme Court retained its allegiance to the fundamental tenets of classical political economy even in a period of massive economic transformation, when classical analysis was widely deemed unable to account for the new reality of US industrial life.