Reuel Schiller,Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism

Abstract

Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Pp. xv + 343. $29.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-107-01226-4. Forging Rivals is a creative, comprehensively researched, eminently readable work that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the late twentieth-century American liberalism. Schiller is a professor of law at UC-Hastings, with degrees in Law and History from Virginia. This remarkable book is his first, although he has law-review articles on labor law, administrative law, and legal history going back into the late ‘1990s. Its subject is the long decay of the political alliance between organized labor and civil-rights advocates in San Francisco between the end of World War II and the early 1970s; although the book’s geographical scope is narrow, one of its greatest strengths is the way in which it effectively uses its fine-grained analysis of labor politics in one city to elucidate what may be the most important long-term change … amcevoy{at}swlaw.edu