Gary Chartier

Abstract.My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well‐known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance‐based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of the paper, I point to the way in which “tacit obligation” emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants—and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain—to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests.

This book develops an account of freedom of expression rooted in a broader understanding of human flourishing. It is intended to highlight reasons for not only political institutions but also noncoercive social institutions—employers, churches, clubs—to value and safeguard expressive freedom. It emphasizes a set of overlapping and mutually reinforcing considerations supportive of this kind of freedom, including property rights, class-analytic and public-choice-theoretic understandings of state and institutional decision-making, the limits on the capacity of expressive activity to injure or cause injury, the independent importance of autonomy, and the various ways in which expressive freedom can foster insight, discovery, and various other aspects of flourishing. It stresses the importance of a social ecosystem as the necessary precondition for many of the benefits yielded by freedom of expression.