In the 1907 case of St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company v. Taylor, Administratrix, the U.S Supreme Court was called upon to determine whether a state law that held railway companies liable for damages in cases where their employees were killed due to negligence or mismanagement was constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The plaintiff argued that her husband had been killed while working on one of the defendant’s trains because of its failure to provide safe equipment. The court ruled in favor of Mrs.Taylor (the administratrix), upholding Arkansas' Employers’ Liability Act which made employers responsible for injuries sustained by employees at work due to employer negligence. It concluded that such laws did not infringe upon an employer's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as they were within a state's power to regulate businesses for public welfare reasons.

In the dissenting opinion for the case of St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company v. Taylor, it was argued that there should be no distinction between a railway company's liability for injuries sustained by its employees while engaged in interstate commerce versus those involved in intrastate commerce. The dissenting justices believed that such differentiation was not supported by any logical or legal reasoning and only served to complicate matters unnecessarily. They maintained that if a railway company is negligent, leading to an employee's injury or death, it should bear responsibility regardless of whether the incident occurred during interstate or intrastate commerce activities. This perspective emphasized fairness and justice over technicalities related to jurisdictional boundaries within commercial operations.