I am very pleased and honored to welcome you all to theinaugural William R. Stewart Lecture on Labor and Employment Law. The lecture is the first in what will become an annual series in honor of William R. Stewart, a distinguished alumnus of this law school. Bill Stewart's is an inspirational story, one that all of our students should know. A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Mr. Stewart was awarded a BA degree in Government, from Indiana University in 1954. He graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. During his freshman and sophomore years, he worked forty hours a week in the home of University President Herman B. Wells. As an undergraduate, Mr. Stewart also took four years of Reserve Officer Training and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army upon graduation.

Mr. Stewart started law school at Indiana University–Bloomington in the fall of 1954 on a full scholarship, but was called to active duty in October 1955. After two years of duty, during which time he served as the courts and boards officer and assistant adjutant for the Third Armored Division in Germany, Mr. Stewart was promoted to First Lieutenant. In the fall of 1957, Mr. Stewart returned to Indiana University and was granted a JD with distinction in 1959. During law school, he was invited to join the staff of the Indiana Law Journal and was selected to be Note Editor. He was also elected to the Order of the Coif.

Mr. Stewart began his career with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 1963 as a legal assistant on the staff of former Chairman McCulloch. It was during this time that he met and befriended William B. Gould IV as they worked together as young assistants. In 1967, the rank-and-file employees of the NLRB and General Counsel's office selected him to be president of the NLRB Professional Association. He left the agency in 1968 for one year to be the manager of labor relations and equal opportunity for Simmonds Precision Products, Inc., in Tarrytown, New York. Upon his return to Chairman McCulloch's staff in 1969, Mr. Stewart was assigned to the Appellate Court Branch. In 1970, he was again elected to be president of the NLRB Professional Association. Mr. Stewart was promoted to a supervisory position in 1976 and to the position of deputy assistant general counsel in 1978. When William Gould was appointed to be chair of the Board in 1994, he asked Mr. Stewart to be his chief counsel. Mr. Stewart retired from active service with the Board in 1997.

Among the many recognitions and awards Mr. Stewart received during his distinguished career, in 1997 Mr. Stewart was granted the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. In nominating him for this award, Chairman Gould cited Mr. Stewart's "exceptional abilities" as a legal scholar, litigation expert, and manager. Pointing out that Mr. Stewart was the first African American selected as chief counsel in the history of the National Labor Relations Board, Chairman Gould stated,

Throughout his career, Mr. Stewart has served as a role model to lawyers and law students of all economic and social circumstances as well as those young people who may have begun in less advantaged circumstances. He has the rare ability to relate to people of all races and creeds on the enlightened basis that we share a common humanity. He sincerely believes that progress is dependent on hard work and making the most of individual talents, and . . . has consistently insured that all have been given the opportunity to succeed.

In commenting on Mr. Stewart's service to the Board, Chairman Gould remarked, "He has never lost sight of our ultimate goal of providing workplace justice to the American people whom we serve. During these past 3 years of travail and challenge for the agency, Bill Stewart was its heart and soul and mind."

In 1999, Mr. Stewart was inducted into the Indiana University Academy of Law Alumni Fellows, and his picture is on the wall across the hall from the moot courtroom, where he can serve as an inspiration to the students who have come after him.

The William R. Stewart Memorial Fund for Labor and Employment Law has been established in conjunction with the Indiana University Foundation for the purpose of supporting an annual lecture on labor and employment law in honor of Mr. Stewart, and for the support of the labor and employment law program at Indiana University School of Law–Bloomington. The fund has been established with a generous gift and commitment from Stanley Stewart (the brother of Bill Stewart) and the Stewart family.

Stanley Stewart received a BS degree in Economics from Indiana State University. He spent twenty-five years serving as the state program director in Michigan for the Corporation for National Service. Mr. Stewart presently resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan with his wife Dorothy. Since his retirement from federal service, Mr. Stewart has been involved in numerous progressive causes.

Stanley Stewart is joined here in Bloomington today by his daughter, Standish. Standish Stewart received a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, where she played basketball; she also received an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, and she is currently pursuing an MBA degree in Heath Care Administration at Cleveland State University. She has spent the last ten years writing software for the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). The software that she has written and modified has improved the donor matching capabilities at the NMDP. Ms. Stewart, like her uncle and father, is also engaged in supporting progressive causes.

Stanley Stewart wrote to us:

Standish and I are pleased to be able to make a donation to Indiana University. In the 50s when other universities wouldn't, IU gave a poor Black kid from Otter Creek High School the opportunity for a wonderful education, and he took advantage of that opportunity and went on to a very successful career.

My brother loved Indiana University and the University loved him back.

Thank you IU.

No, Mr. Stewart, thank you and your family for this wonderful gift in honor of your brother. Please join me in recognizing and thanking the Stewarts.

There could be no better person to inaugurate this lecture than William Gould. Professor Gould is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus at Stanford Law School, where he has been a professor since 1972. A prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law, Professor Gould has been an influential voice on worker-management relations for over forty years. A 1961 graduate of Cornell Law School, he studied comparative labor law at the London School of Economics from 1962–63. Professor Gould was Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994–98. In awarding him his fifth honorary doctorate, the President of Rutgers University said, "Perhaps more than any other living American . . . [Bill Gould] has contributed to the analysis, the practice, and the transformation of labor law and labor relations."

Professor Gould came to both the faculty at Stanford and to the NLRB with broad experience in labor law, having represented both labor as assistant general counsel of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, and management as an attorney at Battle, Fowler, Stokes & Kheel in New York, New York. He has served on the law faculties of Wayne State, Harvard, Hawaii, and Howard, among others, and at universities around the world, including Churchill College, Cambridge; the University of Tokyo Law Faculty; Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; European University Institute, Florence, Italy; and University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

The author of more than fifty law journal articles and numerous newspaper contributions to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other papers and journals, Professor Gould is also the author of nine books, most recently International Labor Standards: Globalization, Trade, and Public Policy. On a more personal note, he is also the critically acclaimed author of a book about the experiences of his great-grandfather titled Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor, as well as a book about his own Washington story, Labored Relations: Law, Politics, and the NLRB. As a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1970, Professor Gould has arbitrated and mediated more than two hundred labor disputes, including the 1992 and 1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee.

Professor Gould has not only agreed to give the first Stewart lecture this fall, but has also made a gift in honor of Bill Stewart to assure that this series will continue. The title of Professor Gould's presentation is: Independent Adjudication, Political Process, and the State of Labor-Management Relations: The Role of the National Labor Relations Board.

Please join me in welcoming William Gould.