ABSTRACT
As firms in a great many American industries began to consolidate after the Civil War, advanced attention was given to means of controlling industrial behavior. Many states enacted anti-trust laws in the 1880s. Massachusetts imposed regulation on railroads in 1871. Among the most dramatic was the circumvention of the common law dealing with workplace accidents by the enactment of workers’ compensation programs. These programs, enacted in the first decades of the century, represented the most radical reform of tort law of the preceding three hundred years. The attention to a functional approach to law was certainly accelerated by the Depression, which seriously upset the idea —the belief—that the organization of the society, including its laws, was working effectively. The Realists, a group of scholars who opposed the Supreme Court’s view of the organization of society, attempted to provide an alternative approach to the law.
