Business Myths, Lawyerly Strategies, and Social Context: Ernst on Labor Law History

Abstract

As any reader of Law and Social Inquiry undoubtedly knows, over the past 40 years, American legal historians have increasingly scrutinized the changing relationship between law and society. An improved understanding of the historical effect of law on American workers has been one product of this effort. Since the mid-1980s, landmark studies by Christopher Tomlins (1993), William Forbath (1991), Victoria Hattam (1993), and Karen Orren (1991) have illuminated the historical interactions of courts, workers, and employers. With the recent publication of Daniel Ernst's Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism, an examination of the people, institutions, and ideals that transformed the law of industrial relations between 1900 and 1919, this disciplinary strength shows no signs of flagging. The methodological backdrop for Lawyers against Labor is the struggle to analyze courts and cases while moving beyond canned conceptions of social relations. Toward this end, Ernst writes three histories. First, he presents a rich institutional history of the American Anti-Boycott Association (AABA), an organization deeply involved in early-twentieth-century