Monday, January 26
Dr. Dave Kamper Senior State Policy Strategist, Economic Policy Institute: Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions
Dave Kamper is a longtime labor organizer, historian, and writer. He currently serves as a Senior Strategist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., joining EPI in 2021 after two decades working in the labor movement. He helped co-found the New Brookwood Labor College in 2019. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he teaches Labor History for the Union Leadership and Activism Graduate Program at UMass-Amherst. His newest book is Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions, about the unexpected and remarkable upsurge of organized labor in the first half of this decade. He is currently researching a book on the power of anti-union myths in modern America. Kamper lives in Minnesota.
Workshop participants should read Kamper’s book, Who’s Got the Power (New Press, 2025), particularly the Introduction, Chapter 1, Introduction to Part II, and Chapters 5 and 8. Available here.
Monday, February 2
Professor Elizabeth Chika Tippett, University of Oregon Law School: The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Laws Haunt the Modern Workplace
Elizabeth Tippett is a Professor and the James O. and Alfred T. Goodwin Senior Fellow at the University of Oregon Law School. She has written widely about employment law, including sexual harassment law. Her research has been cited in numerous state and federal court decisions. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and Harvard Business Review, among other journals, and she has been interviewed on NPR and the BBC. She has also testified before Congress and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington DC. Her new book, The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace was published by the University of California Press in 2025.
Workshop participants should read Tippett’s book, The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace, particularly the Introduction, Chapters 1, 4, 8, 9, and 10. Available for purchase here. For a discount, use code: UCPSAVE30.
Monday, February 9
Professor Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley Law School: Democracy and the Civil Service
Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Work, and she teaches and writes on the law of work and the legal profession. Professor Fisk writes on both recent and historic aspects of labor law and worker organizing, the intersection of intellectual property and the law of the workplace, free expression at and relating to work, and gender and disability discrimination in the workplace. Her forthcoming books are There Are No Neutrals There: Radical Union Lawyers in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press) and Speech @ Work (Yale University Press).
For this workshop, Professor Fisk will speak about the importance of civil service employment. Workshop participants should read: “Democracy and a Nonpartisan Civil Service”, 67 Arizona Law Review 629 (2025). Available here.
Monday, February 16
Dr. Michael McGovern, Knight Law and Media Fellow, Yale Law School: Data and Equality, A History
Mikey McGovern is a historian of science, race, law, and technology and the Knight Law and Media Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. His book project tells the story of how civil rights lawyers and bureaucrats embraced statistical proof of discrimination as a wedge for enforcing transformational legislation during the 1960s in the United States, and how their efforts set in motion legal and technological changes that reshaped the workplace. By providing a historical account of the opportunities and hazards of quantitative frameworks for racial justice, Mikey seeks to inform discussions about discrimination in our current era of big data and machine learning. His work has been supported by the Princeton Mellon Initiative, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. He has taught and mentored students at Drew University, Princeton University’s Prison Teaching Initiative, and Yale Law School. He chairs the History of Science Society’s Forum for the History of Human Science and was a member-at-large on the inaugural executive committee of Yale’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Workshop participants should read Dr. McGovern's book proposal, Justice in Numbers: Computing, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the American Workplace (Forthcoming, Revised 2026) and two sample chapters.
Monday, February 23
Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa, Emory Law School/Information Society Project Fellow, Yale Law School: A.I. and Captured Capital
Professor Ifeoma Ajunwa is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School where she is the Founding Director of the A.I. and Future of Work Program and affiliated faculty with the Carney Center for Business and Transactional Law. She is a Senior Corresponding Fellow with Yale Law School’s Center for Private Law and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School. She was a Resident Fellow (and remains an Affiliated Fellow) with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). Dr. Ajunwa is author of the book, The Quantified Worker, published by Cambridge University Press, and the co-author of The Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Governance. She has been published by top law reviews including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Fordham Law Review among others as well as peer review publications like Nature, PLOS One, the American Journal of Law and Equality, etc. Dr. Ajunwa is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. She is also a prolific public intellectual on A.I. governance and privacy law with essays published in popular media like the NYTimes, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, etc. She has been interviewed by National Public Radio (NPR), CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, etc. and she was a speaker at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. An international keynote speaker and a board member on A.I. ethics advisory boards, Dr. Ajunwa is a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School.
Workshop participants should read Dr. Ajunwa's paper, A.I. and Captured Capital (June 30, 2024). 134 Yale L. J. Forum (2025). Available here.
Monday, March 2
Professor Deborah Widiss ‘99, Indiana Law School: Laboring: An (Unfinished) Story of Pregnancy, Parental Leave, and the Fight for Workplace Fairness
Professor Deborah Widiss is the John F. Kimberling Professor of Law at the Indiana Maurer School of Law. Her research focuses on employment law, family law, statutory interpretation, and laws and policies supporting work-life balance. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including the Minnesota Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Texas Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Law Journal Forum, and the Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal. In 2024, she received the Paul Miller Memorial Award, recognizing outstanding academic and public contributions to the field of labor and employment scholarship. Professor Widiss has been quoted as an expert on employment law and related subjects by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Forbes. She has published short essays for popular and professional audiences in The Atlantic, The Conversation, Ms. Magazine, and Bloomberg Law, and she regularly partners with advocacy organizations to expand and implement legislation supporting working parents and family caregivers.
Workshop participants should read the Overview, Chapters One and Two, and Notes of Professor Widiss' work in progress, An (Unfinished) Story of Pregnancy, Parental Leave, and the Fight for Workplace Fairness (Forthcoming, Revised 2026) and the Supreme Courts Opinion on Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632 (1974).
Monday, March 9
Dr. Lori Flores, History, Columbia University: Amnesic Landscapes of Labor: Latinx Food and Farm Workers' Invisibility and Hypervisibility
Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, where she specializes and teaches in modern U.S., Latino/x, labor, immigration, food, and borderlands history. She is the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016) and Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC, 2025), which was named the International Labor History Association’s Book of the Year and the "Big Book" for LABOR Journal's annual forum. She is also the co-editor of the revamped edition of The Academic’s Handbook (Duke, 2020), a founding co-editor for UNC Press’s Latinx Histories book series, and the creator of The Mexican Restaurants of New York City digital history project. Her research and writing have been supported by institutions including the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. Her work and thoughts have been recently featured in outlets including The Guardian and Irish National Radio. She is currently serving as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and researching a new book on Latino migration, labor, and foodways in Europe. For this workshop, Dr. Flores will speak about labor traumas, Latino workers and the invisibility of Latino workers and her theory, the amnesic landscapes of labor.
Workshop participants should read Dr. Flores' article Wreathed in Worry, Pining for Protection: Latino Forestry Workers and Historical Traumas in Maine (Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 4, March 2023) and the Introduction and Chapter 6 pages 153-174 of her book Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2025).
Monday, March 23
Professor Vicki Schultz, Yale Law School: Rationalizing the Workplace: Title VII’s Legacy of Fairness for All and Today’s Anti-DEI Movement
Vicki Schultz is the Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Science at Yale Law School, where she teaches constitutional law, employment discrimination law, family law, work and gender, and other courses related to labor and civil rights. She runs the Workplace Theory and Policy workshop at Yale. Schultz has written widely on work and gender issues, including sexual harassment, job segregation, work-family dynamics, job insecurity, household labor, and the meaning of work in people’s lives. Her work emphasizes the need for structural solutions to problems often perceived as individual failings. Her articles have reshaped the way people think about sex-based harassment in legal, social science, management, and activist circles. Her work has highlighted the importance of work to people’s identity and security: She was an early voice cautioning against the social and economic breakdown that would accompany rise of gig labor, a trend that has only accelerated in the platform economy.
Schultz is currently working on a history of the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division’s Employment Section from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, when trial lawyers there helped desegregate the American workforce by bringing Title VII pattern or practice suits. Other long-term projects also include a conceptual history of affirmative action law and an analysis of the effects of marriage on equality. Schultz is currently the Secretary of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination and a former chair of the AALS Labor and Employment Section. She’s the proud mom of a Yale graduate and a rescue dachshund.
Workshop participants should read Professor Schultz's work in progress Rationalizing the Workplace: How the Anti-DEI Movement Threatens Title VII’s Legacy and Future Promise of Fairness for Everyone (March 2026).
Monday, March 30
Professor Katie Eyer, Rutgers Law School: Rethinking Textualism: Why Progressives Should Embrace the Common-Sense Idea that the Law Means What it Says
Katie Eyer is a Professor at Rutgers Law School, and an anti-discrimination law teacher, scholar and litigator. Her writing on textualism and LGBTQ rights has been credited with influencing the Supreme Court in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020) (holding that it is “discriminat[ion]…because of…sex” under Title VII to engage in anti-LGBTQ discrimination). Professor Eyer has also written extensively on constitutional law issues, disability rights, and other areas of LGBTQ rights. Her current work focuses on the progressive potential of textualism as a statutory interpretation methodology, as well as constitutional litigation in the area of transgender rights. Prior to entering academia, Professor Eyer launched one of the first LGBTQ employment rights projects in the country, and litigated employment discrimination cases on behalf of LGBTQ and other minority workers. She clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 2004-2005, and graduated from Yale Law School in 2004. Professor Eyer self-identifies as a person with a mental health disability and as a member of the queer community, and lives with her family and many foster pets in Philadelphia.
Workshop participants should read Professor Eyer's work in progress, RETHINKING TEXTUALISM: Why Progressives Should Embrace the Common-Sense Idea that the Law Means What it Says (Forthcoming 2026, University of California Press).
Monday, April 6
Dr. Daniel Galvin, Political Science, Northwestern University: Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights
Daniel J. Galvin is Professor of Political Science, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, and Director of the Workplace Justice Lab at Northwestern University. His scholarship focuses on labor policy and politics, worker organization, and the enforcement of labor standards. His latest book, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024), examines the changing nature of workers’ rights over the last half-century and the political development of “alt-labor” groups—nonunion, nonprofit worker organizations—that support and organize low-wage workers in their fight for their rights in the political and economic arenas. His current research focuses on the politics of wage theft in the United States. At the Workplace Justice Lab, Galvin conducts research on workers’ rights and economic inequality while collaborating with government agencies and worker organizations to improve labor standards enforcement and advance knowledge about emerging models of worker organization.
Workshop participants should read Chapters One and Two of Dr. Galvin's book, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024).
Monday, April 13 - MOVED TO 6:15 PM
Professor Noah Zatz ‘99, University of California School of Law: Retaliation Law as Disruption Rights
Noah Zatz is Professor of Law & Labor Studies at UCLA. His research focuses on law and policy concerning low-wage and no-wage work, especially at their intersections with civil rights, public benefits, family law, immigration, and the criminal legal system. His “Get To Work or Go To Jail” project examines how threats of racialized state violence force people in the U.S. into precarious and underpaid work situations. Other ongoing projects explore the centrality of reasonable accommodation to antidiscrimination theory and the law of organizing beyond labor law. Zatz sits on the editorial board of the Law & Political Economy blog, where he also is a regular contributor. He has been Faculty Director of the UCLA Critical Race Studies Program, an Open Society Fellow, a Princeton Law & Public Affairs Fellow, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School and at the University of Chicago Law School. Before entering the legal academy, Zatz worked as a Skadden Fellow at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in New York City. Before that, he clerked for Judge Kimba M. Wood of the Southern District of New York and Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Workshop participants should read Professor Zatz's work in progress, Retaliation Law as Disruption Rights (April 2026).
