SHULMAN, HARRY

SHULMAN, HARRY (1903–1955), U.S. lawyer and dean of Yale Law School. Shulman was born in Krugloye, Russia, and taken to the U.S. in 1912. From 1929 to 1930 he served as law clerk to Justice *Brandeis. He was special counsel to the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board during 1934–36. Shulman became professor of law at Yale in 1940, and shortly before his death was named dean of the Yale Law School. Along with his academic career, Shulman was reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law of Torts (1937–39), and a member of the U.S. Attorney General's Committee on Administrative Procedure (1941–42), actively contributing to the modernization and reform of the administrative process in the U.S. Shulman's most important professional accomplishment was his pioneering work as a labor arbitrator, and particularly his significant years of service (1943–55) as the umpire charged with the final interpretation of the labor contract between the Ford Motor Co. and the United Automobile Workers, c.i.o. In this role he established innovative processes for peaceful and legal solutions to labor-management conflicts and collective bargaining. Shulman believed that the labor arbitrator should not merely take an objective position in the construction of the terms of a labor contract but rather had to become an integral part of the collective bargaining process. His Holmes Lecture at Harvard Law School (1955), "Reason, Contract and Law in Labor Relations," was evaluated as a major contribution to the institutional development of collective bargaining. Shulman was a specialist in torts, federal jurisdiction, administrative law, and trade regulations, as well as in labor law. He wrote, with F. Frankfurter, Cases on Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure (1937); with F. James, Jr., Cases on Torts (1942); and with N.W. Chamberlain, Cases on Labor Relations (1949).

bibliography:

F. Frankfurter, Of Law and Men (1956), 253–6.

[Julius J. Marcke]