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COMMONWEALTH V. HUNT

COMMONWEALTH V. HUNT, 45 Mass. 111, 4 Met. (1842). In 1842 Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a combination of workers to protect their interests by peaceable collective action was not an indictable criminal conspiracy. The decision has long been understood by many labor and legal historians as a pro-labor departure from the harsh criminal conspiracy doctrine of the early nineteenth century. Actually, the decision had little impact on case law, which generally treated labor organizations as criminal conspiracies until the Norris-La Guardia Act (1932) and the Wagner Act (1935) recognized labor's right to organize and bargain collectively.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Levy, Leonard Williams. The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Nelles, Walter. "Commonwealth v. Hunt." Columbia Law Review 32 (November 1932):1128–1269.

Tomlins, Christopher L. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

David Park

See also Norris-La Guardia Act.