The National Labor Relations Book provides an excellent way for people new to the National Labor Relations Act and National Labor Relations Board to get an initial footing in this area of law, including employment/labor lawyers, law students, union staff, and rank-and-file workers. Even experienced lawyers might find it useful as a reference book, especially because each case summary cites and links to the most recent decisions applying the case.
The National Labor Relations Book takes a novel approach to introducing labor law. Rather than attempt to create a comprehensive legal outline, author Matt Bruenig programmatically identified the 100 most-cited cases in this area of law, found the 100 most-recent cases citing to each of those cases, and then used large language models created by Google and Anthropic to generate legal summaries using those 10,000 cases. This approach is uniquely suited to the purpose of introducing an area of law because it focuses on the points of law that come up the most often. Prior to the invention of large language models, this approach to legal summary would have been too laborious to be feasible.
About the Author
Matt Bruenig is a labor lawyer who has previously worked at the National Labor Relations Board and for a number of major unions, including the Machinists Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the United Auto Workers. Bruenig is a frequent public commentator who has written for most of the major newspapers and magazines in the country. He is also the founder of People's Policy Project, NLRB Edge, and NLRB Research.