HARVARD LAW — Labor unions’ “extension into electoral politics was both necessary to union power,” yet “paradoxically, responsible for its decline,” said Harvard Law School Professor Laura Weinrib at a lecture last week. Weinrib was speaking at an event celebrating her appointment as the inaugural Fred N. Fishman Professor of Constitutional Law. Weinrib, who is also the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a legal historian and constitutional and labor law scholar. Her talk, “Money, Politics, and the Constitution in the ‘Golden Age’ of Capitalism,” previewed an upcoming book and outlined her ideas about the connection between the labor movement’s participation in politics in the mid-20th century and its later reduction in power.