The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations

Interwar America's Dangerous Experiment in Social Control

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Av Ben Merriman, Ben (University of Kansas) Merriman

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The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, founded in 1920, was the lone US trial of a labor court - a policy design used almost everywhere else in the industrialized world during the interwar period. What led Kansas to establish the KCIR when no other state did? And what were the consequences of its existence for the development of economic policy in the rest of the country? Ben Merriman explores how the KCIR's bans on strikes and lockouts, heavy criminal sanctions, and unilateral control over the material terms of economic life, resulted in America's closest practical encounter with fascism. Battered by the Supreme Court in 1923, the KCIR's failure destroyed American interest in labor courts. But the legal battles and policy divisions about the KCIR, which enjoyed powerful supporters, were an early sign of the new political and intellectual alignments that led to America's unique New Deal labor policy.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-08-14
Mått157 x 235 x 20 mm
Vikt496 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCambridge Studies in Historical Sociology
Antal sidor264
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781009665278

Tillhör följande kategorier

Sociologi inom Samhalle och politik
Rättshistoria inom Juridik
Politik och statsskick inom Samhalle och politik
Arbetsrätt inom Juridik
Offentlig förvaltning inom Juridik

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