Transcript:

I was in Bill’s very last class that he taught as a full time member of the Stanford faculty, and I still remember what he said to the class that morning. He kind of paused and looked down and said, class, I got up this morning and turned to my wife and I said, I don’t know what I’m going to say this morning.

And my wife said to me the exact same thing she said to me on my very first day of teaching, which was, I’m sure you’ll think of something. And boy, was that true. Even in his classes, what really struck me as something different about Professor Gould was the way he would understand the importance of the cases to people.

And there are a lot of different teaching styles. Professors love to talk about hypotheticals and we’re going from one case to the next case to the next case. But with Bill Gould, it was always about understanding the impact of labor law cases on people. And it was not a matter of saying, well, he’s for the workers and he’s against business.

It was he understood and he could speak with great clarity and great consistency and just great authenticity. Things like donning and doffing rules in, in, in labor. He knew what they were. He had been active with the UAW. He’d been active as, as, as a labor lawyer. He brought that into the classroom. And later on, when I became dean of a law school, I looked to that.

I looked to the, the genuineness of law law professors experiences. It’s one thing to come from. a top school, be editor in chief of the Law Review, go off to be clerking and multiple clerkships, and then come in to teach. It’s another thing the way Bill Gould did it, which was through practicing in critically important areas in the 60s and in labor law, and then going into becoming a law professor.

But he really brought that experience into the classroom. He, he, he not only just making him more lively. But also bringing the authenticity of having represented individuals having presented cases before the boards of on labor law and that made a real difference to my understanding of the law and what the kind of lawyer that I wanted to be.

I was actually thinking about an experience that I had as a student of Bill’s teaching excellence in this conversation, which is we had, you know, Stanford has students who are, you know, contrarians for the sake of being contrarians. And there was one of those in the labor law class that I took with Bill and he was teaching a case that the name is escaping me now, but it was a Supreme Court case involving unreasonably dangerous conditions for workers.

And one of the students said something about how, you know, is it really good use of the Supreme Court’s resources to, you know, adjudicate this, like, individual worker safety issue? It was an outrageous question, in my opinion, and I could see Professor Gould’s demeanor change. I could, I, I thought I was, you know, he, he kind of like puffed up a little bit and walked a little closer to the student and I was like, Oh, geez, what’s about to happen but he really just very skillfully using the Socratic method ask some questions back to the student and had a discussion with the student that like teased out the issues and I don’t know what the students conclusion was at the end of that, but I think for me watching it was very impressive way to handle somebody who obviously thought very differently than I did and thought very differently than Bill Gould did about the importance of workers and their lives and their safety and their experience at work and then.

You know, these are the, the very issues that the courts, including the Supreme Court, should be spending their time on and he was able to do that in a way that was not you know, that, that was neutral, that was, had integrity, had intellectual integrity and educational value to it and was a very skilled teaching demonstration of very skilled teaching and what I thought were kind of pretty difficult circumstances with the students in the class.

I’m Scott Whitlin. I’m class of 1988 from the law school. I’m a partner practicing labor and employment law at Barnes and Thornburg here in Los Angeles. And I was a student of Bill’s in 86. I remember it distinctly for reasons that’ll become obvious and 87, and I think in the fall and the spring of 87, and the spring of, and the spring of 88.

And I was Bill’s research assistant in 1986 and 87. I mean, he was always so approachable. Both during and after class, he was never a teacher who wanted to humiliate the students through the Socratic method or anything else. He, at least for me, I think it’s true of my colleagues. You wanted to participate in his class because he brought such enthusiasm, such intellect to it, and he always was able to turn something into a teachable moment.

I mean, of course, there were students who hadn’t done their reading or hadn’t been adequately prepared, but again, he wouldn’t humiliate them. He would turn it into a teachable moment. He would find a way to draw that student into the discussion in class. And I just thought, again, that was just remarkable.

Because I think we’ve all had our share of, you know, the humiliating type of professors, not just in law school, but as undergraduate. And, you know, that warmth and that approachability, I think was also a part of, you know, developing my interest as if this is the kind of person who’s not only a labor law professor, but a practitioner.

I mean, he practiced law with UAW here in Michigan and otherwise, even before I became a professor, if that’s the kind of person who wants to be a labor lawyer and is a labor lawyer, that’s the kind of person I want to be. I would draw folks out. Not in a humiliating or degrading fashion, but he was just terrific at that.

And I think that, you know, increased the popularity of his course and it meant he was approachable. You didn’t, you didn’t feel scared to go to his office as intimidated as the stacks were. He was not intimidating and it was always a wonderful experience to go see him. After class. One of the reasons I went to Stanford as opposed to Harvard Law School or other schools was I thought of a smaller environment like that with people like Bill for what I knew about him even before I met him.

It would be a more enjoyable environment as a student, and I generally found that that even the toughest professors like we’re interested in. in humiliating the students. Professor Kevin was great. And there are a lot of other professors like that too. But again my experience in law school was far better than, you know, you see in the crazy movies, like the paper chase with a professor Canfield and all that kind of stuff.

And, and Bill really epitomized that kind of humanity, humane teaching method. But again, positively affected me for the rest of my life. You know, I think what the way that Bill is described, and I never took his course because we were there, we were there before him, but I would agree that what you’ve just how you describe Bill, I Not sure how successful I was, but that’s, you know, that’s what I, that’s what I strive towards.

When I asked you about small classes, I mean, all of my classes were, I never had a class more than about 20, I think, at Stanford because they were all elective courses based on my What I’ve been doing in the government, but I also found that if you had a class that was 15, 20, 20, you know, people that you could you know, I think Bill just naturally did it that way, but I think smaller classes did lead to that, as opposed, you know, from what I hear about lectures at places like Harvard Law School with 300 people there. Yeah, I had Bill, you know, in two different kinds of environments. I had the introductory labor law class, and when I took it in 86, it was, I remember it as being bigger than, than 30.

I think it was about 50 or so people. It was also at 8, 8:30 or 8:40 in the morning. I’m not exactly sure why it was so early. But I distinctly have the recollection of one of my roommates former roommates coming into class, and I could always tell if he had just rolled out of bed because it was, you know, he would be in a baseball cap and sweats, and I could say, oh, Kevin just, kevin didn’t have time to take a shower this morning before, before Bill’s class. But in those classes, Bill would lecture and he may have had notes, but he would appear apparently lecture extemporaneously, you know, he’d walk away from the podium and lecture extemporaneously and he’d be talking about something.

And then all of a sudden in the middle of his lecture, he would go footnote and then he would go literally dropping off as if, you know, having read his. You know, rough drafts of his manuscript, literally as if it were a manuscript. And then he discussed the footnote and then returned back to the middle of his argument as or middle of his lecture topic.

I’d never seen it done before. I’ve never seen it done since. But you know, that’s, that’s Bill’s encyclopedic knowledge. We’ve heard a lot about Bill in the small classes and how wonderful he was in that context. You were talking about a larger class of 50 or 60 and you talked about what a great, you know, how great it was as a lecturer.

How did he draw people in to make the class seem like, that it seemed like it was a smaller class than a class of 60 people? My recollection is he would lecture and then he would raise issues and he’d ask questions and, and, you know, I don’t remember anybody. Being Socratic it at Stanford when I was there by the time we got there, you know, people thought that was just, you know, inhumane and it adopted and, you know, asking questions and trust, but not really in a, in a Socratic method.

And he didn’t. Nobody got called on. I don’t remember anybody getting called on at Stanford, you know, sort of. You know, out of the blue, Mr. Whitlin, tell us about this case. And whether or not we were better for it or worse for it, you could, you could make arguments. But you know, Bill would talk about issues.

I remember him talking about the Jacksonville freight case and which is you know, a boycott case where the, you know, the issue was, you know, was it a prohibited secondary boycott because the workers were boycotting I don’t know. I think they were Russian ships at the time because they were really engaged in a political protest and not a, not really a, a strike and discussing the the merits of that. So I remember, you know, him asking about things and drawing people out. I will say this, it was not my best grade in law school, which you know, may be surprising. And I, and Bill would probably say I didn’t learn anything in this class because I represent management in, in labor relations.

But you know Bill will also tell everyone that he is a neutral. And you know, he’s lived that life, you know, he’s been an arbitrator, head of the National Labor Relations Board, head of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and, and really you know, sees work as in a fascinating field of both life and, and academic endeavor.

So I’m Chris Hu. I’m an associate at Horvitz and Levy, which is an appellate law firm in California. I graduated from Stanford in 2013, and I know Bill because I worked as a research assistant for him for about a year and a half, and I also took his labor law class. So one, one funny thing I was thinking about is, is that in addition to being his research assistant I was, while I was his research assistant, I was, I took his labor law class, and he he used me as a sort of unofficial teaching assistant for the class.

So while I was enrolled in the class, he was also asking me to, You know, continually update the syllabus with new decisions as they were coming out. And so I was sort of playing dual roles in the class, which was funny. When I came in for my interview for teaching the research assistant job, I of course knew who he was.

I had read his book, the primer on labor law, that past summer, because I had been working at a union side labor firm. So I saw the job announcement for the research assistant position. I was really excited to apply. But when I walked into his office, I really didn’t know what to expect. I’d never met him before.

Took me a little while to find his office. And then when I walked in, I wasn’t sure, initially, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. It was, there was a lot going on in the office. You know, books everywhere, papers everywhere. And then, yeah, I walked in and met him and it was just the start of a, you know, really wonderful experience.

I worked on an update to his book and I, I helped him, you know, reading and summarizing new labor law opinions as they came out. But more than anything, I, I just came to, I had, you know, appointments with him every week and I would go in and sometimes he didn’t have a formal project for me. Sometimes it was just an opportunity for us to spend time talking, whether it was about you know, his work on an LRB or about you know, our, our shared interest in sports or really about anything. And so it was a job, but it really turned into a personal relationship as well. I felt really privileged to work for him, but he’s such a warm person.

He didn’t make it seem that way. Like he made it seem like we really, you know, he was my boss, but he didn’t you know, it’s not as if he has a big ego. He didn’t, it’s not as if he was always talking about, Oh, I used to be on the national labor relations board. He’s very modest person. And so, you know, I was, I was odd to be, you know, in his presence, but he’s very down to earth and, and very humble person.

So you know, it made it easier for me to get to know him, even though he was much more senior than me and much more accomplished than me as a student. I don’t know whether I’ve ever would have. Thought to think of myself as really his colleague, but I think in practice we sort of became collaborators so we were we were working on updates to one of his books, and we were really working on it together so he would a new opinion would come out that he’d want to work into his book.

And he would ask me for my opinion, you know, he wasn’t didn’t just treat me as someone who was going to you know, take what he told me and write it up, you know, he wanted to know what I thought we were at that time, there were, there was a lot of interest in sort of the interaction between traditional labor law and social media, which was new at that time.
So whether it could be protected activity to post on Facebook about your conditions of employment. And, you know, naturally he was very interested in what I thought about social media and how it might interact with traditional labor law principles. And then for the NLRB opinions, you know, from the nineties that we were discussing, many of which were really important to the topic were ones that he had personally participated on, you know, or even, and so I, you know, it was, I personally had like, was had a person, I had a personal interest in labor law, so I was just inherently interested in the topic.

But he really made it come alive because he had, he had lived through all of it. And I think that you said that during the words you used, when you were talking about his teaching, you said he was a whirlwind of ideas. Definitely. Yeah. I think whirlwind of ideas is, is a, it’s a great phrase to describe him in part because, you know, he wasn’t someone who taught labor law as a static subject where all these principles were settled and there was nothing new happening.

You know, every day there are new opinions coming out and he would always be changing the syllabus coming, you know, wanting to work in new material because he, I think correctly, saw labor law as a dynamic field that’s always changing. And not only was he a whirlwind in the classroom, he was a whirlwind in like what the syllabus contains.

So as, you know, as, as the law changed, he wanted to change what he was teaching too. And that made it really exciting.