Remembering Local 1330α Staughton Lynd* There’s a well nigh irrepressible desire to fill my portion of the hour with war stories. But I’m going to limit myself to two. In January 1980, we filed our lawsuit and Judge Lambros set a mid-March trial date. US Steel in its infinite arrogance announced that it was going to close its Youngstown facilities about a week before the case was to go to trial. And so the forces of good delegated former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and me to go to Cleveland and get an injunction. Ramsey, as you know, is a very tall man. Judge Lambros is a short man. And I learned that morning how you address former attorney generals, because when Ramsey and I walked into the courthouse, we met the Judge. The Judge looked up at Ramsey and said, “Good morning, General.” Seemed like a good beginning, somehow. Our advocacy strategy was that Ramsey would provide a kind of equitable framework and I would talk about what was happening in Youngstown. I will never forget Ramsey’s first words, which were, more or less, “Judge, we have to start with the railroad strike of 1877.” But we got the injunction. Not only did we get the injunction, but Judge Lambros also decided to try the case in Youngstown. That meant that the trial would be a kind of morality play for the community. And there was also a civil procedure issue. Cleveland would have been too far from Pittsburgh to subpoena the chairman of the board and the chief executive officer of U.S. Steel, but Youngstown was close enough. And that’s why we got them all down to our town, flying in separate helicopters like the president and vice president of the United States, in case one went down. My second anecdote has to do with what happened after Judge Lambros had ruled against us and we went down to Cincinnati to argue before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Arthur Kinoy of the Center for Constitutional Rights had filed an amicus brief based on the research of a young colleague named Michael Ratner. Arthur had in addition sought permission from the court to argue as amicus. This isn’t often done, but it just so happened that Judge Edwards, the head of the three-judge panel, knew Arthur. They were friends. I believe that Arthur had won a case called U.S. v. U.S. District Court in front of Judge Edwards.1 And so after I gave my spiel about the nuts and bolts, Arthur got up as amicus. He tried to maintain Joe Singer’s thesis that somehow this property was imbedded in the community, and there were ties between the management of the property and the α
Remarks at Symposium, Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel: 30 Years Later (Feb. 25, 2011), www.legalleft.org/conference/local1330. Staughton Lynd is an historian, lawyer, and longtime activist. A more complete account of the Local 1330 case and its background can be found in his THE FIGHT AGAINST SHUTDOWNS: YOUNGSTOWN'S STEEL MILL CLOSINGS (1983) and in AMERICAN LABOR STRUGGLES AND LAW HISTORIES 367-75 (Kenneth M. Casebeer ed., 2011). 444 F.2d 651 (6th Cir. 1971). *
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