Still “Learning Something of Legislation”: The Judiciary in the History of Labor Law

Abstract

In the contemporary debate over the law's influence on the prospects of American labor, it seems to me that the naysayers have it. Labor lawyers will tell you that legal hostility to workers' collective action has for years sapped labor's strength,' and legal scholars agree;2 federal labor law bans outright many forms of collective action and makes union organizing enormously difficult. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), an elaborate legal regime that was supposed to protect the working class from the vicissi-