A prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law, William B. Gould IV has been an influential voice on worker-management relations for more than forty years and served as Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board (1994-98) and Chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (2014-___). He is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus at Stanford Law School. Professor Gould has been a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators since 1970 and has arbitrated and mediated more than 300 labor disputes. As NLRB Chairman, he and his agency played a critical role in ending the longest strike in baseball history (1994-95)—and he was a salary arbitrator in the 1992 and 1993 salary disputes between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Major League Baseball Player Relations Committee.

In 1966-67, Professor Gould served as Consultant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and, in that connection, conciliated racial discrimination complaints in Alabama and South Carolina. He served as Independent Monitor for FirstGroup America, addressing freedom of association complaints (2008-2011). Professor Gould served as Special Advisor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (2011-2012). Twice, he has served as an Expert Witness for the National Hockey League on issues relating to the extraterritorial application of American labor law. He also served as an Expert Witness for the County of Santa Clara, California on issues relating to the intersection between public sector collective bargaining and political involvement. Professor Gould was a member of the very first Fact-Finding Board established under the New York Taylor Law in 1967.

A critically acclaimed author of ten books and more than sixty law review articles, Professor Gould’s work includes his historical record of the experiences of his great-grandfather in Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor, and his own Washington story, Labored Relations: Law, Politics and the NLRB: A Memoir. A tenth book, Bargaining with Baseball: Labor Relations in an Age of Prosperous Turmoil appeared in 2011. In 2013, the 5th edition of his A Primer on American Labor Law was published by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Gould is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions in the fields of labor law and labor relations. Before joining the Stanford Law School Faculty in 1972, he was a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School and was an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, as well as for United Auto Workers.