 Especially within the judicial branch, many judges seemed to hold an unalloyed Lockean view that nothing should be done to disturb individual rights in property.As a result, conservative courts consistently restricted both state legislatures and the Congress in their efforts to put through reform measures such as wages and work-hours laws, factory safety measures, rate regulation of public utilities, and progressive taxation of income.This changed during the Great Depression, when the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed many of these reforms at the federal level.