Taking Stock: New Views of American Labor Law Between the World Wars

This Article provides an introduction to the symposium. This symposium originated in a session at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History held in Seattle in October 1998. Entitled Labor, Law, and the State in the Interwar Period, the panel provided four different views of a decisive period in the development of labor law in the United States. In the 1980s the panel\u27s chair, Katherine Van Wezel Stone, and commentator, Christopher L. Tomlins, published works that helped spark a modern revival in the historical study of U.S. labor law. The authors of the four papers presented at the session were more recent entrants into the field and had significantly different perspectives on their subject. As members of the audience quickly realized, the panel as a whole provided an excellent opportunity for taking stock, not only of labor law in the 1920s and 1930s, but also of how historians\u27 understanding of the role of the state in American labor relations has changed in recent years