Opinion ID: 3066125
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: History of the NLGA

Text: As the Supreme Court has observed, “[t]he Railway Labor Act cannot be appreciated apart from the environment out of which it came and the purposes which it was designed to serve.” Burlington N. R.R. Co. v. Bhd. of Maint. of Way Emps., 481 U.S. 429, 444 (1987) (internal quotations omitted). Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the federal judiciary issued a large number of labor injunctions. Pejoratively called “government by injunction,” judicial interference in labor relations became an issue of national importance by the end of the nineteenth century. See 1 The Developing Labor Law 7 (John E. Higgins, Jr. & Patrick Hardin eds., 4th ed. 2002). Nearly every congress between 1894 and 1914 considered proposals to restrict the judiciary’s injunctive power. See Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene, The Labor Injunction 163 (New York, 1930). Congress first attempted to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to issue labor injunctions when it passed the Clayton Act in 1914.3 The Supreme Court, however, 3 The Clayton Act states: “No restraining order or injunction shall be granted by any court of the United States, or a judge or the judges thereof, in any case between an employer and employees, or between employers and employees, or between employees, or between persons employed and persons seeking employment, involving, or growing out of, a dispute concerning terms or conditions of employment . . . .” 29 U.S.C. § 52. The Supreme Court noted over 70 years later that “[t]he language of the ASI V. IBT 29 narrowly construed the Clayton Act in Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, 254 U.S. 443 (1921), and “[d]uring the 1920's, courts issued over 2,100 anti-strike decrees . . . .” Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement 1227 (1991). Congress, however, remained “intent upon taking the federal courts out of the labor injunction business,” Marine Cooks, 362 U.S. at 369, and it passed the NLGA, which broadly stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to issue injunctions in labor disputes, in 1934.4 “[I]n passing the Norris-LaGuardia Act, Congress described federal labor injunctions unequivocally as abuses of judicial power.” Burlington N. Santa Fe Ry. Co., 203 F.3d 703, 709 (9th Cir. 2000) (en banc) (internal quotations omitted). As the Supreme Court later described it, the NLGA was an “extraordinary step . . . necessary to remedy an extraordinary problem.” Burlington N. R.R. Co., 481 U.S. at 437.5 Clayton Act was broad enough to encompass all peaceful strike activity.” Burlington N. R.R. Co., 481 U.S. at 438. 4 “No court of the United States, as defined in this chapter, shall have jurisdiction to issue any restraining order or temporary or permanent injunction in a case involving or growing out of a labor dispute, except in a strict conformity with the provisions of this chapter; nor shall any such restraining order or temporary or permanent injunction be issued contrary to the public policy declared in this chapter.” 29 U.S.C. § 101. 5 I, of course, do not suggest that my colleagues in the majority bear any resemblance to the judges criticized in connection with the passage of the NLGA. Even though I disagree with their analysis, I acknowledge that my colleagues hold their views in good faith, and that they are construing the law as they understand it. 30 ASI V. IBT