Christopher Tomlins
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 367974 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Christopher Tomlins |
| NOMBRES | Christopher |
| APELLIDO | Tomlins |
| FIRMA | TOMLINS C |
| AFILIACIONES | American Bar Foundation |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 102 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 159 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 100 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1979 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Progressive Imaginaire
This essay appraises Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution (2022). The book proposes that an examination of American history since the founding of the republic discloses a polity that, at least incipiently and thereafter occasionally explicitly, promised its members lives of material well-being sufficient to their responsibilities as citizens of a republic. The authors argue that this promise, which they dub “democr…
The State before the State
This essay is a critical appraisal of William Novak’s New Democracy, published in March 2022. A sequel to The People’s Welfare, published in 1996, New Democracy continues Novak’s revisionist account of American state building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the book draws attention to the years between the American Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression as the formative period of the American administrative–regu…
Coda
In this Coda to the symposium on my book In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History , I address the relationship in the book between law, history, and theory. Writing history informed by theory has always been important to me, for historical research is at least as much an engagement in interpretation as an exercise in description
A Call out of Seir
The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about th…
In the Matter of Nat Turner
In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. This book penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery a…
In the Matter of Nat Turner
A Poetics for Spatial Justice
With the ebb of the last half century’s linguistic/cultural turn, socio-legal and legal-humanist scholarship has begun to return to materiality. This article addresses the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and asks how they might be embodied in a philosophy of law that can address the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies. To attempt answers, the article turns to two fi…
The Oxford Handbook of Legal History
"Some of the most exciting, and innovative, legal scholarship over the past few decades has been driven by historical curiosity. This Handbook offers a fascinating compendium of methodological studies from the field of legal history."--From publisher
Vinel Symposium
Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought
Law As … IV
Is minor jurisprudence tallow or is it tar? Taking its cue from Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet’s ‘Damnation’s Cellar (1993), this introduction presents the idea of ‘minor jurisprudence’ as it was first proposed in the mid-1990s, and explores its current potential as discussed, developed, and applied in the essays in this issue of Law Text Culture. The introduction also presents the enterprise known as ‘Law As ...’ – a biennial symposium u…
Be Operational, or Disappear”
Considered as regimes of interpellation, history and law separately and jointly observe and insist upon realities often antagonistic to distinct realities that arise from their alternate incarnation as memory and right. Because it exists at the intersection of history and law, legal history has a responsibility to resolve, or at least reveal, these cross-purposes. This essay summarizes the development of the field of legal history and reviews the…
Bucking the Party Line
Intended as a short survey text, Kitty Calavita's Invitation to Law & Society expertly summarizes many of the central themes of law and society scholarship as they have developed over the past fifty years. It also clearly identifies the field's object of attention: “real” law. I use this commentary on the book as an opportunity to assess the field as it enters its sixth decade. How has the field changed? What are its defining characteristics? Wha…
A Companion to American Legal History
Journal Article A Companion to American Legal History Get access Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. xiv, 582 pp. $195.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1180–1181, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau017 Published: 01 March 2014
Animals Accurs’d
This essay comments on the three substantive articles comprising the University of Toronto Law Journal’s symposium on ferae naturae and the law of property. It argues that the articles collectively represent a reconsideration of the influential thesis developed by Robert Ellickson in Order without Law, that when members of any community resolve disputes arising in the course of some shared activity they are prone to do so in ways that avoid the c…
The State, the Unions, and the critical synthesis in labor law history
This article responds to Jean-Christian Vinel's assessment of the 'critical synthesis' whose proponents created labor law history as a new and flourishing field of scholarship in the decade after 1978. Vinel accords my book, The State and the Unions (1985) a key role in the development of this new field. Here, I situate my book in relation to the critical synthesis, and assess the capacity of critical legal scholarship to address the current parl…
Freedom Bound
What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm after Critique? Revisiting Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories”
For more than twenty-five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critica…
A Search for Sovereignty
A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 LauRen Benton Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010 xvi + 340 pp., ISBN: 978-0-521-70743-5 (£16.99) In wha
Freedom Bound
Freedom Bound is about the origins of modern America – a history of colonizing, work and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were pl…
The Strait Gate
For many years, history has furnished a conceptual and methodological standpoint, historicism, which scholars have employed to enter into engagements with law. But how do the exponents of historicism — whether conventional or critical — define that standpoint, and what is the nature of the object (the past) that their definitions isolate for contemplation? This essay seeks illumination through counterpoint — an exposition of Walter Benjamin's phi…
Transplants and Timing
This Article applies the concept of "legal transplant" to the slavery regimes that sprang up in all regions of settlement during the first two centuries of English colonization of mainland America. Using a distinction between "extrastructure" and "intrastructure," we can divide the Anglo-American law of slavery into discourses of explanation/justification and technologies of implementation. The two components were produced from distinct sources. …
The Cambridge History of Law in America
Necessities of State
Over the last fifteen years, legal historians have been exploring conceptualizations of the state and state capacity as phenomena of police . In this essay, I offer a genealogy of police in nineteenth-century American constitutional law. I examine relationships among several distinct strands of development: domestic regulatory law, notably the commerce power; the law of indigenous peoples and immigrants; and the law of territorial acquisition. I …
In This Issue
Framing the Field of Law's Disciplinary Encounters
In this article I address the historical interrelationship of law and social science. I explore the separation of "law" and "social science" during the later 19th century, examine their relationship over the next 50 years, and finally take up their more elaborate post-World War II interaction, culminating in the birth and development of the law and society movement. The narrative focuses on two realms of encounter, the intellectual and the instit…
A Search for Sovereignty
A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 LauRen Benton Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010 xvi + 340 pp., ISBN: 978-0-521-70743-5 (£16.99) In wha
The Fall of the House of Labor. The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism 1865-1925
AFL Unions in the 1930s
Journal Article AFL Unions in the 1930s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective Get access Christopher L. Tomlins Christopher L. Tomlins graduate student Department of History, the Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 65, Issue 4, March 1979, Pages 1021–1042, https://doi.org/10.2307/1894558 Published: 01 March 1979
Reconsidering Indentured Servitude
(2001). Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775. Labor History: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 5-43
How Autonomous Is Law
Socio-legal scholars forever debate whether law is the product of internally constructed rules, procedures, and rationales or an effect of external social forces and interests. Traditionally, the debate pitted formalists who defended law's actual autonomy against instrumentalists who claimed law was a creature of exogenous circumstance. The debate was transformed in the later twentieth century, first by fundamental refinements in Marxist theory t…
The Many Legalities of Early America
Legal historians were brought up short by Stanley Katz's 1984 essay “The Problem of a Colonial Legal History” (in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole's edited collection Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, 1984), in which he decried the field's limited scope and teleological tilt toward the American nation. As Christopher L. Tomlins, a coeditor of this volume, puts it, Katz argued that “colonial legal history ha…
A Mysterious Power
On 16 June 1837, at a little after six o'clock in the morning, a train of cars carrying lumber and gravel and crowded with twenty or more Irish track laborers and other workmen left the Boston depot of the Boston & Worcester Railroad Corporation bound for Worcester. About four miles out, just after the train had passed the City Mills and was nearing the Brookline road, a wheel on one of the cars broke. The train was thrown from the tracks. Two me…
The New Deal, Collective Bargaining, and the Triumph of Industrial Pluralism
This paper addresses what the author views as a prevailing misconception of labor law theorists and practitioners: that the goal of the Wagner Act was no more than the promotion of peaceful negotiating procedures and written agreements between organized interests-unions and employers-presumptively equal in power. The author argues that in fact the NLRA was drafted, and for a time implemented, with the avowed purpose of giving workers equality wit…
How who rides whom. Recent ‘new’ histories of American Labour law and what they may signify
Necessities of State
Over the last fifteen years, legal historians have been exploring conceptualizations of the state and state capacity as phenomena of police . In this essay, I offer a genealogy of police in nineteenth-century American constitutional law. I examine relationships among several distinct strands of development: domestic regulatory law, notably the commerce power; the law of indigenous peoples and immigrants; and the law of territorial acquisition. I …
Subordination, Authority, Law
In the first section of this essay I discuss alternative ways of interpreting an eighteenth-century anecdote about employment relations. This serves to introduce a series of arguments that advocate altering our conception of labor history (with special reference to American labor history) in ways that center it on the study of household relations. Asserting that law is the primary site upon which authoritative social relations are constituted, I …
What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm after Critique? Revisiting Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories”
For more than twenty-five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critica…
In This Issue
In a Wilderness of Tigers
This essay addresses the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland. Rather than narrate a familiar story of events--migration, settlement, the creation of viable Anglophone cultures amid hardship and danger--it pursues a less familiar track by examining the terms upon which English adventurers and their contemporaries understood the world they inhabited, the process of transatlantic expansion upon which they were engage…
Why Wait for Industrialism? Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America—An Historiographical Argument
The State, the Unions, and the critical synthesis in labor law history
This article responds to Jean-Christian Vinel's assessment of the 'critical synthesis' whose proponents created labor law history as a new and flourishing field of scholarship in the decade after 1978. Vinel accords my book, The State and the Unions (1985) a key role in the development of this new field. Here, I situate my book in relation to the critical synthesis, and assess the capacity of critical legal scholarship to address the current parl…
American Legal History in Retrospect and Prospect
Fifteen years ago, a decade after the appearance of his Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, Morton Horwitz was the keynote speaker at the American Society for Legal History's annual meeting in Toronto. His address was an erudite, if idiosyncratic, excavation of the historiography of Anglo-American legal history. The occasion was particularly memorable, however, for the moment when Horwitz offered his interpretation of the scholarship of Jo…
The Many Legalities of Early America
Engaging Willard Hurst
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Law, Police, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the New American Republic
On 1 June 1779, Thomas Jefferson became the second governor of the state of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary where he pursued a series of educational innovations that he had unsuccessfully promoted earlier while engaged in his mammoth revision of the laws of Viriginia. The goal of Jefferson's proposed educational reforms was the creation of an educational system which would b…
Criminal conspiracy and early labor combinations
Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher L. TomlinsThe author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Charles Warren Center, Harvard Univ.; the American Bar Foundation; the Australian Research Grants Committee; and the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe Univ., all of whom have granted assistance to the larger project of which this article is a part
The Unmaking of the American Working Class
The Knights of Labor in the South
AFL Unions in the 1930s
Journal Article AFL Unions in the 1930s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective Get access Christopher L. Tomlins Christopher L. Tomlins graduate student Department of History, the Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 65, Issue 4, March 1979, Pages 1021–1042, https://doi.org/10.2307/1894558 Published: 01 March 1979
Getting Industrial Relations Right
New Directions in American Labor History
Writing in 1926, the economist and labor relations expert, William M. Leiserson, noted that over the previous 25 years an important change had overtaken the study of labor and labor affairs in America. At the turn of the century, students had concentrated their attention on a massive and growing 'labor problem' which they saw arising from rapid industrialization and mass immigration. They had identified their task as the discovery of the roots of…
What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History
Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism 1867-1892
Long Swings and Spatial Yardsticks
In an earlier article in this Journal I described the attempts of lead ing American labor historians to establish a historcial critique of 'in dustrial pluralism', the dominant social scientific model of labor-capital relations in advanced capitalist societies for the last forty years. The foundations for their critique, I argued, were twofold: the pioneering work of Harry Braverman which analysed the transformations wrought by monopoly capitalis…
Dreaming of What Might Be
The New Deal, Collective Bargaining, and the Triumph of Industrial Pluralism
This paper addresses what the author views as a prevailing misconception of labor law theorists and practitioners: that the goal of the Wagner Act was no more than the promotion of peaceful negotiating procedures and written agreements between organized interests-unions and employers-presumptively equal in power. The author argues that in fact the NLRA was drafted, and for a time implemented, with the avowed purpose of giving workers equality wit…
The Unmaking of the American Working Class
Black Labor and the American Legal System
The State and the Unions
The State and the Unions
Journal Article The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960. By Christopher L. Tomlins. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xvi + 348 pp. Notes, bibliographical essay, and index. Cloth $39.50; paper, $12.95) Get access Richard Oestreicher Richard Oestreicher University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American Histo…
The State and the Unions
Joseph D. Keenan, Labor's Ambassador in War and Peace
Criminal conspiracy and early labor combinations
Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher L. TomlinsThe author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Charles Warren Center, Harvard Univ.; the American Bar Foundation; the Australian Research Grants Committee; and the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe Univ., all of whom have granted assistance to the larger project of which this article is a part
The State and the Unions
A Mysterious Power
On 16 June 1837, at a little after six o'clock in the morning, a train of cars carrying lumber and gravel and crowded with twenty or more Irish track laborers and other workmen left the Boston depot of the Boston & Worcester Railroad Corporation bound for Worcester. About four miles out, just after the train had passed the City Mills and was nearing the Brookline road, a wheel on one of the cars broke. The train was thrown from the tracks. Two me…
The Fall of the House of Labor. The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism 1865-1925
The ties that bind
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to means — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that's all.”
Reply to Professor Appleby
Joyce Appleby's very constructive commentary rightly locates my article philosophically and historiographically amid the intellectual eddies of the postindustrialist sensibility. At the same time she is sensitive, I think, to my ambition to tell more than a relativist's tale. If that ambition has led me to splash my colors too indiscriminately across Jefferson's broad canvas, however, Appleby is right to chide me for it. Thus, for example, while …
Law, Police, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the New American Republic
On 1 June 1779, Thomas Jefferson became the second governor of the state of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary where he pursued a series of educational innovations that he had unsuccessfully promoted earlier while engaged in his mammoth revision of the laws of Viriginia. The goal of Jefferson's proposed educational reforms was the creation of an educational system which would b…
Labor Law in America
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Fictitious Commodity
In Nat Turner's shadow
Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher L. Tomlins I am very grateful to Daniel W. Crofts of Trenton State College, NJ, and Tommy Lee Bogger of Norfolk State University, VA, for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am particularly indebted to Professor Bogger for his generosity in sharing with me material from his forthcoming study, The Darker Side of Freedom: Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860, prior to its p…
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