Welke, "Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life, by Barbara Young Welke (University of Minnesota). A description from the Press:

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry–branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke’s loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document—with its literal meaning, “the course of life”—had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children’s and families’ lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

A sampling of advance praise:

“What a profound, heart-rending, heart-healing work of history! But Writing with Fire transcends history. It is at once a landmark account of the way institutions shaped the lives of ordinary people in the twentieth-century US and an offering of searing, intimate stories of grief and those who have summoned the strength to go on living. Welke has wrought something entirely unique: a scholarly tour de force, a moving memoir, and a literary masterpiece.” -- Dan Bouk

“A brilliant and exquisitely rendered work of history, Writing with Fire is also a revelatory exploration of love, loss, and the creation of meaning. Welke braids together three stories whose juxtaposition powerfully testifies to the inseparability of our intellectual and intimate lives. This study of life-altering tragedy and its contributions to human knowledge is a gentle, wrenching masterpiece that changed how I see the world.” -- Serena Mayeri

“From events that barely made it into one-inch news stories, from academic developments scarcely acknowledged, and from her own grief at the death of her young daughter, Welke spins a profound, eloquent, and brave narrative that enables us to comprehend lives not our own―and also our own. Writing with Fire is an important history, which deploys the creative research skills of the legal historian and the journalistic skills of the oral historian to make a remarkable literary narrative that changed my mind about how history can be written.” -- Linda K. Kerber

“Writing with Fire is a remarkable book, scrupulously scholarly and highly personal, objectively rational and deeply emotional. Welke has braided three strands of contemporary life, difficult, even impossible, to contemplate: the maiming and death of children in fire; the death of her own child and her response to that death; and the course of twentieth-century professional life, which has come to define the contemporary academy and dictate the disciplined subjectivities deemed appropriate to its purposes. Placed amongst those purposes, Welke’s book seems strange, even awkward. How can these strands of life, these emotions, these realities, belong among the discourses of dispassion and data we have been taught to practice? In fact, our estrangement is Welke’s greatest achievement. There are no neat resolutions here, no tidy explanations of lives damaged or destroyed while worlds spin on regardless. But as the fragile strands she presents for our inspection entwine, and if we are patient, perhaps a new and different sensibility will awaken, in which unspeakable pain can yet become knowledge for those who remain.” -- Christopher Tomlins 

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

-- Karen Tani  

CFP: Regulating the Global Movement of Care

 [We have the following CFP.  DRE]

W G Hart Workshop 2025: Regulating the Global Movement of Care.  Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London.  11-12 June 2025

We invite abstracts (of 250-300 words) for the 2025 W G Hart Workshop focusing on the role of law in regulating the global movement of care. Given the historical and contemporary significance of the issue of the movement of carers, we welcome abstracts that explore the legal regulation of care (including comparative and international aspects) through the lens of a variety of disciplines: law, history, anthropology, politics, sociology, criminology, and creative arts.

The Workshop is organised around four themes - precarity, advocacy, protection, and kinship networks (see below) - reflecting the varied facets through which law's role in regulating the movement of care can be examined. Care is broadly defined and includes healthcare, social care, domestic care, as well as unpaid care. Legal requirements often create precarity by imposing stringent professional regulatory standards on migrant care workers or permitting the claw back of visa fees. Law may also be a tool in the hands of carers and individuals and organisations who support them to battle against exploitation. Legal regulation may, in some instance, offer protection to migrant care workers. Law, in particular immigration requirements, can also define relationships between migrant carers and their broader kinship networks both in their host countries and in the countries that they come from.

Abstracts should be emailed to adrienne.yong@city.ac.uk and p.saksena@leeds.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday, 6 January 2025. Please also include a brief biography of the speaker in the submission. Further details on the workshop themes are included below.

Academic Directors:

Dr Adrienne Yong (City St George's, University of London)
Dr Priyasha Saksena (University of Leeds)
Dr Amanda Spalding (University of Leeds)
Dr Amrita Limbu (University of Leeds)
Professor Marie-Andrée Jacob (University of Leeds)

More after the jump.

Friedman on Work Accidents

Lawrence M. Friedman, Stanford Law School, has published Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts in the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal.  The acts are Farwell, workers compensation statutes, and their administration.  An admirably compact essay, by the master.  And, while we're on the subject, we recently viewed this, which was part of the exhibit, American Art: The Stories We Carry, at the Seattle Art Museum.

--Dan Ernst

BHC Prizes to Con Díaz and Canaday

Several prizes of interest to legal historians were awarded at the just-concluded Business History Conference.  One was the Anne Fleming Article Prize, awarded jointly ever other year jointly with the American Society for Legal History “to the author or authors of the best article published in the previous two years in either Law and History Review or Enterprise and Society on the relation of law and business/economy in any region or historical period.”  This year’s recipient is Gerardo Con Díaz, Yale University, for Patent Law and the Materiality of Inventions in the California Oil Industry: The Story of Halliburton v. Walker, 1935–1946, published in Enterprise and Society:

This article examines a patenting conflict between the Halliburton Oil Well and Cementing Company and an independent inventor named Cranford Walker. It argues that Halliburton’s effort to lower the barriers to entry into the oil well depth measurement industry facilitated the re-emergence of materiality as a pre-condition for the patent eligibility of inventive processes. In 1941, Walker sued Halliburton for infringement of three of his patents, and Halliburton responded with an aggressive defense aimed at invalidating them. Over the next five years, the courts handling this conflict adopted very narrow legal theories developed during the Second Industrial Revolution to assess the patent eligibility of inventions that involved mental steps—processes such as mathematical computations, which people can perform in their minds. The resulting legal precedent cleared the path for Halliburton’s short-term industrial goals and continued to shape patent law for the rest of the century.

The BHC’s Hagley Prize in Business History, "for the best book in business history, broadly defined," went to Margot Canaday, Princeton University, for Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America:

Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.

Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of “don’t ask / don’t tell”: in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century’s end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism.

Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

Other prize winners and honorable mentions, many for scholarship of interest to legal historians, are here.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: SB

Weekend Roundup

• We note the passing of the constitutional historian Herman Belz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. 
  

• Eric Foner reviews Dylan C. Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (NYRB). 
  

• New online in the American Journal of Legal History: Alexander Hamilton's Constitutional Jurisprudence and the Bank Bill by Peter Charles Hoffer.

• 

  Melville Fuller (LC)
  

  "On April 11, 2024, at 6:15 pm, the [Supreme Court Historical] Society and Dacor-Bacon House Foundation will co-host a lecture on Chief Justice Melville Fuller with author Douglas Rooks, [who will speak on the Insular Cases.]  The event will be held at the historic Dacor-Bacon House in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC. Tickets are $35 to attend in person and $10 to attend virtually."  Register here.
  

• Congratulations to Gerard N. Magliocca, the Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, upon his naming as a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. 
  

• Brandon Terry, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, delivered the inaugural Catharine Wells Memorial Lecture in Jurisprudence at the Boston College Law School on February 26.  Professor Terry drew upon his book, The Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement: Political Theory and the Historical Imagination.

• ICYMI: UC Berkeley student brings to light stories of LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII  (Berkeley Library).  Library archives uncover long-lost history of Colorado women dying trying to get an abortion (CPR).  “Women’s Work” Powers the Economy—And Has Always Been Undervalued (Time).
  

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• 

  Edward Garrison Draper (Dartmouth College)
  

  “The Supreme Court of Maryland will hold a Special Session on October 26, 2023 for the posthumous bar admission of Edward Garrison Draper, the earliest known individual found fully qualified to practice law in Maryland, but who was denied the privilege of doing so based on his race.”  The Court is acting when, at its invitation, “Hon. John G. Browning, retired Justice of Texas’ Fifth Court of Appeals, Maryland attorney Domonique A. Flowers, and University of Baltimore School of Law Professor José F. Anderson filed a petition for Mr. Draper’s posthumous admission.”  Judge Browning had previously published “To Fight the Battle, First You Need Warriors: Edward Garrison Draper, Everett Waring, and the Quest for Maryland's First Black Lawyer” in the University of Baltimore Law Forum.  More here and in Bloomberg Law. 
  

• Martin J. Siegel, formerly a law clerk to Irving Robert Kaufman, will speak on his book, Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs at the University of Akron’s Center for Constitutional Law, directed by Tracy Thomas, on September 12 at noon in Room 180 at the Center.  Registration is not  required and the lecture is free and open to the public.  (Akron Legal News)
  

• On Thursday, September 14th, 2023, at 3 p.m. EDT, the Law Library of Congress will host its Constitution Day event, a discussion by University at Buffalo School of Law Professor Samantha Barbas of her book Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan.  Register here.

• "In the latest edition of the [University of Pennsylvania’s] 60-Second Lectures series, Sarah Barringer Gordon, the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History, discusses whether the U.S. Constitution is too old." Monday, September 18, 2023, 11:50 a.m., Benjamin Franklin Statue.
  

• Jack Goldsmith, HLS, interviews Samuel Moyn, YLS, on Moyn's Liberalism against Itself (Lawfare).
  

• On Wednesday, September 13, at 2 pm ET, at the FDR Library and Museum, Education Specialist Jeffrey Urbin will lecture on The Power of Employment: Jobs in the Roosevelt Administration.
  

• Five Ohio universities will receive “state funding for the creation of a civics center specifically focused on American constitutional history” (Miami Student).
  

•  The Law & Society Association has issued its Call for Submissions for its 2024 Annual Meeting to be held at the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center, June 6-9.  The theme is "Unsettling Territories: Tradition and Revolution in Law and Society."  The deadline for submissions is October 24, 2023.

• The July/August 2023 issue of the Archival Outlook (published by the Society of American Archivists) includes "three cases studies on Japanese American incarceree records from World War II."
  

• ICYMI: Alabama Cherishes Its History of Defying the Federal Courts (NYT).  US has a long history of state lawmakers silencing elected Black officials (Times-Union). 
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• Two law schools have recently noted publications by legal historians: NYU Law has a notice of Noah Rosenblum’s Columbia Law Review article, “The Antifascist Roots of Presidential Administration,” and Georgetown Law notes Brad Snyder’s Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment." 
  

• On Wednesday, January 18, at 6 p.m., the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History and Civics will host three former Solicitors General (Clement, Verrilli, and Francisco) in conversation “on the U.S. Supreme Court’s history and founding under the leadership of the country’s first Chief Justice, John Marshall, as well as drawing comparisons between then and now” (More.)
  

• The National Constitution Center has posted The History of the Speaker of the House, a discussion, moderated by Jeffrey Rosen, by Matthew Green and Josh Chafetz.  They discuss “the role and the history of this powerful constitutional office” and “some of the most notable Speakers throughout history, from Henry Clay to Joe Cannon to Nancy Pelosi,
  

• Until January 31, the most-read essays of 2022 from Labor, the journal of the Labor and Working-Class history Association, are available open access.  Most are from a symposium on sexual harassment.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society just posted to YouTube a recording of Scott Gerber’s lecture, Historical Origins of an Independent Federal Judiciary. 
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society is hosting a virtual conversation with the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown about her book, Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas, at 7:00 p.m. (ET) on January 25, 2023
  

• ICYMI: be sure to check out The Steelyard, Hansard Merchants, and a “Misliving” Singlewoman in Late Medieval London, by Sara M. Butler, over at Legal History Miscellany.
  

• We were very impressed by and grateful for the career of Elizabeth Pugh, who, after a 44-year career in government service, has recently retired as general counsel of the Library of Congress (LAW360 Pulse).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History blogger.

Barrett on RBG and the Dumbbell-Lifting Case

John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law, has posted Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Litigating Against Gender Discrimination...and Remembering One Such New York Case, which appears in 16 Judicial Notice 51-61 (2021).

RBG (LC)

This tribute to Justice Ginsburg, published by the Historical Society of the New York Courts, focuses on her New York State ties and activities.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born and raised in Brooklyn and graduated from Cornell University and, later, Columbia Law School. She became a New York lawyer and, in time, a law professor at Columbia and, in 1972, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project.

From her ACLU base in New York City, Professor Ginsburg litigated pathmaking cases regarding the equal rights of women and men. She participated in thirty-four cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, including presenting oral arguments to the Justices in six cases.

This article describes that history, and also Ginsburg’s participation in one New York City gender discrimination case that went up to the New York Court of Appeals, the State’s high court, but not, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the national ACLU’s New York City affiliate, brought this case, Sontag v. Bronstein. It concerned a dumbbell-lifting test that New York City’s civil service commission imposed as a job qualification on two women who were school audio-visual aides; because they failed the weight-lifting test, the City moved to dismiss them from their jobs. They sued, claiming gender discrimination. Their lead attorney was NYCLU lawyer Eve Cary. Joining her on the brief in the New York Court of Appeals was then-Professor Ginsburg. They won—the dumbbell test was sexist government harassment of women, not a bona fide job test.

Justice Ginsburg always remembered the Sontag case, its striking facts, and Eve Cary’s powerful brief. Justice Ginsburg kept that brief close at hand, including as she wrote the Supreme Court’s 1996 landmark gender equality decision, United States v. Virginia. In many senses, that decision was a culmination of the constitutional lawyering that Cary, Ginsburg, and their NYCLU and ACLU colleagues had done, including in Sontag, two decades earlier.

--Dan Ernst

Witt Reviews Holdren's "Injury Impoverished"

John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, has posted Radical Histories/Liberal Histories in Work Injury Law, a review forthcoming in the American Journal of Legal History of Nate Holdren’s Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era:

Nate Holdren has written a brilliant, impassioned, and intellectually stimulating book on the legal history of industrial accidents. According to Holdren, work injuries were at their core a form of labor exploitation. He describes the law of work accidents as a machinery of injustice that bolstered the legitimacy of a violent and inhuman capitalist system. He fiercely critiques the workers’ compensation reforms enacted by progressive reformers a century ago as legitimating a form of systematic labor violence. He insists on recognizing and attending to the dignity of each accident victim, both in the content of his argument and as a matter of literary form. Injury Impoverished is a welcome if unsettling rebuke to complacent accounts of the field, perhaps my own among them. But Holdren’s analysis also raises many questions. Holdren attributes little value to the dramatically safer workplaces of the middle of the twentieth century. His cautious admiration for the litigation system of the years before workers’ compensation rests on a fantastical conception of the way 19th-century tort law actually worked. He calls for an impossibly demanding form of "justice as recognition" from the law. He misses the ways in which workers co-opted new forms of accident law and turned them to their own interests. And his single-minded focus on commodification and the point of production leads him to discount the surrounding political and legal institutions that shaped the social meaning of work injuries.

--Dan Ernst

Barzun on MacKinnon

Charles L. Barzun, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Catharine MacKinnon and the Common Law:

Few scholars have influenced an area of law more profoundly than Catharine MacKinnon. In Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), MacKinnon virtually invented the law of sexual harassment by arguing that it constitutes a form of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Her argument was in some ways quite radical. She argued, in effect, that sexual harassment was not what it appeared to be. Behavior that judges at the time had thought was explained by the particular desires (and lack thereof) of individuals was better understood as a form of social domination of women by men. Judges, she argued, had failed to see that such conduct was a form of oppression because the social and legal categories through which they interpreted it was itself the product of male power.

This argument is not your typical legal argument. It may not even seem like a legal argument at all. But this article explains why on one, but only one, model of legal reasoning, MacKinnon’s argument properly qualifies as a form of legal reasoning. Neither the rationalist nor the empiricist tradition of common-law adjudication can explain the rational force of her argument. But a third, holistic tradition of the common law captures its logic well. It does so because, like MacKinnon’s argument (but unlike the other two traditions), it treats judgments of fact and value as interdependent. This structural compatibility between MacKinnon’s argument about gender oppression, on the one hand, and the holistic tradition of the common law, on the other, has theoretical and practical implications. It not only tells us something about the nature of law; it also suggests that critical theorists (like MacKinnon) may have more resources within the common law tradition to make arguments in court than has been assumed.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• LaborOnline, the blog of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, has been hosting a symposium, introduced by Eileen Boris, on recent LHB Guest Blogger Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era.

•  Catch the latest Legal History Podcast: Philip Thai discusses his book, The War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast with Siobhan Barco. We announced the book here. 

• Over at Strict Scrutiny, Adam Cohen is interviewed about his book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck.

• The deadline for applying to the previously announced constitutional history seminar with Josh Chafetz and David Pozen has been extended to September 9.

• The 13th annual Court History and Continuing Legal Education Symposium, “An Election Fraud Case for the Ages: U.S. v. Aczel,” will take place in a virtual session Friday, Nov. 20 from 4 to 5 p.m.  Journalist Sasha Issenberg will explore the story behind U.S. v. Aczel, a trial in federal court of the mayor, chief of police, and other prominent officials in Terre Haute, Indiana, for voter suppression in 1914.  More.

• ICYMI: Martha Jones's search to find out if her grandmother voted (NYT), and Felice Batlan discovers that her great-grandmother lost her US citizenship under the Expatriation Act of 1907 (WaPo).  Garrett Epps on birthright citizenship and Kamala Harris (The Atlantic).

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Holdren’s First Post -- My book and my plans for future posts

I want to thank the editors of the Legal History Blog for having me as a guest blogger. It’s an honor and I’m delighted to have my words on here. As Professor Tani mentioned in her introduction, I recently published a book and I want to tell you about it.

My book is called Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. It's my first book and is based on my dissertation. I think of the book as a study in the intellectual life of governance - how power relationships are conceptualized, mostly by powerful people, and what concepts are implied within power relationships, whether or not anyone actually thought them explicitly. In my view, inquiry is enriched by emphasis on both of these facets, the actual thoughts of people and the implicit logics enacted within institutional practices. I’m aware that this all sounds pretty abstract. In addition to talking about abstract matters, I also tried to foreground the real human beings who died, suffered, and lived despite all the harms to which working-class people are subjected. In my view, that dying and suffering was (and still is) largely organized by the kinds of abstractions I talk about in the book.

Weekend Roundup

•  Over at Jotwell, Deborah Dinner has a notice of Nate Holdren's  forthcoming Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press).

• “Katrina Jagodinsky will use a three-year, $460,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how habeas corpus was used in the American West by various marginalized groups to claim freedom and establish their rights between 1812 and 1924.”  More.

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “The Work of Some Irresponsible Women”: Jurors, Ghosts, and Embracery in the Irish Free State," by Mark Coen.  “This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934.”

• Ronald K.L. Collins has posted Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Fight for the Free Press: When Benjamin Franklin’s Grandson was Jailed for Critiquing His President (Part I), over at First Amendment Watch.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York State Courts is a post summarizing John Oller’s article, forthcoming in Judicial Notice, entitled “George Wickersham: ‘The Scourge of Wall Street.’”  The video of the Society’s webinar, "Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic," is here; its video, "The Evolution of Slavery, Abolition in NY, and the NY Courts: The Lemmon Slave Case," is here.

• ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen on The Lessons of the Great Depression (The Atlantic)  David Bernstein on administrative constitutionalism (Volokh Conspiracy).  Transcribing manuscripts as a productive escape from pandemic blues (WaPo).

• Sadly but not surprisingly, the Law Books course at Rare Books School, taught by Mike Widener (assisted by Ryan Greenwood) has been cancelled for summer 2020. 

• If you're not already zoomed out: Fridays at 6pm Eastern Time is Drinking with Historians, hosted by Matt Gabriele (Virginia Tech) and Varsha Venkatsubramanian (UC-Berkeley) and with a different guest each week. Registration is here.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

O’Donnell's "Inventing Unemployment"

Anthony O’Donnell, Senior Lecturer in Law, La Trobe University, Melbourne, has published Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia (Hart):

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time?

Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships.

In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the 'gig economy' are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define 'unemployment' and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of 'unemployment', rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of 'employment'.

–Dan Ernst

Galer on Disability Rights activism in Canada

Out with the University of Toronto Press is Working Towards Equity: Disability Rights Activism and Employment in Late Twentieth-Century Canada by Dustin Galer, personal historian and founder of MyHistorian.com. From the publisher: 

In Working towards Equity, Dustin Galer argues that paid work significantly shaped the experience of disability during the late twentieth century. Using a critical analysis of disability in archival records, personal collections, government publications and a series of interviews, Galer demonstrates how demands for greater access among disabled people for paid employment stimulated the development of a new discourse of disability in Canada. Family advocates helped people living in institutions move out into the community as rehabilitation professionals played an increasingly critical role in the lives of working-age adults with disabilities. Meanwhile, civil rights activists crafted a new consumer-led vision of social and economic integration. Employment was, and remains, a central component in disabled peoples' efforts to become productive, autonomous and financially secure members of Canadian society. Working towards Equity offers new in-depth analysis on rights activism as it relates to employment, sheltered workshops, deinstitutionalization and labour markets in the contemporary context in Canada.

Praise for the book:

"This is an ambitious and largely successful book. It deserves a wide readership because of its potential to expand the historiography about work, rights and rights movements, and policy (federal and provincial) – in the style of the new disability history – by bringing a disability analysis to bear on these topics." -Jason Ellis

"Working towards Equity makes a notable and worthwhile contribution to the field of disability studies as well as to social policy, labour history, and social movement activism studies in Canada. The illustrations and photographs are terrific features helping to bring alive the history, making it both personal and political." -Michael J. Prince

"Working towards Equity draws from a broad array of sources, including archived manuscript collections, documentary films, interviews, government reports, and published monographs and articles. Filling a significant gap in the historiography of disability rights, employment, and labour, this study makes a significant contribution to twentieth-century social and cultural history." -Michael Rembi 

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi