Salem Press

	A good introductory resource, this is one of the more useful titles in Salem's Magill's Choice series, because it pulls together content that is scattered throughout so many other sets.
Booklist

Criminal Justice
Clear, authoritative treatment of all aspects of criminal justice - emphasis on justice in the media.

U.S. Laws, Acts,
and Treaties
Provides the much-needed service of selecting, from literally thousands of U.S. laws, those most likely to come up in classroom discussions.

The Bill of Rights
A comprehensive survey of all aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights; from its origins to its role in modern American history.

U.S. Legal System
This set includes articles emphasizing basic legal concepts and offer a practical guide to how the federal and state legal systems work.

U.S. Court Cases
Debs, in Re

U.S. Supreme Court - Decided May 27, 1895

The Supreme Court for the first time upheld the authority of the federal government to use an injunction against striking union members.

In re Debs was a by-product of the 1894 strike against George Pullman’s Palace Car Company. The strike began in May as a response to wage cuts and high rents at the company town of Pullman, located near Chicago, Illinois. The American Railway Union, headed by Eugene V. Debs, supported the striking Pullman workers by refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars. By the end of June, nearly all the railroads west of Chicago had been paralyzed by the strike.

Railroad owners, alleging that the strike was hampering the movement of the mails, petitioned President Grover Cleveland to send federal troops to Illinois. In July, Cleveland complied by dispatching two thousand troops to the strike scene. At the same time, Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, secured an injunction prohibiting the strikers from interfering with the mails or with railroads engaged in interstate commerce. Olney found authority for this legal device in the Sherman Antitrust Act, enacted by Congress in 1890 to control corporate monopolies. The statute outlawed combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade. When Debs and other leaders of the American Railway Union ignored the injunction, they were arrested. The strike subsequently collapsed.

Debs and his associates were arraigned in the Federal Circuit Court for Northern Illinois, convicted for contempt of court, and sentenced to imprisonment. In sentencing Debs to six months in jail, Judge William Woods upheld the right of the federal government to secure an injunction, under the Sherman Act, against strikers. The activities of Debs and his cohorts, according to Woods, constituted a conspiracy in restraint of interstate commerce.

In an attempt to test the constitutional propriety of the labor injunction, Debs petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus. In 1895, Justice David Brewer read the unanimous opinion of the Court. Brewer made no judgment on the constitutional propriety of using the Sherman Act against unions. Instead, he based his decision on the broader grounds that the relationship of the federal government to interstate commerce and the delivery of the mails justified the use of the injunction to prevent forcible obstruction by Debs and his fellow strikers. “The strong arm of the national government,” he asserted, “may be put forth to brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails.” Debs’s petition was denied.

In legalizing the federal injunction against the railway strikers, the Court gave to employers a powerful new weapon in their wars against unions. The injunction subsequently became a regular feature of labor-management struggles. Over the next thirty-seven years, the labor injunction was used more than two hundred times against strikers. Management continued to seek injunctions from federal courts until Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act in 1932.

Ronald W. Long