Workers against the City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Law ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This book contributes to legal and labor history by reinterpreting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hague v. CIO (1939) decision, which upheld a federal district court injunction prohibiting Jersey City boss Frank Hague from obstructing workers from the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allies in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from meeting in urban public places. The case involved speech and assembly freedoms, rights essential for CIO workers’ organizing efforts, but, as the book shows, these rights were submerged under municipal police powers to preserve public order until the court brought them under federal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment in Hague. Revising the conventional view, the book argues that Hague was more than simply a civil liberties victory for workers over a dictatorial, antilabor city boss. Drawing on new evidence in city archives, CIO records, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and Jersey City court filings, as well as traditional sources in ACLU records and anti-Hague literature, the book demonstrates that the Hague-versus-CIO controversy emanated more from shifts in the labor movement from craft to industrial unionism, in municipal law, in urban police practices, in the politics of anticommunism and antifascism, and especially in the Supreme Court’s “civil liberties revolution.” With women and African Americans on the periphery, the book concludes, male CIO workers initiated the case, but Hague ultimately benefitted outdoor protests more than it benefitted labor speech.

Into Federal District Court

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-143
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Federal District Court ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
New Vision ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter recounts the federal district court injunction proceeding instituted by the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop Jersey City from denying leafletting rights and public-speaking permits. Revealing the hearing’s nastiness, the chapter shows that the trial had legal significance beyond exposing Mayor Hague’s misdeeds, as it tested whether Jersey City’s claim of traditional municipal police powers against alleged CIO communists or the ACLU’s new vision of nationally protected speech and assembly rights for workers would prevail, and indeed, whether federal courts would accept jurisdiction. With law in flux, the chapter concludes, the district court broke new ground by assuming jurisdiction, rejecting Jersey City’s old legal vision, embracing new ACLU views, and enjoining Jersey City as requested.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

Street Fight and Media Fight

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-109
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter traces the political and media battle that unfolded 1937-38 over Jersey City’s denial of public speaking permits to the Committee for Industrial Organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, and supporters, including a few women. It shows how the media dominated popular understanding of the controversy by projecting rival discourses of democracy versus dictatorship and law and order versus subversive communism, temporarily obscuring legal questions about municipal police powers, labor law, and free speech that federal courts were on the verge of deciding. The chapter illustrates how the struggle intensified. Mayor Hague staged extravagant anticommunist “Americanism” rallies against the CIO with broad local support, while an outside pro-CIO left-labor coalition denounced Hague as a dictator in Popular Front language of antifascism and working-class Americanism.

The U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-178
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
District Court ◽  
Circuit Court ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Jurisdiction ◽  
The U.S

This chapter traces Hague’s appeal through the Third Circuit Court of Appeals into the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, showing how the Hughes court’s inner dynamics explain affirmation of the district court injunction. Observing flux in court personnel and law, the chapter shows that both courts embraced the contemporaneous civil liberties revolution by defending worker speech and assembly rights, but it reveals the Supreme Court as divided over constitutional logic. Justice Owen Roberts’s plurality opinion upheld speech and assembly rights under the Fourteenth Amendment privileges and immunities clause, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s concurrence incorporated the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment due-process clause, and dissenters rejected federal jurisdiction. The ruling reflected the contentious evolution of civil liberties jurisprudence, not antiboss or labor law politics.

Pitiful Plaintiffs: Child Welfare Litigation and the Federal Courts. By Susan Gluck Mezey. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. 209p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-217
Author(s):  
William T. Gormley
Keyword(s):  
Continuity Of Care ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Family Services ◽  
University Of Pittsburgh ◽  
Abuse And Neglect ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

In 1988 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), on behalf of B. H., a 17-year- old youth in foster care, and nearly 20,000 other children forced to live outside their home because of abuse and neglect. Attorneys accused the DCFS, responsible for pro- tecting and placing such children, with violations of Illinois statutes and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. B. H., for example, had been placed in ten different settings despite clear evidence that children require continuity of care for their emotional growth.

Ferlinghetti on Trial

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel E. Black
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Police Department ◽  
District Court ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Court Judge ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

In spring 1957 the Juvenile Division of the San Francisco Police Department seized copies of Howl and charged the poem's publisher, Lawrence Felinghetti, with obscenity. Tried in summer 1957 and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti was exonerated by a District Court judge. Scholars typically place the Howl trial at the beginning of a cultural and social revolution that flourished in the 1960s or place it amid the personal lives and rebellions of the actors composing the Beat Generation. However, these treatments do not fully consider the ways the prosecution reflected trends in law, shaped debates over juvenile delinquency, and amplified distinctions between legal censorship and public censuring. This paper situates the Howl prosecution amid the regulation of comics, rock music, motion pictures, narcotics in postwar America, to tell a story about California, conservatism, radicalism, and censorship in the Cold War Era.

The Rise of Boss Hague

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-44
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Police Action ◽  
Municipal Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
Law Enforcement Culture ◽  
Public Concerns

This chapter analyzes the mayoralty of Jersey City boss Frank Hague, portraying him not just as an autocrat who trampled on civil liberties, but as representative of city machine politics, municipal law, and law enforcement culture that prevailed before the 1930s. Much like other city leaders, he was a second-generation Irish Catholic boss who blended ward politics with Progressive “coercive moral reform.” Meanwhile, constitutional law under Davis v. Massachusetts (1897), municipal law’s “limits of power” doctrine, and the common law of “illegal assembly” allowed city police broad authority over speech, assembly, and picketing, while public concerns about crime and widespread police lawlessness abetted tough “law-and-order” police action in Jersey City and elsewhere. This old-fashioned legal culture shaped Jersey City’s reception of CIO organizers 1937-39.

Medicaid & Medicare: D.C. Appellate Court Denies Claim for Medicare Reimbursement of GME Cost

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-205
Author(s):  
choeffel Amy
Keyword(s):  
Medical Center ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
District Court ◽  
Appellate Court ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
Department Of Health ◽  
Administrative Proceedings ◽  
Summary Judgment

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld, in Presbyterian Medical Center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System v. Shalala, 170 F.3d 1146 (D.C. Cir. 1999), a federal district court ruling granting summary judgment to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in a case in which Presbyterian Medical Center (PMC) challenged Medicare's requirement of contemporaneous documentation of $828,000 in graduate medical education (GME) expenses prior to increasing reimbursement amounts. DHHS Secretary Donna Shalala denied PMC's request for reimbursement for increased GME costs. The appellants then brought suit in federal court challenging the legality of an interpretative rule that requires requested increases in reimbursement to be supported by contemporaneous documentation. PMC also alleged that an error was made in the administrative proceedings to prejudice its claims because Aetna, the hospital's fiscal intermediary, failed to provide the hospital with a written report explaining why it was denied the GME reimbursement.

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