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The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law

John Fabian Witt

3.50 · Rating details · 16 ratings · 2 reviews

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation's exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen's organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief ...more

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Paperback, 311 pages

Published September 1st 2006 by Harvard University Press (first published 2004)

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Start your review of The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law

Jan 09, 2013 Frank Stein rated it really liked it

The takeaway here is that workman's compensation legislation, sponsored by social reformers and passed by almost all states during the nineteen-teens, became the model for most subsequent social legislation, and itself involved a revolution in the way lawyers and judges thought about harm and responsibility. It's a great look at the intersections of legal, political, and philosophical thought.

Some of the sections here, such as those on cooperative insurance and managerial "Taylorism" (the creati
The takeaway here is that workman's compensation legislation, sponsored by social reformers and passed by almost all states during the nineteen-teens, became the model for most subsequent social legislation, and itself involved a revolution in the way lawyers and judges thought about harm and responsibility. It's a great look at the intersections of legal, political, and philosophical thought.

Some of the sections here, such as those on cooperative insurance and managerial "Taylorism" (the creation of scientific work rules), walk on well-trodden ground, but surprisingly, Witt is often able to find new insights in areas that have been discussed before.

For instance, Witt discusses the vital importance of the now forgotten case of Ives v. South Buffalo Railway (1911), the New York Court of Appeals decision that overturned the first workmen's compensation law in the country as a taking of property. William Werner's opinion, often misread, caused workmen's comp rules to be restructured so that they substituted, instead of supplemented, traditional tort remedies, or provided employers the option to "opt-in." The Ives case also formed the basis for Theodore Roosevelt's attack on the judiciary in his 1912 Progressive presidential campaign.

Witt also highlights some lesser changes that influenced accident and tort law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The theory of "strict liability" for harms done, without any consideration of negligence or fault, grew in importance as "spark statutes" (laws that gave property owners compensation for any fires started by railroads) and the recognition of an increased numbers of "hazardous occupations" (where any injury constituted prima faciae evidence that the employer in a dangerous occupation was at fault) became more common. Statistical theories and investigations of accidents called into question the whole notion of "fault" in many cases, and workmen's compensation represented the most important instance of lawmakers and judges giving up the whole previous philosophical constructions of what exactly "caused" injury and simply working with statistical evidence.

So this is a familiar topic done with fresh facts and insights. Its much to be appreciated.

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