When the historian charles beard wrote in 1913 that “[t]he Constitution was essentially an economic document,” he claimed too much. The founders intended the Constitution to protect many values, not just property rights. Nevertheless, property and contract rights ranked high among the rights that the Constitution was initially designed to safeguard. Prominent framers and ratifiers worried particularly about legislation excusing debtors from obligations to their creditors. They viewed such legislation as immoral because it violated the sanctity of promises and as imprudent because it discouraged commercial lending. (If the legislature could excuse promises to repay money, banks would be less willing to loan money in the first place.) Article I, Section 10 thus provides that “[n]o State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” The Fifth Amendment forbids the taking of “private property … for public use, without just compensation.”

Curiously, however, the Supreme Court's most important and sustained effort to protect economic liberties occurred under a provision of the Constitution that was not clearly designed to restrict substantive legislation at all – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”