Legal Reconstitution of the Welfare State: A Latent Social Democratic Legacy
Year: 1987
Type: article
Abstract: A critical review of two recent discussions of problems in the law of the welfare state helps to explain the contemporary appeals of a theory of legal evolution originally developed by social democratic theorists in conjunction with the rise of collective labor law in settings as disparate as Germany and the United States. Influential contemporary formulations treat collective labor law as merely one example of a generalizable decentralization of regulative and constitutive law, taken as a distinguishing feature of a new evolutionary stage. But the question is raised whether the plausibility of this model does not tacitly depend on a positive reading of the labor experience, and consequently whether its present relevance is not seriously put into question by the deep crisis of the labor movement, whose social and political power was acknowledged by the original theorists to underlie the legal structures taken as paradigmatic.
Source: Law & Society Review
DOI: 10.2307/3053384
Author: David Kettler
Institution: Bard College
Language: English
Topic: Legal and Labor Studies
Subfield: Industrial relations
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2092278592