The story of how the advocacy of workers and labor unions and a monumental shift on the Supreme Court paved the way for fair labor standards in the United States.The eight-hour day. The five-day work week. Minimum wage. Time-and-a-half overtime pay. Prohibition of oppressive child labor.Today we take these features of employment for granted, but they are the result of a long, difficult, and often violent struggle for workplace protections that culminated in...

Finalist: Langum Prize in American Legal HistoryChild labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The b...

In the depths of the Great Depression, when foreclosure rates skyrocketed across the United States, more than two dozen states passed mortgage-extension or -adjustment laws to help farmers and homeowners keep their properties. One such statute in Minnesota led to the most important property law case of its time and still casts a long shadow upon constitutional debates and our own era's severe economic downturn.Fighting Foreclosure marks the first book-length study of the l...