| The mining of coal is an extremely profitable, but equally hazardous, enterprise. Around the year 1000 A.D., laws first appeared to address problems in the coal industry. While these earliest legal actions focused on the right of ownership, the emphasis shifted in later years to issues of labor and the rights of miners. The initial section of the present analysis examines this evolution of coal legislation in England to illustrate how these laws reflected the socioeconomic conditions of a specific era in British history.;Theoretically, the analysis adheres to a dialectical explanation of law, rejecting traditional models, i.e., the consensus, pluralist, and elitist models, because of their limited applicability to mine legislation. The dialectical paradigm depicts law as the end-product of a process aimed at the resolution of crises and dilemmas resulting from the contradictions inherent in the socio-historic structure of a society.;In the United States, the Organic Act of 1910 is the first major legislation in the area of coal. This act and the series of laws which followed were characteristically weak, severely limiting the power of federal agencies in the coalfields. It is argued that these acts function primarily as legitimating elements in the capitalist system. The remainder of the historic segment reviews the contents and impact of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969. The analysis concludes that, while the 1969 Act forwarded numerous progressive but long overdue provisions, the state generally was unsuccessful in implementing these standards. |
