A Strike and its Legal Consequences -- An Examination of the Receivership Precedent for the Labor Injunction

Abstract

THE study from which this paper proceeds is an attempt to understand the labor injunction in the light of its comparatively brief history. The questions of labor law are indissociable from the question of what Madison called "the most difficult of all political arrangements"-that of so adjusting the conflicting claims of those with and those without property "as to give security to each and to promote the welfare of all." To deal with them on the basis only of what is contained in law books is to miss many factors which have influenced the judgments both of courts and of their critics. Those factors include conditions and events, personalities, faiths cherished with uncritical devotion, and a vast complex of forces of interest and desire among which genuine desire for social harmony, though it tends always to abdicate its vague power as mediator and to trust in the benevolence after victory of one or the other of the major protagonists in social conflict, may not be so negligible as contemporary disillusion inclines to assume.