Merriman, Ben. 2025. Kansas Court of Industrial Relations: Interwar America’s Dangerous Experiment in Social Control: Cambridge University Press.

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.

Eiermann, Martin. 2025. The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue: Columbia University Press.

The concept of privacy is central to public life in the United States. It is the fulcrum of countless conflicts over reproductive rights and consumer protection, the power of tech companies and the reach of state surveillance. How did privacy come to take on such import, and what have the consequences been for American institutions and society?

Martin Eiermann traces the transformation of privacy from a set of informal cultural norms into a potent political issue. Around the turn of the twentieth century, in a nation that was searching for order amid rapid change and frequent moral panics about the ills of modern life, privacy spoke to emerging social problems and new technological realities. During this tumultuous period, political mobilization and judicial contestation shaped a legal, institutional, and administrative privacy architecture that has partly endured into the twenty-first century. Eiermann rebuts the claim that technological change renders privacy obsolete, demonstrating that the concept became increasingly capacious when it was applied to the social problems and political disputes of the information age. And he shows that it is often the selectivity—not the ubiquity—of governmental and corporate data collection that should elicit our concerns.