Ben Merriman is Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Merriman is the author of Conservative Innovators: How States are Challenging Federal Power, as well as articles on political and administrative matters in the American Journal of Sociology, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, Politics & Society, and Theory & Society.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The court that failed; Part I. The KCIR in Kansas: 2. Progressivism without experts: the colonial legacy and the arc of reform in Kansas; 3. Making the KCIR: institutional design and political philosophy; 4. The lost legal promise and political failings of the KCIR; Part II. The KCIR in the World: 5. The KCIR in national public life: divided reception in a stalemated era; 6. No intellectual haven: legal and economic divisions over the KCIR; 7. The KCIR before the US Supreme Court: reversal and reaction; 8. Locking into liberalism: the defeat of the KCIR and America's turn away from international labor policy models; Afterword: Shall the 2020s be new lean years?; Appendix: The cases and investigations of the KCIR.

'Ben Merriman turns the collapsed shards of a brief and long-expired Kansas experiment in judge-led corporatism in the 1920s into a stunning review of the role of the state – both what it can do and what it cannot do – in workers' lives in the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting the high-minded but failed efforts of William L. Huggins with those of more successful industrial relations reformers like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, this book captures a dramatic political struggle; this is engaged legal history and political thought at its sophisticated best.' Leon Fink, Senior Research Associate, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University