Socio-legal Scholarship

How do labor judges and labor inspectors persuade workers to settle their claims? How do multi-national companies implement private, global agreements in particular plants and among their global suppliers? Because these questions deal with the way law works “in action” I cannot always find answers in law books. I must engage in “socio-legal” research to get the answers. Therefore, some of my scholarship reports on “elite interviews,” or interviews I do of people who are especially knowledgeable of certain law-related matters, such as a company’s implementation of a private agreement. Additionally, I have done two ethnographies based on participant observation. That research requires me to spend significant time in a place where I can get an intimate understanding of how law works. I have been lucky to do this type of research at the labor inspectorate and labor courts of Chile, where I followed labor inspectors to copper mines, agricultural fields, and other places of work. I also served as an organizer at Arise Chicago, a worker center, to learn how that group advocated for workers without counting with the resources of a traditional labor union. Below is a list of my socio-legal publications. Some report on original research, while others report on secondary data or set theoretical and research agendas.

Labor, Alt-Labor, and their Institutions

“Personal and Political: How the Illinois Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights Connected Lives,” (2024) 57 UC Davis Law Review 3033-3062.

“Fair Transition Funds, Employer Neutrality, and Card Checks: How Industrial Policy Could Relaunch Labor Unions in the United States,” in Todd Tucker ed., Bringing the State Back In (Again) (Roosevelt Institute, 2024)

“Alt-Labour and Worker Centres,” in Guy Davidov, Brian Langille & Gillian Lester eds., Oxford Handbook of the Law of Work 481-498 (Oxford University Press 2024)

“Organizing the State: The ‘New Labor Law’ Seen from the Bottom-Up” co-authored with Michael C. Oswalt (2018) 39:2 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 415-480.

“Worker Centers and the Moral Economy: Disrupting through Brokerage, Prestige, and Moral Framing” (2017) 2017 University of Chicago Legal Forum 409-434.

Wage Boards and Sectoral Bargaining

Quasi Tripartism: Limits of Co-Regulation and Sectoral Bargaining in the United States” (2023) 90(2) University of Chicago Law Review 703-738

“Wage Boards and Labor Revitalization: U.S. Aspirations and Uruguayan Realities” (2022) 32 Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 109-151.

“Can Wage Boards Revive U.S. Labor? Marshaling Evidence from Puerto Rico” (2020) 95:1 Chicago-Kent Law Review 127-156.