The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.

This essay considers Christopher Tomlins’ thoughts—as expressed in his In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History—on historical ethics and practice in the context of recent and ongoing controversies concerning the history of race and slavery in the American past. Tomlins endeavors to recover as much as he can relating to Nat Turner and his mentalité at the time of the infamous 1831 rebellion. He also promises a self-conscious engagement with the creation of history as an intellectual practice, and invites readers to reflect on their standpoint in the histories they create. For Tomlins this practice means a close reading of Turner’s “confession” through the work of social theorists, an approach that will likely prove controversial for some readers. For those who stay with him, however, Tomlins provides a bravura demonstration of historical methodology with implications for current debates and divisions within the wider field.

Critical migration studies emerged to trace how restrictive immigration contexts contribute to conditions of migrant “illegality” and deportability. More recently, researchers have turned to examine diversity in migrants’ experiences, revealing how migrant “illegality” and deportability can take varied forms based on different social factors, including migrants’ immigration status, developmental stage, ethno-racial background, gender, and nationality. Yet, despite increasingly nuanced and contextualized accounts of migrants’ lived experiences, the psychology of migrant “illegality” remains under-theorized, as we lack general concepts and frameworks to explain how deportability shapes, and is shaped by, migrants’ psychosocial lives. This article introduces such a framework by drawing upon findings from two ethnographic studies with undocumented migrants in Canada and the United States. Observing common psychosocial patterns in both groups, I propose cycles of deportability as a framework to capture how migrant “illegality” develops at the psychosocial level through repeated occurrences of status-related stressors, which produce both acute and chronic fears that further require distinct agencies and coping strategies. Next, I examine differences in migrants’ cycles of deportability based on their national context and immigrant generation. I conclude by discussing how this framework can help consolidate previous research findings and guide future psychological and critical migration studies.

This engagement with Christopher Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner (2020) focuses on a key methodological issue faced by the author, namely how one reads and positions the “authentic voice” of a past subaltern subject, known to us only through a hostile written source. This challenge is well-known to social historians of the European middle ages, and this essay suggests various ways in which Tomlins’s monograph contributes to existing debate, regarding both method and how one culturally situates and interprets the voice(s) thus identified, particularly with regard to the politics of apocalypticism.

In this chef d’oeuvre, Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.

In this Coda to the symposium on my book In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, I address the relationship in the book between law, history, and theory. Writing history informed by theory has always been important to me, for historical research is at least as much an engagement in interpretation as an exercise in description.