The decision last month by the National Labor Relations Board to order union elections in nine of Yale’s academic departments put one long-running legal dispute to rest — but it may also have paved the way for another.

In the decision, NLRB Regional Director John Walsh did not clarify whether masters and professional students in the nine departments — a group that will be eligible to vote in six of the nine departmental elections — will have their votes counted, setting up a potential eligibility dispute much like the one that has prolonged the ongoing union election process at Harvard.

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tanford law professor and former NLRB Chairman William Gould said the NLRB’s Local 33 ruling did not resolve the eligibility of masters and professional students because doing so would be time-consuming and might delay the elections.

“What the board will often do is once the vote comes in, then they will see what the margin of victory or defeat for the union is, and whether the challenges would affect that outcome,” Gould said.

If the number of challenged ballots proved greater than the margin deciding one of the elections, the NLRB would have to determine whether each individual master’s and professional student was eligible to vote, he said.

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Still, in an interview, Gould defended the NLRB’s eligibility rules, saying it would be “impossible to speculate” about whether certain ineligible students in the nine departments might teach in the future.

“There would be no way that you could address that in an evidentiary hearing,” Gould said.