Howard Lesnick

Religious Particularity, Religious Metaphor, and Religious Truth: Listening to Tom Shaffer

I have met Tom Shaffer no more than two or three times in my life. Nonetheless, we have for several years been carrying on a conversation that has been of central and growing importance to me and to my work. He has spoken to me through his writing, about professional responsibility, about teaching, and about religion and law. Except for the ways in which he has influenced my teaching, I have responded mostly in my head. It is a unique opportunity to be able to acknowledge to him and others the gift of his work; I am proud to participate in this collective appreciation. I am grateful too for the chance to engage in this forum with some of what his writings have said to me. To select, for a brief reflection, from a bibliography of Shafferiana that extends well up into the three-digit range is a daunting task. I have chosen two themes that have special salience for me: first, he celebrates the “particularity” of specific religious communities, while linking Judaism and Christianity to a common “Hebraic tradition”; second, he calls on those attracted to the use of “religious metaphors” to be clear about what beliefs underlie that use. I have found the first liberating and affirming, and the second profoundly challenging.

State-Court Injunctions and the Federal Common Law of Labor Contracts: Beyond Norris-LaGuardia

HE question presented is whether federal law restricts state power to enjoin a strike as in violation of a collective bargaining agreement. The relevant sources of federal law are the Norris-LaGuardia Act I and section 3o i(a) of the Labor-Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act.2 (i) It seems clear that the Norris-LaGuardia Act does not itself apply to actions in state courts. It is doubtless true that many of the animating principles underlying the I932 statute are implicated whenever a strike is sought to be subjected to the control of equity, in state or federal court.3 Moreover, the Supreme Court has dramatically sustained the attribution of substantive import to Norris-LaGuardia, despite the acts jurisdictional language, as a legislative response to judicial interpretation of earlier statutory regulation.4 Finally, it is at least part of the story to note that the statute was cast as it was because of doubts, soon thereafter dispelled, whether Congress had power to make substantive law to govern labor disputes.5 The fact remains that the decision was made to write a statute addressed to the federal courts, that the problem there may have been thought at