Biography

Noah Zatz is jointly appointed in Labor Studies and the School of Law. His writing and teaching address how work structures both inequality and social citizenship in the contemporary U.S. Zatz’s primary focus has been on which activities become recognized and protected as “work,” how work is defined in relationship to markets, and how the boundaries of markets are themselves mediated by gender and race, among other things. His published scholarship engages these questions by studying the legal concepts of “work” in welfare work requirements and “employment” in labor & employment law, especially with regard to the status of family caretaking, prison labor, workfare, sex work, and court-ordered employment or work programs. Another major interest is how antidiscrimination law, and employment law more generally, address labor market inequality that is jointly produced by workers’ interactions with employers, coworkers, and actors outside the workplace.

As a teacher, Zatz is committed to training future public interest lawyers, especially those working as part of labor and social movements, and to engaging students with law’s possibilities both as an instrument of injustice and as a contributor to emancipatory social change. Before entering law teaching, Zatz was awarded a Skadden Fellowship to work at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in New York City. As a NELP staff attorney, he represented low-income individuals and community organizations in matters at the interface between the low-wage workplace and the welfare system. After law school, Zatz served as a law clerk in federal district and appellate courts. He also has been a fellow at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at Yale Law School. Zatz writes regularly for public audiences at the OnLabor and Law & Political Economy blogs.

Zatz’s most recent research explores “Get To Work or Go To Jail” schemes in which workers face incarceration for being unemployed or underemployed while under state supervision through systems such as probation or parole, child support enforcement, and collection of criminal justice debt. This project shows how precarious and exploited work is produced through active state construction of labor markets, not just through deregulation, and how the racial & economic stratification of contemporary criminal legal systems produces labor subordination, not only exclusion from employment. Zatz held an Open Society Fellowship to develop this project. Parts of this work have included collaborative research with the UCLA Labor Center, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, and NELP.

Zatz also has begun a new research project using labor law as a foil for thinking about collective action to democratize economic life beyond employment relationships, such as through tenants unions, debtors unions, consumer unions, and co-ops of various sorts.

Courses Taught

LBR STD 187: Work, Race & Mass Incarceration

UG- LAW 260: Labor Law & Collective Action

UG- LAW 263: Employment Discrimination Law

UG- LAW 325: Public Benefits Law & Antipoverty Policy

UG- LAW 537: Low-Wage Workers

UG- LAW 973: Designing Real Utopias