William B. Gould IV

Law professor William B. Gould IV was born on July 16, 1936 in Boston, Massachusetts to Leah F. Gould and William B. Gould III. He received his A.B. degree in 1958 from the University of Rhode Island and his L.L.B. degree in 1961 from Cornell Law School. He also studied at the London School of Economics.

After graduating from law school, Gould was hired as assistant general counsel for the United Auto Workers in Detroit in 1961. He then served as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, D.C. from 1963 to 1965 before going on to work as an associate at Battle, Fowler, Stokes & Kheel in New York City until 1968. He served as a consultant to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1966 and was selected as a member of the first Fact-Finding Board established under the New York Taylor Law in 1967. In 1968, Gould was hired as a professor of law at Wayne State Law School in Detroit. He then was hired as a professor of law at Stanford Law School in 1972, where he was named the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law in 1984. In Gould’s litigation of Stamps v. Detroit Edison (1973), his clients received the largest per capita employment discrimination judgment at the time. Later, Gould was selected as a salary arbitrator for the 1992-1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball (MLB) Players Association and the MLB Player Relations Committee. He was appointed a member of the On the Future of Worker/Management Relations Commission of the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Commerce in 1993 and a member of the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States in 1994. From 1994 to 1998, Gould served as chair of the NLRB, where he helped to negotiate the end of the 1994-95 MLB strike. Gould retired from Stanford in 2002. In 2011, he was appointed a consultant and special advisor to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on project labor agreements. From 2014 to 2017, Gould served as chair of the California Agricultural Relations Board. Gould has arbitrated and mediated more than three hundred labor disputes.

Gould is the author of over eleven books, including A Primer on American Labor Law (1982); Labored Relations: Law, Politics and the NLRB–A Memoir (2000); and Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (2002).

Gould was appointed secretary of the Labor and Employment Law Section of the American Bar Association in 1980. Gould is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators.

Gould has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and five honorary doctorates.

Gould and his wife, Hilda, live in Palo Alto, California. They have three sons, William B. Gould V, Timothy Gould, and Edward Gould.

William B. Gould IV was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on June 28, 2022.