Date

7-21-2026

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

John Austin Moore

Keywords

William Howard Taft, Judge William Howard Taft, Taft, early judicial career, judicial history, American legal history, nineteenth-century legal history, Gilded Age, Second Industrial Revolution, Progressive Era, common law, common law reasoning, jurisprudence, lower courts, Superior Court of Cincinnati, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Sixth Circuit, federal courts, labor law, antitrust law, Sherman Antitrust Act, restraint of trade, rule of reason, law and industrialization, industrial capitalism, capital and labor, labor unions, union boycotts, secondary boycotts, injunctions, strikes, workplace injury liability, employer liability, negligence, contributory negligence, assumed risk, fellow servant doctrine, master-servant law, tort law, railroad law, interstate commerce, public franchises, municipal franchises, corporate combinations, business competition, unfair competition, trademarks, patents, intellectual property, property rights, contract law, equity, conspiracy, legal boundaries, institutional restraint, rule of law, Cincinnati legal history, Ohio legal history, civil service reform, private property, federal judiciary, judicial independence

Disciplines

History | Legal Studies

Abstract

William Howard Taft’s early judicial career has been dismissed by historians and biographers for nearly a century as merely an unimportant preliminary phase before his later political and Supreme Court career. This dissertation challenges that interpretation through a detailed examination of forty-six labor and antitrust-related opinions written by Taft while serving on the Superior Court of Cincinnati and the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. During his eleven years on these courts, Taft wrote a disproportionate share of labor and antitrust-related opinions and engaged deeply with legal problems arising from the socioeconomic upheavals of the Second Industrial Revolution. In these cases, he combined common law reasoning with emerging statutes and precedent to confront major legal issues involving workplace injury liability, intellectual property protection, public franchise grants, business competition, corporate combinations, union boycotts, and restraint of trade. Across these areas, Taft sought to define the rights, duties, and limits governing workers, employers, businesses, unions, government entities, and courts themselves. His civic speeches from the same period further reveal the assumptions behind this jurisprudence, especially his belief that labor, capital, government, and the judiciary served legitimate social roles but required clear legal boundaries. Rather than serving in routine or unimportant judicial posts, Taft participated in a broader community of lower court judges who adapted inherited common law principles to industrial change and, in so doing, helped shape emerging labor and antitrust law.

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