The 59th Annual William H. Leary Lecture: The Imagined History of the Labor Cartel with Sanjukta Paul

Originally aired on March 4, 2025

The Imagined History of the Labor Cartel: Economic Coordination and Competition in American Legal Thought. Today, we broadly assume that until the New Deal, the law viewed labor unions effectively as cartels. According to this story, unions were eventually granted an “exemption” from antitrust law, which allowed them to engage in their core activities of collective bargaining and other collective action over the terms of individual labor contracts. But the law generally did not view labor unions in this way prior to the New Deal. Instead, the modern “labor exemption” is, in an important sense, a solution that helped to create its own problem. In tracing the relevant developments in law and legal thinking from the early republic through the New Deal, together with contributing strands of economic thought, this talk will aim to shed light on some of the more general questions about law, competition, and economic coordination that antitrust’s labor question raises, and which still confront us. Watch the recording.