By David E. Bernstein, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., and London, 194 pages, $45

The book “Rehabilitating Lochner” is about a U.S. Supreme Court decision that generations of lawyers and law students have been taught to scorn as the imposition of obsolete economic dogma disguised as constitutional principle. Commentators have gone so far as to group the case with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), as examples of how badly judicial thinking can go astray.