Background of Judges Makes a Difference

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Mon Mar 6 05:45:00 PST 2000



>On Behalf Of Tom Lehman
>
> Professor James Brudney of the Ohio State College of Law analyzed all
> appeals court decisions reviewing NLRB decisions from 1986 to 1993 and
> reached some interesting conclusions. Judges who graduated from elite
> colleges were significantly more likely to reject the union's position
> than judges from less prestigious(and presumably less expensive)
> schools. Surprisingly, judges who had represented management in NLRA
> cases before going on the bench were signiticantly more likely to
> support union claims than judges who lacked that professional
> experience.

What's surprising :)

Elite schools barely teach labor law and most elite students never have seen a labor union, so they buy the anti-union ideology prominent in society and in the law and economics teaching of most of corporate law. Only the students hired to bust unions are going to get the education needed to even understand what unions are about; and hell, having been hired to bust the unions, they have a better understanding of just how stacked the deck is against unions at the NLRB.

-- Nathan



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