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74 3 The Impact of the Northern District of Ohio on Industrialization and Labor Liability Law and Labor Injunctions in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, 1870–1932 Melvyn Dubofsky Since the mid-1980s, scholars in legal history and related fields have insisted that rulings by the American judiciary shaped the character, beliefs, and goals of the American labor movement and its affiliated trade unions. Judgemade law caused unions to conclude that political reform had become a dead end for workers and that instead of relying on political action to improve working conditions, unions should build their own power. Moreover, the judiciary defined the meaning of free labor, implemented the doctrine of employment at will, and sanctified the concept of individual liberty of contract as the cornerstone of the employment relationship. Workers and unions existed in a world created and defined by judges.1 The federal district court for northern Ohio reflected the reality that judges played a decisive role in determining the fate of workers and their unions. Two dominant labor issues occupied the judges who sat on that bench from the 1870s into the 1930s. The most common variety of labor case that came before the district court concerned claims made by injured employees or surviving dependents for compensation from employers deemed responsible for the injury or death; such cases fell under the rubric of master-servant law. But per- 75 The Impact of the Northern District on Industrialization and Labor haps more significant in revealing judicial attitudes toward workers and their organizations were the cases that occupied the district judges far more irregularly —cases that arose from industrial conflicts during which employers sought judicial protection against collective action by their employees. These latter cases tended to fall within common-law categories of criminal conspiracy, illegal restraint of trade, and equity proceedings that might provide injunctive relief. In instances of personal injury and industrial conflict, the district court took jurisdiction on one of two grounds: either diversity of citizenship, meaning plaintiff and defendant were citizens of different states, or under the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce. One obstacle complicates our ability to discern clearly and fully the pattern of labor law jurisprudence as applied in the district court. Not all of the cases and rulings heard under the rubric of master-servant law were reported. Indeed, many such cases only entered the reported record when the Sixth Circuit Court ruled on appeals of the district court’s original decisions. In those instances, the appeals court rulings offer evidence of decisions originally made at the district level. Because the cases that arose from collective action during strikes were far less common and usually more contentious legally and politically (and also not presented to juries), they resulted in more complete recorded reports. Ten different judges sat on the northern Ohio district court between the 1870s and the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932. In 1878, Congress divided the district in two, creating separate judgeships for an eastern half and a western half. Eight of the ten judges were appointed by Republican presidents and had been active in Republican Party politics at the state and local levels. The other two were appointed by Woodrow Wilson and had figured prominently in Ohio Democratic Party affairs. Two judges from other districts in the Sixth Circuit heard significant labor cases that came before Ohio’s Northern District. Both were appointed by a Republican president, although one who sat on the bench for the Western District of Tennessee had been a Southern Democrat and Confederate military officer. All twelve judges were white males of Protestant faith. Their family origins and circumstances were largely similar. They enjoyed comfortable family circumstances that ranged from solidly middle-class or respectably bourgeois to upper-class elite. All were well educated, and most had attended prestigious private colleges, though not all graduated. The majority prepared for the law by matriculating in law schools, although several trained in what was then the traditional manner of reading the law in the office of an older practicing attorney, sometimes a family member. Given their similarities 76 Melvyn Dubofsky in family background, education, legal training, religion, political activity, and memberships in an array of fraternal organizations, it should come as no surprise that the men who sat on Ohio’s Northern District court—with one exception , a judge who resigned after a brief...

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