by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court in 1871. It held that the plaintiff was entitled to recover
damages from the defendants, certain union officials, because they had
induced his employes, who were free to quit at will, to leave his employ
and had also been instrumental in preventing him from getting new
employes. But as yet these expectancies were not considered property in
the full sense of the word. A transitional case is that of Brace Bros.
_v._ Evans in 1888.[36] In that case an injunction against a boycott was
justified on the ground that the value of the complainant's physical
property was being destroyed when the market was cut off. Here the
expectancies based upon relations which customers and employes were
thought of as giving value to the physical property, but they were not
yet recognized as a distinct asset which in itself justifies the
issuance of injunctions.

This next step was taken in the Barr[37] case in New Jersey in 1893.
Since then there have been frequent statements in labor injunction cases
to the effect that both the expectancies based upon the
merchant-function and the expectancies based upon the employer-function
are property.

But the recognition of "probable expectancies" as property was not in
itself sufficient to complete the chain of reasoning that justifies
injunctions in labor disputes. It is well established that no recovery
can be had for losses due to the exercise by others of that which they
have a lawful right to do. Hence the employers were obliged to charge
that the strikes and boycotts were undertaken in pursuance of an
unlawful conspiracy. Thus the old conspiracy doctrine was combined with
the new theory, and "malicious" interference with "probable
expectancies" was held unlawful. Earlier conspiracy had been thought of
as a criminal offence, now it was primarily a civil wrong. The emphasis
had been upon the danger to the public, now it was the destruction of
the employer's business. Occasionally the court went so far as to say
that all interference with the business of employers is unlawful. The
better view developed was that interference is _prima facie_ unlawful
but may be justified. But even this view placed the burden of proof upon
the workingmen. It actually meant that the court opened for itself the
way for holding the conduct of the workingmen to be lawful only when it
sympathized with their demands.

During the eighties, despite the far-reaching development