Legal History Commons^™

Law, Labor, And The Hard Edge Of Progressivism: The Legal Repression Of Radical Unionism And The American Labor Movement's Long Decline, Ahmed White

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No abstract provided.

Its Own Dubious Battle: The Impossible Defense Of An Effective Right To Strike, Ahmed White

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One of the most important statutes ever enacted, the National Labor Relations Act envisaged the right to strike as the centerpiece of a system of labor law whose central aims included dramatically diminishing the pervasive exploitation and steep inequality that are endemic to modern capitalism. These goals have never been more relevant. But they have proved difficult to realize via the labor law, in large part because an effective right to strike has long been elusive, undermined by courts, Congress, the NLRB, and powerful elements of the business community. Recognizing this, labor scholars have made the restoration of the right …

Book Review, Ahmed White

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No abstract provided.

Criminal Labor Law, Benjamin Levin

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This Article examines a recent rise in civil suits brought against unions under criminal statutes. By looking at the long history of criminal regulation of labor, the Article argues that these suits represent an attack on the theoretical underpinnings of post-New Deal U.S. labor law and an attempt to revive a nineteenth century conception of unions as extortionate criminal conspiracies. The Article further argues that this criminal turn is reflective of a broader contemporary preference for finding criminal solutions to social and economic problems. In a moment of political gridlock, parties seeking regulation increasingly do so via criminal statute. In …

My Coworker, My Enemy: Solidarity, Workplace Control, And The Class Politics Of Title Vii, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

Workers Disarmed: The Campaign Against Mass Picketing And The Dilemma Of Liberal Labor Rights, Ahmed A. White

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In the late 1930s and early 1940s, mass picketing, characterized by large numbers of workers congregating in common protest at or near their employers' establishments, emerged as a crucial weapon in a historic campaign by American workers to realize basic labor rights and build an enduring labor movement in the face of strident resistance from a powerful business community. So potent a weapon did mass picketing prove that these business interests, aided by allies at all levels of government, moved quickly to ban the tactic. From the real-world complexities of labor conflict, this coalition forged a simplistic, analytically dubious, but …

American Gangsters: Rico, Criminal Syndicates, And Conspiracy Law As Market Control, Benjamin Levin

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In an effort to reexamine legal and political decisions about criminalization and the role of the criminal law in shaping American markets and social institutions, this Article explores the ways in which criminal conspiracy laws in the United States have historically been used to subdue nonstate actors and informal markets that threatened the hegemony of the state and formal market. To this end, the Article focuses primarily on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) as illustrative of broader trends in twentieth-century criminal policy. Enacted in 1970, RICO provides criminal sanctions for individuals engaged in unacceptable organized activities and …

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

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This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims of intimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth.

While the situation that gave rise to the battered women's movement in the 1970s is often presumed …

Blue-Collar Crime: Conspiracy, Organized Labor, And The Anti-Union Civil Rico Claim, Benjamin Levin

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This Article provides an historically-rooted analysis of a recent spate of civil RICO complaints arising from labor union organizing campaigns. The Article historicizes contemporary civil RICO suits against labor unions by analogizing to nineteenth century conspiracy prosecutions of unions. In tracing this history of organized labor’s social standing, the Article addresses the cultural framing of the union and its place in political and cultural discourse over the past century. The civil RICO complaints have received limited scholarly attention mainly focusing on issues of federal preemption; this Article argues for a broad reading of the cases as a way to understand …

Industrial Terrorism And The Unmaking Of New Deal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

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The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of "industrial terrorism." Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations …

The Depression Era Sit-Down Strikes And The Limits Of Liberal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

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This paper explores the history of sit-down strikes from the New Deal Era and beyond and traces their influence on the substance of modern labor law. It argues that, even as the sit-down strikes proved essential to the development of a meaningful system of labor rights, the strikes also had a very different effect. As this paper undertakes to demonstrate, legal and political attacks on labor rights that were originally aimed at the sit-down strikes metastasized into a more general campaign to prohibit a range of militant strike practices, even those bearing little outward resemblance to the original sit-down strikes. …

The Crime Of Economic Radicalism: Criminal Syndicalism Laws And The Industrial Workers Of The World, 1917-1927, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

Assessing Internal Revenue Code Section 132 After Twenty Years, Wayne M. Gazur

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In 1984, Congress enacted Internal Revenue Code section 132 to bring more certainty to the taxation of employee fringe benefits. This article examines the impact of the legislation from the standpoint of administrative pronouncements and taxpayer litigation. The article concludes that section 132 has produced little litigation, but primarily because it has played the role of increasing exclusions. It remains unclear whether section 132 has also contained the growth of new forms of nonstatutory fringe benefits.

A Different Kind Of Labor Law: Vagrancy Law And The Regulation Of Harvest Labor, 1913-1924, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

Mutiny, Shipboard Strikes, And The Supreme Court's Subversion Of New Deal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

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No abstract provided.

Presidential Exemption From Mandatory Retirement Of Members Of The Independent Regulatory Commissions, Harold H. Bruff

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No abstract provided.

Removal Of The Corporate Director During His Term Of Office, Arthur H. Travers Jr.

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The traditional rules governing the removal of corporate directors have evolved so as to insulate the board of directors from the shareholders who elect them. Professor Travers in his article examines initially the interests being advanced by protecting the board members from removal by their electorate. He then critically analyzes the law as it relates to these interests in order to suggest a more rational approach.