Harry H. Wellington | Yale Law School dean, 84

Harry H. Wellington, 84, whose half-century of studying and teaching law included a decade as dean of Yale Law School and eight years as dean of New York Law School, died Monday of a brain tumor at his home in New York.

Mr. Wellington made an early mark in labor law, enlivening what could be a drab and technical field with vivid ideas that drew on other disciplines and tested first principles. In his 1972 book, The Unions and the Cities, he argued that it could be dangerous to allow public labor unions to become too powerful. The argument, controversial at the time, anticipated the current debate over public unions.

Mr. Wellington was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, and he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. After teaching at Stanford Law School for a year, he joined the Yale law faculty in 1956.

He was dean of Yale Law School from 1975 to 1985. In 1990, after returning to the faculty there, he published Interpreting the Constitution: The Supreme Court and the Process of Adjudication. He was dean of New York Law School from 1992 to 2000.

- New York Times
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