NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD

I. INTRODUCTION 5
Inasmuch as the decision of the Supreme Court in the Morgan
ease 5 during the spring of 1938 also gave rise to a wide revival of
popular and professional interest as to the nature of quasi judicial
agencies and in their methods of administration, it may be helpful
to describe in a general way the manner in which the Board performs
its several functions. When charges are filed by individuals
or labor organizations they are investigated by the Board's field
agents who are subject to the general supervision of the Secretary of
the Board. The Board itself decides whether complaints should be
issued in only a very small proportion of the cases, and then only if
the preliminary investigation indicates that the case involves a particularly
difficult question of fact or law or an important new appli-.
cation of the statutory policy. The members of the Board themselves
are therefore rarely familiar with the details of the case in its
investigative stages, and never at first-hand. When a complaint is
issued, the case is tried by an attorney permanently assigned to a
field office who is directly responsible to an Associate General Counsel.
Neither the attorney nor the Associate General Counsel is in
direct consultation with the Board in connection with the particular
case except when there is an extraordinary development which concerns
the policy of the Board as a whole. Even in the exceptional
case, however, the members of the Board take no further direct interest
in the case after the question of policy has been decided. The
hearing on the complaint is presided over by a trial examiner who is
designated in each case by the Chief Trial Examiner Again there
is no consultation in the particular case between the Board, on the
one hand, and the trial examiner or the Chief Trial Examiner, on the
other unless, again, some new question of policy is' involved. More
significant are the instructions to the staff that there must be no relationship
between the attorney for the Board trying the case and the
trial examiner sitting on it except that which normally exists between
judge and counsel. After the trial examiner issues his intermediate
report, and exceptions thereto are taken by the parties, the case comes
to the Board on the formal record for the making of the statutory
findings of fact, conclusions of law_, and appropriate order. In this
work the Board is assisted, as the Supreme Court has expressly said
administrative agencies may be, by a staff of lawyers under the supervision
of an Assistant General Counsel. In deciding a particular
case on the record there is no consultation between the Board or its
assistants, on the one hand, and the attorney who tried the case or the
trial examiner who heard it, on the other.
This description of the manner in which the Board performs its
duties under the act takes on full meaning only when considered in
the light of the fact that the procedural provisions of the act as a
whole are by no means novel and have been sustained as constitutional
in many Supreme Court precedents. To quote Chief Justice Hughes
in the first case raisin°. the issue under the act, National Labor 1elatons
Board v. Jones ''ce Laughlin Steel Corporation (301 U. S. 1.
46-47) :
The procedural provisions of the act are assailed. But these provisions, as
we construe them, do not offend against the constitutional requirements governing
the creation and action of administrative bodies. See Interstate Commerce
Commission v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co. (227 U. S. 88, 91). The act estab-
5 Morgan v. D. S., 304 U. S. 1 (1938).