Labor law in America

About this book

Labor history and legal history have traditionally stood as separate disciplines. But recent scholarship has suggested the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach. In Labor Law in America Christopher L. Tomlins and Andrew J. King bring together eleven leading scholars to explore more completely than any previously published work the range of labor's legal experience in America. The contributors present new findings on topics ranging from the beginnings of wage labor in colonial America to the battered conditions of unions in the late twentieth century, from the stirrings of organization among journeymen in the early republic through battles over unemployment relief and labor standards in the Depression. They chart the "strange career" of master and servant law during the nineteenth century, the criminalization of vagrancy in the name of free contract, and the implications of constitutional structure and judicial ascendancy for labor strategy. They throw old interpretations into sharp relief by changing our perspectives on familiar topics - pointing out, for example, the impeccably republican reasoning behind antebellum criminal-conspiracy prosecutions or underlining the racial and gender exclusiveness of free-labor ideology. Labor Law in America amply demonstrates that labor law history is emerging as one of the most rewarding ways to understand the interaction of law, state, and society.