372
Opinion of the Court
IV
That conclusion would make this a fairly straightforward administrative-law case, except for the contention that the Board's factfinding here was not an aberration. Allentown asserts that, although "the Board continues to cite the words of the good faith doubt branch of its withdrawal of recognition standard," a systematic review of the Board's decisions will reveal that "it has in practice eliminated the good faith doubt branch in favor of a strict head count." Brief for Petitioner 10. The Board denies (not too persuasively) that it has insisted upon a strict head count,4 but does defend its factfinding in this case by saying that it has regularly rejected similarly persuasive demonstrations of reasonable good-faith doubt in prior decisions. The Court of Appeals in fact accepted that defense, relying on those earlier, similar decisions to conclude that the Board's findings were supported by substantial evidence here. See 83 F. 3d, at 1488. That the current decision may conform to a long pattern is also suggested by academic commentary. One scholar, after conducting "[a] thorough review of the withdrawal of recognition case law," concluded:
"[C]ircumstantial evidence, no matter how abundant, is rarely, if ever, enough to satisfy the good-faith doubt test. In practice, the Board deems the test satisfied only if the employer has proven that a majority of the bargaining unit has expressly repudiated the union. Such direct evidence, however, is nearly impossible to gather lawfully. Thus, the Board's good-faith doubt
4 The Board cited in its brief a number of cases in which it found circumstantial evidence sufficient to support a "good-faith reasonable doubt." See Brief for Respondent 31-32, n. 8. Those cases do indeed reveal a genuine interest in circumstantial evidence, but the most recent of them, J & J Drainage Products Co., 269 N. L. R. B. 1163 (1984), was decided more than a decade ago. Allentown contends that the Board has abandoned the good-faith-doubt test, not that it never existed.
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