Labor Law For All
Through its decisions and rulemakings, the National Labor Relations Board creates the labor law that governs unionization and worker rights in the private sector. But this law is impossible to access for most people.
The NLRB releases its decisions, memos, and other legal documents on its website, but not in a way that is conducive to fast and effective research. Commercial legal research services like Westlaw and Lexis organize some of these NLRB documents into their databases, but these services charge users thousands of dollars per year.
The NLRB Research database is a collection of all of the legal documents released by the NLRB on its website. It includes:
- Supreme Court Decisions
- Published and Unpublished Board Decisions
- Administrative Law Judge Decisions
- Appellate Briefs
- General Counsel and Advice Memos
- Agency Manuals
The database stays up to date by automatically downloading any new documents released on the NLRB website. At present, the database has over 90,000 documents in it, with that number increasing every week.
Users can find specific documents by searching for dates, names, case numbers, and legal citations. They can also do a text search that will locate all of the documents that contain certain words or phrases. The search engine handles complex query logic and is lightning fast, with most searches completing in less than 0.1 seconds.
The ability to search all of these documents at the same time is valuable and is not possible in any other legal research service, including Westlaw and Lexis. A user looking for guidance on a specific topic might find that their search matches a Supreme Court decision, a dozen NLRB decisions, a couple of advice memos, and the casehandling manual – all from a single query. The database contains the full text of each document as well as an AI-generated summary of each document.
When it comes to labor law, NLRB Research should be of value to legal professionals and academics as well as rank-and-file workers and union representatives. The latter group, union representatives, should find it especially useful as their job often requires them to confront legal issues without having access to any legal research resources.
Who Made This
NLRB Research was created by Matt Bruenig, a labor lawyer and public policy expert. Bruenig wrote all of the code that populates the database and built this website using Simon Willison’s datasette software. Andrew Ross built the advanced search tool.
Bruenig has been a practicing labor lawyer since 2014 and has worked for the Machinists Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Auto Workers, and the National Labor Relations Board. He is most well known for founding the People's Policy Project.
Bruenig currently runs the NLRB Edge newsletter where he covers legal developments at the NLRB and represents individuals and unions at the NLRB.
Contact him at matt@nlrbedge.com.