Of voice, charisma, and the bottom line

THE BETRAYAL OF LOCAL 14: PAPERWORKERS, POLITICS, AND PERMANENT REPLACEMENTS. By Julius Getman. Ithaca, New York: ILR Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 259. $30.00.

In a career that will soon span four decades, Jack Getman has done four things that most legal scholars never do. He has (twice) published

books based on his own quantitative and qualitative field-based research.1 He has reached the pinnacle of the law school prestige hierarchy (tenure at Stanford and then Yale) and voluntarily stepped down from it.2 He has gone on record with a deeply felt, book-length critique of the intellectual life of the legal academy.3 And, in the course of doing the latter, he has told us a great deal about himself.

Getman portrays himself as an anti-elitist academic, shaped by the conflicting influences of a garment-worker father who craved formal education and a mother who mocked it. He was slow as a child to embrace books and ideas because he saw "intellectuals" as soft, humorless, fastidious boys who "couldn't throw a ball twenty yards."4 In the course of his teaching career, he has found elite law schools and other legal institutions frustrating and wrong-headed because their elitism leads them to prefer theory to fact, professional voices to grassroots voices. He has authored a significant body of labor law scholarship that is motivated by the belief that the answers to labor law's most important questions are found close to the ground, in the perspectives and experiences of ordinary working people.5 In his writings, the experts whose lessons he conveys are not fellow academics. Instead, they are the union organizers and leaders whose work he has come to know and respect.6