The right to freely associate with one another. The ability to engage in collective bargaining so workers could shape their own destinies. The right to protest without fear of retaliation. Gould counts off the promises of America’s founding labor law, passed in 1935. “But, as I point out in my new book and a number of my other books and articles, it has become such a failure.” I loved it, and I love it to this day,” says Gould. It was like a mosaic with so many different portions to it. “The statute-the National Labor Relations Act-was and is so intellectually fascinating. He found spiritual satisfaction in the study of labor law-and intellectual inspiration. It was 1960 and I earned the princely sum of $80 per week.” “I was really excited by this opportunity. And subsequent to his professor’s recommendation, Gould was offered a summer job at the UAW’s general counsel office. He heard Walter Reuther, then president of the United Auto Workers, speak on campus-and was inspired by him. And I wrote a paper that brought me to my professor’s attention,” Gould recalls.

“Of course, I took to it like a fish takes to water. Gould was fortunate to find a mentor at Cornell University Law School in his 1L legal research professor Kurt Hanslowe, who devised a problem for the class that combined labor with civil rights law. That made me look in the direction of union law,” he says. And some of the unions, like the industrial unions that emerged in the 1930s, were promoters of civil rights and equality. “Some unions were an obstacle to desegregation. He understood what it meant to be a laborer and saw unions as progressive-but also as tools to keep minorities and women out of good-paying jobs. During summer breaks, Gould worked at the A&P grocery store lifting heavy boxes-and then, as a member of the Utility Workers Union, breaking up roads with a pick and shovel. Gould studied history and political science at the University of Rhode Island and met Marshall after the justice visited campus. Of course, Thurgood Marshall’s picture was on the cover of Time magazine, and I followed the cases that he was arguing very closely.” And these events heightened my interest in the law. “I had this interest in religion that sort of linked to law. My father brought me up with the idea that, as the Book of Common Prayer says, ‘Come unto me, all you that travail, that work and are heavy laden,’” Gould says.

“I had been attracted to the Episcopal priesthood. Board of Education, and Gould’s path in life became clear to him. “My father worked at Fort Monmouth, which was the installation that was being investigated by McCarthy, so we had personal experience with that.” “At the end of the school day, the principal and I would watch together,” Gould recalls of the televised hearings held to investigate conflicting accusations between Senator Joseph McCarthy and the U.S. William (“Bill”) Gould with President Clinton He was one of only two Black students in the college prep track at Long Branch High School in New Jersey when the Army-McCarthy hearings took place.

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