The Unfolding of American Labor Law: Judges, Workers and Public Policy across Two Political Generations, 1790-1850, by Jeffrey Kahana. LFB Scholarly Publishing, El Paso, TX, 2014, 350 pp., ISBN: 978-1-59332-580-0, $85.00, hardback.

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-828
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Scholarly Publishing ◽  
Political Generations ◽  
American Labor

scholarly journals A Call out of Seir: The Meaning and Future of US Labor Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Divide And Conquer ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Current Century ◽  
American Labor

The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.

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