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.

His parents were farmers, and the Summers family moved to Colorado; South Dakota; and Tecumseh, Nebraska, before settling in Winchester, Illinois, in 1929.

His mother died that same year.

Summers attended high school in Winchester, and entered the University of Illinois at the age of 16.

There, he earned a Bachelor of Science in accounting in 1939 and subsequently attended the University's college of law where he graduated with a J.D. (cum laude) in 1942.

While an undergraduate and law student, Summers became active in the Methodist Student Movement and became a believer in the social gospel.

Summers' brother had enlisted in the United States Army at the beginning of World War II.

But Summers, opposed to the use of force, declared himself a conscientious objector.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Summers wrote numerous "ground-breaking" articles for law reviews that discussed how labor unions were violating their members' rights and the lack of democratic procedures and due process in union constitutions and processes.

The Illinois State Bar Association admitted he was of high moral character and exhibited excellent knowledge of the law, but denied him admission in 1942 due to his conscientious objector status.

He taught law at the University of Toledo from 1942 to 1945.

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.

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.

They had two sons and two daughters.

Summers earned a Master of Laws in 1946 and a Doctor of Science in law in 1952, both from Columbia University.

His 1947 article, "The Right to Join a Union", proved to be a critical piece in the development of his legal thinking, because it advocated that union members do not merely gain the right to work on a job but gain the right to actively participate in the union's decision-making processes.

He taught law at the University of Buffalo from 1949 to 1956.

While at Buffalo, Summers was also employed by the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers to teach labor law to union members, and represented union members in arbitration hearings.

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.

His 1952 ACLU report helped frame the legislative proposals the Senate Select Committee considered as its work came to an end.

He taught law at Yale Law School from 1956 to 1975, but left after he felt marginalized by the faculty there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The New York legislation Summers helped write became the basis for Title V of the Act.

His testimony before the Senate "played a pivotal role in the Senate's narrow vote, during the next session of Congress, to add a Union Members' Bill of Rights to the bill..."

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.

Summers' work was critical to the drafting and passage of the Landrum–Griffin Act of 1959.

He joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1975, where he was Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law.

He retired in 2005 at the age of 87.

"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."

Summers was born in Grass Range, Montana.