David E. Feller, 86; Labor Lawyer and UC Berkeley Professor

David E. Feller, 86, a labor lawyer and longtime UC Berkeley professor who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and counseled groups as diverse as steelworkers and baseball players, died Monday at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland. He had been under treatment for a number of unspecified health problems, a representative of UC Berkeley said.

Feller taught at the university’s Boalt Hall School of Law for 35 years, joining the faculty after a distinguished career as one of the nation’s top appellate lawyers.

A graduate of Harvard University, where he earned his law degree, he argued a number of major labor cases before the Supreme Court during the 1950s and ‘60s, including Vaca vs. Sipes and Goodall-Sanford Inc. vs. Textile Workers. As a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Goldberg, Feller & Bredhoff, he was also general counsel for the United Steelworkers and the industrial union department of the AFL-CIO.

During the ‘50s he was a member of a committee that advised future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on litigation challenging school desegregation, when Marshall was general counsel for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. Feller wrote or contributed to friend-of-the-court briefs on two landmark civil rights cases: Brown vs. Board of Education and the Bakke affirmative action case.

A New York City native, he was also a member of an economic study committee that made recommendations to baseball owners and players in 1992 on such issues as salary scales and the relationship between revenues and on-field success in the major leagues.