The Constitution and Business Regulation in the Progressive Era

I was somewhat surprised when the editors of this issue asked me to contribute an essay on the future of the profession. The reason is that I have spent most of my academic life studying the years between the Civil War and World War II and feel more comfortable writing about the past than foreseeing the future. Thanks to developments in American society, politics, and law, however, the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has become ever more relevant in recent years. We have seen a widening of the gap between the rich and the rest of society. There has been a political movement against the federal government and government regulation of business in general. Increasingly, Supreme Court decisions seem to favor corporate interests and concentrated wealth. To non-lawyers and critics, at least, some of those decisions seem to be based on technical, unrealistic legal reasoning.1 Taken together, these developments have put us in an age that bears some striking similarities to the early Progressive Era. They have rekindled debates that dominated politics and law more than a century ago.

Constitution · Gilded Age · Government (linguistics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Progressive era · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes