Law Commons^™

Constitutional Clash: Labor, Capital, And Democracy, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

In the last few years, workers have engaged in organizing and strike activity at levels not seen in decades; state and local legislators have enacted innovative workplace and social welfare legislation; and the National Labor Relations Board has advanced ambitious new interpretations of its governing statute. Viewed collectively, these efforts — “labor’s” efforts for short — seek not only to redefine the contours of labor law. They also present an incipient challenge to our constitutional order. If realized, labor’s vision would extend democratic values, including freedom of speech and association, into the putatively private domain of the workplace. It would …

Union Rights For All: Toward Sectoral Bargaining In The United States, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

American labor unions have collapsed. Having once bargained for more than a third of American workers, unions now represent only about 6 percent of the private sector workforce. In the wake of new statutory and constitutional limitations, their presence in the public sector is shrinking as well.

People As Resources: Recruitment And Reciprocity In The Freedom-Promoting Approach To Property, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Theorists usually explain and evaluate property regimes either through the lens of economics or by conceptions of personhood. This Article argues that the two approaches are intertwined in a way that is usually overlooked. Property law both facilitates the efficient use and allocation of scarce resources and recognizes and protects aspects of personhood. It must do both, because human beings are both resources for one another and the persons whose moral importance the legal system seeks to protect. This Article explores how property law has addressed this paradox in the past and how it might in the future.

Two bodies …