Revisiting old Values

Baldy Center conference pays tribute to Professor Atleson's seminal book

SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, James B. Atleson

A daylong gathering of legal scholars and historians at UB Law School paid tribute to Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus James Atleson and celebrated the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking analysis of labor law.

Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, published in 1983 by the University of Massachusetts Press, is widely considered to be one of the most important contributions to labor law scholarship of the late 20th century.

In the book, Atleson describes a set of rarely expressed values that underlie American labor law and help to explain the judicial and administrative decisions reached in the field. Legal decisions, he argues, can be understood through such factors as notions of inherent property rights, the need for capital mobility and employers' interest in continuing productivity.

Those ideas have challenged a generation of law students and scholars, and the "25th Anniversary Retrospective" conference, an undertaking of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, brought together scholars from throughout the United States and Canada to examine the book's impact on legal studies and labor history.

The conference, two years in the making, was organized by UB Law Professors Dianne Avery, Fred Konefsky, Robert J. Steinfeld and James Wooten. They also served as moderators for panel discussions on praxis, ideology, history and transnational legal norms, the last reflecting Atleson's late-career interest in international labor law.

Reflecting on Atleson's interview with UB Law's Oral History Project, Konefsky reflected: "He approached problems as a teacher. He believed that learning and grasping the underlying questions is just as important a skill as legal analysis and reason. Jim is possessed of a kind of withering skepticism. He does not accept the conventional wisdom. Even in the most casual conversation, Jim always wants to know why. And finally, there is an unmistakable passion for social justice."

Labor historian Steinfeld, in introducing the history panel, said: "I have always considered Values and Assumptions to be above all else a great work of historical excavation or legal archaeology, which exposed the deep continuities that connected modern labor laws in shocking ways to the old explicitly hierarchical English and American master and servant law."

Virginia A. Seitz '85, Sidley & Austin, Washington, D.C

Presenters in the symposium included academics affiliated with Washington University, the University of Connecticut, Georgetown, Rutgers, Cornell and Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, Toronto, as well as the National Labor Relations Board. Representing practicing lawyers was UB Law alumna Virginia Seitz '85, a partner in the law firm Sidley & Austin, in Washington, D.C.

"As I have practiced law," Seitz said, "I have realized this book is a tool kit for the practicing lawyer to effectively represent his or her clients. It has lessons in how to analyze specific labor law issues; lessons about how to examine the common-law origins of almost any area of law and use them to make effective arguments in your case; and lessons in general methods of case law analysis. It works in almost any area of practice."

As outside labor counsel to the Major League Baseball Players Association, Seitz discussed a recent dispute over whether the baseball owners' ability to eliminate small-market teams was subject to mandatory bargaining with the players union. "Every argument we made," Seitz said, "was directed at demonstrating that baseball is a different enough industry that the court should recognize exactly what the traditional values and assumptions are, and know and understand why they were not applicable in the case of the contraction of a baseball team. This was a completely successful strategy on the association's part, to make these arguments distinguishing baseball from other industries, and I attribute our ability to see they were there, to dissect a partial plant closing case and see what was behind it and distinguish the situation, to Jim's book."

Professor Atleson, accompanied by family members, spoke at the end of the day, expressing appreciation and reflecting on the genesis of Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law.

"One really does not know where ideas come from," Atleson said. "The ideas behind this book certainly did not come from my legal education. This was before Critical Legal Studies; this was before the Law & Society Association."

He noted that Values and Assumptions was considered, then rejected, by two publishers before it found a home. He acknowledged his reputation as a contrarian in labor law studies, saying that footnotes in academic journals began "But see Atleson" so often that "I thought my first name was But See."

And he remembered arriving at UB Law School. "When I came here," he said, "I was 26 years old. I had one month to go before I would have to make some terrible choices about whether I would go to Vietnam or jail or Canada. I had one important month to get through till I was 27; that was the magic age."

The Army did not call, and Atleson carved out a distinguished career in the company of his fellow UB Law scholars. "This school has been very important to me," he said. "I do not think I could have written what I have written if I had been at any other school. The amount of intellectual excitement and support at this place is certainly more than at any other school I know of."