GR 22008; (November, 1924) (CRITIQUE)
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THE AI-ASSISTED CRITIQUE
The Court’s reliance on broad, historical definitions of police power to invalidate the maternity leave statute is analytically flawed. While correctly citing authorities like Commonwealth v. Alger and Cooley, the opinion uses these definitions not as a flexible framework for a modern industrial society but as a rigid boundary, concluding that the mandate to pay wages during a voluntary leave constitutes a “taking of property” without due process. This reasoning improperly conflates a regulatory condition on operating a business—a classic police power exercise—with a compensable appropriation of private property. The Court’s assertion that the law forces an employer to “pay for services not rendered” ignores the established principle that health and welfare regulations can impose incidental financial burdens to achieve a public good, such as protecting maternal health and ensuring the welfare of future citizens. By elevating the employer’s contractual liberty and property interest above the state’s interest in public health, the decision adopts an anachronistic, ***Lochner*-era substantive due process analysis that was already being questioned in American jurisprudence by 1924.

The decision’s narrow conception of the state’s interest is its central weakness. The Court acknowledges the “praiseworthy purpose” of the law but dismisses its connection to public health, safety, and morals as too attenuated, framing it instead as a purely private welfare measure. This artificial separation is untenable; the health of pregnant women laborers and their newborn children is a direct concern of the state’s parens patriae authority and has a clear nexus to a healthy workforce and populace. The opinion fails to engage with the compelling state interest in preventing the economic desperation that could force women to work immediately before and after childbirth, thereby endangering themselves and their infants. By not weighing this significant public interest against the modest, fixed financial imposition on employers, the Court applied an unreasonably strict scrutiny. It effectively required the law to be a direct prevention of an immediate physical hazard, rather than recognizing the legislature’s prerogative to adopt comprehensive social welfare measures as a prophylactic safeguard for the community’s long-term well-being.

Ultimately, the ruling in People v. Pomar represents a judicial overreach that substituted its own economic policy judgment for that of the legislature, contravening the principle of judicial restraint in police power cases. The Court imposed a definition of reasonableness that was static and unduly restrictive for an evolving society, ignoring the “constant growth of public opinion” it itself cited. The law was a reasonable exercise of discretion to address a specific, harmful condition in industrial employment—the lack of security for pregnant workers. The penalty for violation was a fine, not a forced gift, aligning with typical regulatory sanctions. By invalidating the statute, the Court enshrined a libertarian contract doctrine that hindered progressive labor legislation and left a vulnerable class without protection, a stance later Philippine jurisprudence would rightly overturn as it developed a more robust and compassionate understanding of the state’s police power** to regulate economic relations for the common good.