Legislative Facts in Grutter v. Bollinger

In 1924, Henry Wolf Bikle, a Philadelphia lawyer who also taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for twenty-eight years, published a pioneering article to show that the constitutional validity of legislative action often depended on generalizations about social, economic, political, scientific, medical, or psychological matters that reviewing courts, particularly the United States Supreme Court, accepted as true. One of the examples Bikle gave was the Lochner case, in which the Supreme Court held that a state law limiting the hours worked in bakeshops had "no substantial relation to the promotion of the public health."