The Legal Ancestry of the Pullman Strike Injunctions

As the common-law doctrines of combination and conspiracy faded from the American scene, following Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), an instrument of judicial restraint and hindrance of union activities with an equally venerable lineage took their place. In its classic form the was not well adapted to the labor-management struggle, since among other things it was required that the restraining order must name the persons who were to be enjoined. American judges, however, with the ingenuity typical of a youthful nation, soon found themselves able to overcome this limitation. By the 1890s, the labor injunction had become a perfected instrument of control and a serious obstacle to the growth of trade unionism, but especially after the precedent established with the issuance of a so-called in the Pullman strike of 1894. Yet, even this form of the instrument had its own precedents, having been synthesized from receivership orders and the classic in various railroad strike and boycott cases, beginning in 1877. The emergence of the blanket from those cases to its application in the Pullman strike in 1894 is traced in this article. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)

Bankruptcy · Boycott · Commonwealth · Political science · Politics · Receivership · Revocation · Engineering · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Law, logistics, and international trade

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  Gerald G Eggert•Labor History•1966

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