Origin
The Labor Law Group was created in the mid-20th century to produce high qualty instructional materials for teaching labor and employment law.
Wirtz’s Modest Proposal
In December 1946, in talk before the Labor Law Roundtable of the American Association of Law Schools, then-Professor William Willard Wirtz blasted “the orthodox Labor Law course” – mostly “historical analysis of appellate court opinions” – for distorting how judges and students saw labor relations to a view in which management primarily wanted to “exploit[ ] workers for larger profits while labor’s thinking starts with an impulse to revolt and ends in befuddled support of some little Caesar’s grab for power and bigger pay checks” (Wirtz 1947, pg. 4).
The real problem: “[O]nly bad labor relations produce lawsuits” and studying “labor litigation offers no real insight into the basic laws of decent labor relations.” Wirtz’s villain was the “case method” of legal instruction, because labor law had “very few reliable legal precedents” and “personal predilections [that] are unusually strong. These opinions amount invariably to rationalizations, in terms of next-most-similar legal concepts, of decisions reached upon a basis never articulated at all.” While a “good teacher” could undo the effect of this on a law student, only a masterful teacher could “see to it that, having erased the board of what is written, he does not go on to articulate some premises which are solely his own.”
Wirtz presented alternatives, including studying how labor relations actually worked. He also urged labor law professors to abandon their “prima donna” habits and work together to prepare better labor law teaching materials. Wirtz later worried whether labor law professors could even collaborate in this way, given financial and time obstacles as well as a profession complacent with the status quo.
The Trust
Beginning in 1948, multiple law school teachers worked together to create a mimeographed version of a new labor law textbook later used in seventeen schools. Each collaborator supplied comments and suggestions for change, and the textbook was eventually published as Labor Relations and the Law (Mathews and Labor Law Group 1953).
Thereafter, a “group of Law School teachers and others interested in the teaching of Labor Law and Labor Relations” executed a Declaration of Trust, dated November 4, 1953 (Labor Law Group Papers, n.d.). In that document, they assigned any royalty payments from Labor Relations and the Law “and any other volumes or works produced by the Group” to a trust with a purpose “to improve the training of law students in an understanding of Labor Law and Labor Relations and to provide the best possible materials for such training.” The trustees – elected by the Group – could “expand and alter” the trust’s purpose. However, the trust’s purpose had to be “exclusively educational in nature, and shall in no case involve the carrying on of propaganda or the advocating or opposing of pending or proposed legislation.”
Since 1953, many have worked on Labor Law Group projects. For more on the Labor Law Group’s history, see Bodie (2013), Dunsford (2000, pg. 825-28), and the Labor Law Group papers at the University of Minnesota.