The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, founded in 1920, was the lone US trial of a labor court – a policy design used almost everywhere else in the industrialized world during the interwar period. What led Kansas to establish the KCIR when no other state did? And what were the consequences of its existence for the development of economic policy in the rest of the country? Ben Merriman explores how the KCIR's bans on strikes and lockouts, heavy criminal sanctions, and unilateral control over the material terms of economic life, resulted in America's closest practical encounter with fascism. Battered by the Supreme Court in 1923, the KCIR's failure destroyed American interest in labor courts. But the legal battles and policy divisions about the KCIR, which enjoyed powerful supporters, were an early sign of the new political and intellectual alignments that led to America's unique New Deal labor policy.

‘Ben Merriman turns the collapsed shards of a brief and long-expired Kansas experiment in judge-led corporatism in the 1920s into a stunning review of the role of the state – both what it can do and what it cannot do – in workers' lives in the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting the high-minded but failed efforts of William L. Huggins with those of more successful industrial relations reformers like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, this book captures a dramatic political struggle; this is engaged legal history and political thought at its sophisticated best.'

Leon Fink - Senior Research Associate, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University

‘A fascinating case and history, shedding new light on a mostly forgotten policy episode in the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations. Carefully researched and written, social scientists of different stripes – law and society, labor, historical and political sociology – will find much to like and will benefit from this book.'

Marc Dixon - Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College