In a moment of renewed scrutiny of the legal system’s role in upholding, bolstering, or creating both legal and material inequality, Lieback’s project aims to contribute to historically informed reform proposals of labor law and constitutional law. This is not a new concern. In the 20th century, maturing industrialization processes and the expansion of social democratic ideas on the responsibility of the state towards its citizens linked up with an increasing skepticism about the neutrality of liberal law in capitalist societies. This gave rise to new demands for democratizing access to legal recourse and for rewriting the law itself. Lieback will analyze four different legal movements in the U.S. and Germany pre- and post-WWII that developed a sustained critique of the legal system’s unequitable outcomes and the contestation possibilities for workers. Through this tradition’s engagement with labor law, labor courts, and collective bargaining procedures, she will highlight the deep connections between the legal system, the organization of labor disputes, and its role in democracies. This project will recenter a tradition of thought, policy making, and legal activism that aimed at reforming the law in favor of worker power, workers’ rights, and broader lay participation in the legal system.
To do so, Lieback will conduct archival research in both countries, analyze legal cases and proposals for new, worker-centered conflict resolution institutions, and – where possible – talk to those who pioneered new conceptual frameworks for questioning capitalist stratification through the law. Through the project’s comparative focus, she aims to highlight structurally conditioned divergences as well as similarities between a common and a civil law-centered approach. Lieback plans to contribute to an intensifying debate on the role of the law in entrenching inequality in general and of its role in limiting and enabling labor power in particular. Through paying close attention to the emerging proposals’ strengths and limits, this project will devise new pathways for thinking about the role, value, and limits of the law in fighting entrenched inequality. Through analyzing the interactions between the legal, the political, and the economic institutions and procedures, she will draw connections between today’s continuous decline of organized labor and the conditions necessary for its flourishing.
