Synopses & Reviews
Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American "individualism." In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe's labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor's outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.
Review
This work is nothing less than a full-scale reinterpretation of the making of American pure-and-simple unionism. Forbath's book is certain to provoke lively and health-giving debate; it will be required reading for all students of American labor history. David Brody, University of California, Davis
Review
In this admirable synthesis of legal and social history, Forbath reconstructs in brilliant detail the bitter drama of the most violent years of U.S. labor relations, the era of the labor injunction...It effectively replaces Frankfurter and Greene's classic of 1930 on labor injunctions as the standard work on the subject. Robert W. Gordon, School of Law, Stanford University
Review
A very distinguished work...Forbath derives bold and original conclusions...and is sensitive to the political and social context in which law functions...His book is right and relevant today. Lance Liebman, Harvard Law School
Synopsis
In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, Forbath challenges the notion of American "individualism." He shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial in reshaping labor's outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.
About the Author
William E. Forbath is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair at the University of Texas School of Law.
University of Texas at Austin School of Law
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Broad Contexts Recasting American "Exceptionalism" The State of Courts and Parties
2. Judicial Review in Labor's Political Culture
Samuel Gompers and in Jacobs
Hours Laws in Illinois
Hours Laws in Colorado
Pressed toward a Minimalist Politics
3. Government by Injunction
The Origins and Dimensions of Government by Injunction
The Origins of Governmentby Injunction in Railway Strikes
The Rise and Repression of City-Wide Boycotts
4. Semi-Outlawry
The Usurpation of Local Polities Courts and the Uses of Police, Guards and Troops
Labor's Resort to Injunctions
5. The Language of the Law and the Remaking of Labor's
Rights Consciousness
"Labor's Whole Gospel Is Liberty of Contract"
Labor's Constitution
A Great Popular Defiance
Anti-Injunction Laws before Norris-LaGuardia
The Norris-LaGuardia Act
Conclusion
Appendix A: Labor Legislation in the Courts, 1885-1930
Appendix B: Approximating the Numbers of Labor Injunctions and Their Relation to Other Strike Statistics, 1880-1930
Appendix C: Judicial Treatment of Statutes Seeking to Protect Union Organizing and Action by Revising Equity and Common Law Doctrine
Index