LABORS CONSTITUTION OF FREEDOM

The American labor movement of the early twentieth century sustained a tradition of independent constitutional thought and action. Unionists held that antistrike injunctions and statutes violated the Constituti on notwithstanding court decisions to the contrary. They endeavored to enforce their constitutional holdings through noncompliance and direc t action. In this Article, Professor Pope explores the dynamics of lab or's constitutional insurgency through a case study of the four-month ''constitutional strike'' by 10,000 coal miners against the Kansas Ind ustrial Court Act of 1920. Although most of the strikers lacked techni cal legal knowledge, they constructed stories about the Constitution t hat guided and inspired collective action. In effect, they created an alternative legal world in which antistrike laws did not exist. Profes sor Pope distinguishes three main strata of the insurgent movement: lo cal activists, national officials, and union lawyers. The constitution al commitments of these strata differed sharply, lending to complex pa tterns of alliance, conflict, and avoidance. Immersed in their culture of resistance, activists experienced severe difficulty finding suppor t for their ideas within the legal profession, where even the best fri ends of labor were under the sway of progressivism, a discursive frame work hostile to fundamental rights thinking.