Back in the day, when I was at the law school, I had the opportunity to study Labor Law — union/management relations —  with Reynolds Seitz. It was the only “employment law” course in the curriculum at Marquette, and Marquette was quite typical of all law schools. I enjoyed the course very much and so, after my clerkship with Tom Fairchild, I became a management-side labor lawyer until I decided to move into law school teaching. The Dean at my first teaching post told me I would be teaching Torts and Labor Law, but that I had to make up two more courses.  So, I did.  One of them was a new course in Employment Discrimination Law. The area was relatively new, and I had been doing an increasing amount of it in practice. I saw it as interesting, important, and the wave of the future of employment law. I was shocked, however, to discover that at that time less than a handful of law schools had an Employment Discrimination course and that there were no published teaching materials. I had to assemble materials and have them copied and distributed to the students. It was a major effort, and I am glad that, as far as I know, no copies of my original efforts survived to embarrass me.  That challenge, however, became an opportunity. Employment discrimination law became a major focus of my scholarship, and I got several talented colleagues to work with me on several projects. First, we did a treatise, and then we got a contract from what was then Little Brown & Co. to do a casebook. Now published under the Aspen name, but still with the familiar red binding with black print, we are still at it. Our seventh edition was published last year, and we will be doing a supplement this summer. It is still an area that fascinates me and the law continues to struggle to achieve its primary goals of ending and remedying discrimination.

Across all law schools, more students now take Employment Discrimination than any other employment or labor law course. Channeling the union movement, Labor Law is now at risk of being dropped from the curriculum at many schools. Some of us console ourselves by claiming it is now a course in the history of labor law. This coming fall I will be teaching Labor Law at Loyola Chicago, where it has not been taught by a member of the regular faculty in the memory of living humankind. My plan is to try to combine both private and public unionization into one course, though I am not sure if I can pull that off. But combining the two areas reflects the strength that unions retain in the public sector that they lack in the private sector. Labor law will be, for the first time in a long time, in the news as a major political issue. Congress will consider amending the National Labor Relations Act with the Employee Free Choice Act. If enacted, that will allow a union to gain legal recognition by proof that it represents the majority of workers through signed authorization cards.