William B. Gould IV

Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor

William is the author of Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor discusses his great grandfather, William Benjamin Gould, who was enslaved and later escaped, served in the United States Navy from 1862 until the end of the Civil War, and whose diary was the basis for his book.

[Recorded January 14, 2021.]

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      William B. Gould IV is Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School. A prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law, Gould has been an influential voice in worker–management relations for more than fifty years and served as Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB, 1994–98) and subsequently Chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (2014-2017). Professor Gould has been a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1970. As NLRB Chairman, he played a critical role in bringing the 1994–95 baseball strike to its conclusion and has arbitrated and mediated more than three hundred labor disputes, including the 1992 and 1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee. He served as Secretary, Labor and Employment Law Section, American Bar Association (1980-81) as well as Independent Monitor for FirstGroup America, addressing freedom-of-association complaints (2008–10). Gould also served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on project labor agreements (2011–12). A critically acclaimed author of ten books and more than sixty law review articles, Professor Gould is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions to the fields of labor law and labor relations.


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