Gilded Age courts approved professional cartels while striking labor laws

Evidence

The laws created, in essence, little guilds, self-​perpetuating, and composed of respectable professionals or tradesmen. By and large, the courts had no problem with these laws. Few licensing statutes were challenged in court; fewer still were overturned. In the midst of a period when state courts were at times hard on unions of factory workers, and suspicious of “trusts,” they accepted the mini-​cartels of pharmacists, nurses, and the like, with hardly a murmur of protest. This helps us understand the inner meaning of “freedom of contract” and other constitutional shibboleths, which courts used at the time to overthrow social or labor legislation. The judges, middle-​class, conservative men, could empathize easily with professionals and artisans. They were rather less understanding when they sensed class struggle or proletarian revolt, things which they barely understood and desperately feared. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2625

Categorization

• XREF: Directly expands the ch49 claim that membership functions exclude outsiders and connects to the course question of who benefits from ‘freedom of contract’ rhetoric — later echoed in substantive due process cases like Lochner. — connects to: Gilded Age industrialists invoked natural laws to justify opposing state regulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 342; Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343; Surveillance capitalists parallel Gilded Age industrialists in exploiting law to escape constraints — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 341 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the same ‘freedom of contract’ doctrine that crushed labor unions sheltered professional cartels reveals the class-filtered logic beneath formal legal neutrality — dense enough to sit with.

Broader Connections

• Late-nineteenth-century courts functioned as a shield protecting established interests #corroborates (0.90) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3602
• Gilded Age industrialists invoked natural laws to justify opposing state regulation #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 342
• A progressive bourgeois law was repurposed to suppress workers’ associations #corroborates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1948
• Gilded Age elites circumscribed democracy to protect their economic regime #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 343
• Surveillance capitalists parallel Gilded Age industrialists in exploiting law to escape constraints #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 341