SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland on NLRB appeals

Merrick Garland (public domain).

According to CNN, Pres. Obama will nominate Merrick Garland, Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for the current SCOTUS vacancy left by Justice Scalia. I'm sure we'll get plenty of press coverage.

For now (and because this is an employment law blog), I'm going to recommend Hannah Belitz's post, The Supreme Court Vacancy and Labor: Merrick Garland on the On Labor blog. The takeaway? In 18 of 22 appeals from NLRB decisions in which Judge Garland drafted the majority opinion, he "upheld the entirety of the NLRB’s decision finding that an employer had committed unfair labor practices." In two of the other four, he "upheld the aspects of the NLRB’s decisions that were favorable to the union involved, and overturned only the part of the NLRB’s decision in each case that was favorable to the employer . . . . In only one case was Judge Garland’s decision mostly favorable to the employer and not the union." Even in that one case, "Judge Garland overturned two of the NLRB’s findings of unfair labor practices but upheld a third."