The Schiller Backlist

Reuel Schiller

Reuel Schiller, Hastings Law, has posted some of his backlist on SSRN.  If you haven’t been reading Professor Schiller, here’s a chance to catch up.

An Unexpected Antagonist: Courts, Deregulation, and Conservative Judicial Ideology, 1980-94, in Making Legal History Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson, edited by Daniel J. Hulsebosch and R.B. Bernstein (New York University Press, 2013), 264-92

Group Rights to Individual Liberties: Post-War Labor Law, Liberalism, and the Waning Of Union Strength, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 20 (1999): 1-73

The Strawhorsemen of the Apocalypse: Relativism and the Historian as Expert Witness, Hastings Law Journal 49 (1998): 1169-77

Reining in the Administrative State: World War II and the Decline of Expert Administration, in Total War and the Law: The American Home Front in World War II, edited by Daniel R. Ernst & Victor Jew (Praeger, 2002), 185-206  Not available for download, but here's the abstract:

This article argues that World War II had a profound effect on the relationship between courts and the administrative state in the United States. Between 1940 and 1950, administrative law changed dramatically. During the 1930s, it allowed administrative agencies to function with a great deal of autonomy. By 1950, the judiciary had asserted considerably more control over the administrative state. There is a direct link between the United States’ involvement in World War II and this change. In particular, three aspects of the wartime experience caused changes in American political culture that, in turn, contributed to this transformation. First, America’s encounter with totalitarianism – both abroad and on the home front – diminished people’s trust in the administrative state, which they began to associate with the unchecked power of fascism. Second, the track record of the wartime agencies – particularly the War Production Board and the Office of Price Administration – did little to assure Americans that administrative power could be used in a manner that was both efficient and consistent with democratic principles. Finally, the prosperity the War created caused one-time advocates of the administrative state to question the value of economic planning and to refocus their attention on curing economic maladjustments through Keynesian fiscal policy rather than through administrative control of economic actors. Thus, by the end of the War there were few advocates of extreme administrative autonomy left. Ideological, political, and economic changes dictated that the judiciary be put firmly in control of the administrative state.

Singing the 'Right-to-Work Blues': The Politics of Race in the Campaign for 'Voluntary Unionism' in Post-War California, in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein & Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (University of Pennsylvania Press 2012)

This article tells the story of the failed attempt to pass a right-to-work proposition in California in 1958. In particular, it shows how right-to-work activists attempted to persuade African Americans to vote in favor of the proposition by portraying it as a fair employment practices measure. Because many California labor unions engaged in discriminatory practices, anti-union forces within the state thought they could tap into the hostility that many African Americans felt towards the labor movement. This strategy was unsuccessful. African Americans voted against the right-to-work proposition in overwhelming numbers. Nevertheless, the campaign exacerbated tensions in the tenuous political alliance between labor and the African American community. In the years that followed the proposition’s defeat, these tensions would undermine the political power of the labor movement, the African American community, and the Democratic Party.