The Employment Relation and Its Ordering at Century’s End: Reflections on Emerging Trends in the United States

The enormous success of the United States economy in producing new jobs has focused world-wide attention on the flexibility of the American labor market, and on the malleability of the legal order that regulates it. Despite our reputation for sparse public regulation of the employment relationship, however; the past decade has been a period of unprecedented judicial and legislative activity. The United States now has more formal employment regulation than ever before. The following piece places these developments in the context of a decline in the practice of private law-making, and identifies four movements that have emerged and which characterize the developments of this period.