Description: Today, most Americans lack constitutional rights on the job. Instead of enjoying free speech or privacy, they can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. This book uses history to explain why. It takes readers back to the 1930s and 1940s when advocates across the political spectrum - labor leaders, civil rights advocates, and conservatives opposed to government regulation - set out to enshrine constitutional rights in the workplace. The book tells their interlocking stories of fighting for constitutional protections for American workers, recovers their surprising successes, explains their ultimate failure, and helps readers assess this outcome.
Brief description: Sophia Z. Lee is Assistant Professor of Law and History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her work has appeared in the Virginia Law Review and Law and History Review. She earned her JD and her PhD in history from Yale University. Prior to joining the Penn Law faculty, she clerked for the Honorable Kimba M. Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and served as a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law. As a graduate student, she won awards and fellowships from the American Society for Legal History, the American Historical Association, and Yale Law School.
Review Quotes: "The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right is both ambitious and important - it moves across time and among a variety of individuals, organizations, and government entities, and it utilizes a wide range of archival material - all of keen interest to historians, legal scholars, and political scientists alike. Lee's formidable intelligence gives us new insights, as well as historical and historiographical surprises."
Risa L. Goluboff, John Allan Love Professor of Law and Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia