Harry A. Shulman, Sterling Professor of Law, 1929-54

Harry A. Shulman

REFERENCES:

Laura J. Cooper, “Harry Shulman: Deciding Women’s Grievances in Wartime,” in Gladys W. Gruenberg, ed., Arbitration 1994 Controversy and Continuity: Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting, National Academy of Arbitrators 153 (1995).

Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).

Eugene V. Rostow, “Dean Harry Shulman,” 64 Yale L. J. 802 (1955).

3 Who Was Who in America 784 (1963).

Harry Shulman (1903-55) came to Yale in 1929. He was appointed the dean of the Law School in 1954, but died only a year later. Although he contributed to torts and administrative law scholarship, his best-known work involved labor contracts.

Shulman has been described as “one of the most influential people in the history of American Labor arbitration.” He served on the National War Labor Board during World War II, and later served for many years as umpire of the labor agreement between Ford Motor Company and the United Automobile Workers. His 1949 casebook, Cases on Labor Relations, on which he collaborated with an economist, was the first book on arbitration of collective bargaining disputes and, in the functional approach of the Legal Realist tradition, was organized by the types of disputes that might arise in the life of a labor contract.

Dean Shulman’s 1955 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture, “Reason, Contract, and Law in Labor Relations,” 68 Harv. L. Rev. 999, remains one of the most frequently-cited law review articles.  His vision of the limited and restrained arbitrator has remained influential to this day.

At the Law School, a scholarship fund was established in his honor in 1955, a research fund in 1957, and a library fund in 1963.