Clyde Summers

Clyde Wilson Summers (November 21, 1918 – October 30, 2010) was an American lawyer and educator who advocated for more democratic procedures in labor unions. He helped write the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (also known as the Landrum–Griffin Act or LMRDA) and was highly influential in the field of labor law, authoring more than 150 publications on the issue of union democracy alone. He was considered the nation's leading expert on union democracy. "What Louis Brandeis was to the field of privacy law, Clyde Summers is to the field of union democracy," wrote Widener University School of Law professor Michael J. Goldberg in the summer of 2010. "Summers, like Brandeis, provided the theoretical foundation for an important new field of law."

Early life Summers was born in Grass Range, Montana. His parents were farmers, and the Summers family moved to Colorado; South Dakota; and Tecumseh, Nebraska, before settling in Winchester, Illinois, in 1929.

Career and further education Summers' brother had enlisted in the United States Army at the beginning of World War II. In a highly controversial but important decision, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the denial of admission to the bar in In re Summers, 325 U.S. 561 (1945). Summers later was admitted to the New York State Bar Association.

He taught law at the University of Toledo from 1942 to 1945. In the summer of 1945, although a law professor and no longer a student, he participated in the Chicago YMCA's "Students in Industry," joined union strike picket lines, and protested discrimination against African Americans at local restaurants. While teaching at Toledo, he met and married Evelyn Wahlgren, a music teacher. In the summer of 1949, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked Summers to update the organization's 1943 report, Democracy in Trade Unions. The updated report was published in June 1952. He joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1975, where he was Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law.

As the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management began holding hearings in early 1957 on organized crime's influence in labor unions, Governor of New York Averell Harriman believed a similar commission should be created to address problems in his state. Subsequently, Harriman established the Governor's Committee on Improper Labor and Management Practices and appointed Summers chair. Summers and the committee drafted legislation which eventually became the New York Labor and Management Improper Practices Act of 1958. That same year, Summers drafted a "bill of rights for union members" for the ACLU.

Summers' work was critical to the drafting and passage of the Landrum–Griffin Act of 1959. His 1952 ACLU report helped frame the legislative proposals the Senate Select Committee considered as its work came to an end. In 1957, Harvard Law School professor Archibald Cox was asked by Senator John F. Kennedy to put together a panel of experts to draft labor law reform legislation that would address the issues raised by the Select Committee. The draft legislation which Summers helped write was the foundation of the 1958 Kennedy-Ives Bill, which itself was incorporated into the Landrum–Griffin Act.

For nearly four decades starting in 1969, Summers served on the board of directors of the Association for Union Democracy (AUD), on the invitation of union reformer Herman Benson, whom he had worked closely with in supporting early cases filed under the LMRDA. He participated in two landmark Landrum–Griffin decisions of the US Supreme Court, Trbovich v. United Mine Workers, 404 U.S. 528 (1972) (which upheld the right of union members to intervene in enforcement proceedings brought by the United States Department of Labor) and Dunlop v. Bachowski, 421 U.S. 560 (1975) (which upheld the authority of federal courts to review the Department of Labor's decision to proceed or not proceed with prosecutions under Landrum–Griffin). Indeed, he wrote most of the legal brief in Trbovich. He also testified in a federal RICO prosecution against Teamsters Local 506, a favorable decision which eventually led to the establishment of federal trusteeship over the entire international union in 1989. His 1960 casebook, Labor Relations and the Law, is considered a labor law "classic". His 1998 casebook, Labor Law, Cases and Materials, "is one of the few casebooks to provide a thorough discussion of union democracy."

Death Summers died at a retirement home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on October 30, 2010, from complications of a stroke. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, and two sons.

Publications Articles 'The Right to Join a Union', Columbia Law Review, (1947) 47, p.33 ‘The Public Interest in Union Democracy’, Northwestern Law Review, (1958) 53, p.610 'Worker Participation in the U.S. and West Germany: A Comparative Study from an American Perspective’, American Journal of Comparative Law, (1980) 28, p.367 ‘Democracy in a one party state: perspectives from Landrum Griffin’, Maryland Law Review, (1984) 43, p.93