Faculty image Theodore Joseph St. Antoine James E. & Sarah A. Degan Professor Emeritus of Law Law School
Biography

Theodore J. (“Ted”) St. Antoine is the James E. & Sarah A. Degan Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan. He was born on May 29, 1929 in St. Albans, Vermont. St. Antoine is a graduate of Fordham College, summa cum laude, and Michigan Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. Following service in the Army JAG Corps in the Pentagon, he did postgraduate study in law and economics on a Fulbright grant at the London School of Economics.

For seven years St. Antoine practiced law with Woll, Mayer & St. Antoine in Washington, D.C., representing the AFL-CIO and several international unions. He then joined the Michigan law faculty in 1965. He was Dean of the Law School in 1971-78. His teaching specialties were labor and employment law and the basic course in contracts. He has written extensively on collective bargaining and labor arbitration.

St. Antoine has been a labor arbitrator for about 40 years and was President of the National Academy of Arbitrators in 1999-2000. He is also a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the American Arbitration Association.  He is a past Secretary and Council member of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section and a past Chair of the Michigan Bar’s Labor and Employment Law Section. He was a member of the UAW’s Public Review Board for 35 years and its Chairperson for the last eight. He was Chair of the UAW-GM Legal Services Plan from 1983 to 1995 and is a past member and Chair of the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board. He has also been elected to the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. In Ann Arbor he was the initial Chair of the Arbor Hospice Foundation.

St. Antoine is co-editor of a leading labor law casebook, now in its twelfth edition, and editor of the National Academy of Arbitrators’ The Common Law of the Workplace: The Views of Arbitrators (1998, 2005). He has been a visiting professor at Cambridge, Duke, George Washington, Illinois, and Tokyo Universities and has taught at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. He has also lectured widely in Europe and China on American labor law and arbitration.

 St. Antoine is married to the former Elizabeth Lloyd Frier. The couple has four children, Arthur, Claire Mercurio, Paul, and Sara Kelsey, and seven grandchildren. St. Antoine is an avid sports fan but totally unathletic himself. His extracurricular interests include classical music, the theater, reading (literary novels, modern poetry, detective fiction), and foreign travel.

Curriculum Vitae
Memoirs

My deanship at the Law School will best be remembered for my having dug a big hole in one corner of our famous Gothic Quadrangle -- and leaving it to my successor, Terry Sandalow, to fill it up.  At least I managed to still a storm of protest from alumni and many faculty at the originally proposed glass and steel addition by directing that the whole thing be placed underground. It became the quite handsome, and even naturally well-lighted, Allan F. and Alene Smith Library.

Despite that, I took greatest personal pride in carrying on the work of my immediate predecessor, Frank Allen, to promote a more diverse and productive faculty. One of my favorite moments was receiving a phone call from Harry Edwards, our first African-American appointee, who had been stolen away by Harvard, telling me he now realized he had made the mistake I had warned him against, and asking whether my offer still stood for him to return "home." Another pet moment -- which causes many persons a double-take as I describe it -- was when I ordered our sign-painter to remove "Faculty" from the door to the restroom nearest most Hutchins Hall offices and replace it with "Men."

During the regimes of Frank Allen, Terry Sandalow, and myself, I do believe the facutly became not only more diverse by race and gender, but more scholarly and more productive. Indeed, so many interdisciplinary figures -- in economics, sociology, psychology, history, and even English and classics -- were added that at a certain point I began to feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein: mere lawyers with briliant law school and practice records but little scholarly writing had a hard time competing for positions with Ph.D.s brandishing impressive dissertations as well as their J.D.s.

 

 

 

 

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