29th January 2023
Over at Substack, this week’s essay for paying subscribers is on the Taff Vale case of 1901, which is generally regarded as the important trade union case in British history.
In that case the House of Lords held that a trade union could be sued for the damages caused to an employer by wrongful acts. This exposed trade unions to significant legal peril when taking industrial action.
In my post I set out how the law and world view of the time, especially in respect of “economic torts”, meant that the trade union lost the case and why the labour movement had to look to parliament for legal change. I also put the case in a context of other trade union cases of the time.
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Every weekend I do an essay for paying subscribers, in addition to the free-to-read law and policy topical commentary on this blog every weekday.
The essays are on aspects of legal history or the relationship between law and lore or popular culture.
Previous essays have been on:
Malone (1979) – which is for me the one case from the last fifty years which signifies the most about our constitution;
The origin of Wednesbury unreasonableness (1948) – the notion that a public body can make irrational decisions, as long as those decisions are not so unreasonable that no public body would make them; and
Dr Bonham’s case (1610) where a great judge said that there were limits to what could be done with an Act of parliament.
Like a Marshall Cavendish part-work publication of yesteryear, I am hoping these essays will build up to be an interesting library and resource in their own right, but without the dinky plastic models
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I have also posted the essays at Patreon for my Patreon supporters, and Patreon supporters and anyone who made a PayPal contribution to this blog in 2022 can have a one-year full complimentary subscription – just leave a “Private” comment below. It is important that nobody pays “twice” for my drivel.
Thank you all for following this blog. I would like to keep the topical commentary free, and these essays on less immediately topical subjects are a way of cross-subsidising the daily free-to-read topical posts.
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If you are looking for suggestions to lengthen this part-work series, I think you’ve written before on Somerset v Stewart, and the Zong case, and Liversidge v Anderson. Perhaps they merit revisiting in longer form?
I’m not sure if you’ve written about it before, but another foundational case that might merit the treatment is Entick v Carrington. Or on another tack the court ending 250 years of legal fiction in R v R.