This study examines over 100 collective bargaining agreements, covering a wide range of professions and organizations, to assess the continuing fundamental debate over the compatibility of unionization with professionalism. The author finds that some contractual provisions affecting professional standards, participation in organizational decision-making, and other issues of professional concern support traditional professional values and some do not. This mixed evidence challenges claims that unionization necessarily involves the rejection of professionalism. DEBATE over the compatibility of unionization with professionalism has accompanied the dramatic growth of collective bargaining by professional employees during the past three decades. Many people, including many professional employees themselves, believe that the selection of a union entails the rejection of key professional values, such as collegial participation in organizational decision-making, professional independence from hierarchical control, and expectations of performance and rewards based on individual merit.Many others, by contrast, claim that collective bargaining is often the most effective method of achieving and maintaining these same professional values, even under a system of labor law that imposes barriers to bargaining over professional issues and that may not cover professional employees who play a significant role in institutional governance.'

I began this article at the College of William and Mary, where I spent the 1989-1990 academic year as the Lee Distinguished Visiting Professor. Charles Koch and Rodney Smolla provided valuable criticisms and suggestions on an early draft. Probing comments and questions from my colleagues during and after a faculty colloquium at the University of Texas School of Law helped enormously as I revised this article. I am grateful to

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A SMALL group of largely overlooked American scholars linked the two great English legal historians, Henry Maine and Frederic Maitland. Ancient Law, published by Maine in 1861, and The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, published by Frederick Pollock and Maitland in 1895 and written primarily by Maitland, 1 are probably the two most important books about legal history ever written in the English language. In Ancient Law, Maine generated provocative conclusions about legal evolution based largely on works by previous scholars on the history of Roman law. For Henry Adams, who initiated the professional study of legal history in the United States, Maine was both an inspiration and a foil. Better known for his subsequent multivolume works of American history and especially for his great books, The Education of Henry Adams and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams was appointed to the history faculty of Harvard College in 1870 as part of the effort by its new president, Charles W. Eliot, to transform Harvard from a traditional teaching college to a major research university. Adams praised Ancient Law and placed Maine at the same level of intellectual importance as Darwin and Spencer. 2 Yet Maine's "brilliant hypotheses", Adams declared, remained "hazardous guesses" unsupported by facts. 3 In his teaching and scholarship, Adams tested Maine's "brilliant hypotheses" by examining the facts of English legal history, which Maine had not addressed in Ancient Law. Dismissing as amateurish prior work in England on the history of English law, Adams endorsed and directed his students to German "scientific" methods of research in original sources and to German scholars, such as Rudolph Sohm and Heinrich Brunner, who used these methods while studying the history of Teutonic law. In their Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, published in 1876, Adams and his students relied on primary sources to test, and often to question, many of Maine's generalizations.