ABOUT
I am an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, and Faculty Co-Chair for Berkeley's Center for Law and Work. I am also a Worker Power and Economic Security Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute.
I research and write about work as an institution and its relationship with law. I conceptualize work law as a site where critical choices are made about the relationship between America’s economic commitments and its democratic ideals. I consistently return to the question of what it would mean to use law to affect a meaningful decommodification of human labor.
Empirically, I use diverse methodologies to trace the transmission and reinterpretation of legal and economic ideas across institutional fields over time. These methods include surveys, survey experiments, interviews, participant observation, content analysis, and archival work.
My scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in an array of academic journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the California Law Review, the Yale Law Journal Forum, Labor Studies, and the New Labor Forum, among others. You can find some of my shorter pieces on the Law and Political Economy blog (here and here).
I completed my PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley, with an emphasis in economic sociology and politics, in 2023.
Before my return to academia, I represented labor unions and workers at the AFL-CIO, Altshuler Berzon LLP, and the California Teachers Association. I clerked for Judge Theodore McKee on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and Judge Kimba Wood on the Southern District of New York. I received my JD, magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, from NYU School of Law, where I was also a Root-Tilden-Kern scholar. Before law school, I worked as an organizer for the Texas State Employees Union. I grew up in a mixed-race, mixed-immigration status family within a working class community in the outskirts of Houston, TX.
For more information about my work, please keep scrolling, or email me at dsreddy@berkeley.edu. A copy of my CV is available here. A copy of my research agenda is available here. I am always interested in opportunities to engage with broader audiences and to collaborate with researchers and organizations studying law, culture, politics, social solidarity, and inequality.
WORKS IN PROGRESS + PUBLICATIONS
Research and Articles
Discrimination as Exploitation: A New Paradigm for Workplace Inequality (work in progress; please email for a copy)
Employment discrimination law has failed its most important constituency. Sixty years after Title VII, Black-White wage gaps today are wider than they were in 1979. Women dominate every one of the forty lowest-paying occupations in the American economy. People of color are overrepresented in gig, contingent, and subminimum-wage work at rates that should long ago have triggered legal intervention. The dominant scholarly response to these realities has been to develop finer tools to identify more subtle forms of exclusion, while the dominant organizational response has been doubling down on symbolic compliance, via greater investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, to minimum effect but maximum backlash. This Article argues that these responses are wholly insufficient to address the most significant ways that status inequalities continue to structure labor market outcomes.
Discrimination law does not work today because it remains constructed around an outdated understanding of what discrimination looks like: a paradigm that this Article refers to as discrimination as exclusion, that is, the intentional, implicit, and structural denial to marginalized workers of access to better jobs and improved working conditions. But exclusion has always been just one of the mechanisms by which racial and gender subordination operate in the workplace. In today’s segmented labor market, where there is an ever-widening gulf between “good jobs” and “bad jobs,” discrimination as exclusion is increasingly peripheral to the experiences of most marginalized workers. What anti-discrimination law needs is not just better tools for finding the old discrimination. It needs a new theory of what discrimination looks like.
Herein, I propose a new understanding of discrimination for the contemporary economy: a paradigm that this Article refers to as discrimination as exploitation, that is, the structural preference for marginalized workers in bad and worsening jobs, precisely because their marginalization makes them cheaper and less likely to challenge exploitative and abusive employer practices. Employers do not merely fail to hire Black, Latino, immigrant, and women workers into good jobs. They affirmatively recruit, sort, and concentrate them within bad ones.
In calling for this paradigm shift, this Article makes three major contributions. First, it provides a systematic account of the exclusion paradigm’s origins, showing how the civil rights movement’s broader economic agenda — one that explicitly targeted bad job conditions, not just exclusion from good ones — was progressively narrowed into the individualized, access-focused model that governs today. Second, it develops a political-economic account of discrimination as exploitation, situating it within the literatures on racial capitalism, neoliberalized labor markets, and predatory immigration policy, and arguing that exploitation-based discrimination has become the primary form of status-based stratification in a segmented, deunionized, and increasingly contingent labor market. Third, it proposes a multi-pronged legal framework for reaching discrimination as exploitation, encompassing reformed doctrinal frameworks in anti-discrimination law and increased recognition of the anti-discrimination potential of minimal standards, labor, and immigration law.
Discrimination law is doomed to irrelevance if it facilitates only individual upward mobility into better jobs, while leaving bad jobs behind to be filled by the next group of precarious workers. A discrimination as exploitation paradigm radically shifts the focus of antidiscrimination law, attacking the racialized and gendered processes by which bad jobs are constructed in the first place and fighting for improved labor standards that inure to the benefit of all working people.
Diminishing Returns? Predicting Plaintiff Success in Federal Disability Discrimination in Employment Cases 1979-2018 (forthcoming N.Y.U. Law Review 2027) (with Catherine Fisk, Linda Krieger, Rachel Best & Yan Fang).
Valuing Employment: Transaction Benefit Economics and the Future of Work Law, 114 Cal. L. Rev. 55 (2026).
In debates about the future of work, scholars and policymakers often treat economic efficiency and distributive justice as the principal values at stake. Those who argue for the end of the employment relationship appeal to economic efficiency. They extend law and economics scholar Ronald Coase’s classic theorization of “transaction costs,” arguing that technological innovation has dramatically reduced the transaction costs of economic coordination. As a result, they argue, work today can be more efficiently performed through independent contracting and automation than through the institution of employment.
In response, those who defend the legal form of employment invoke distributive justice and equality. They argue that employers should not be able to circumvent the social safety net constructed around employment simply by reorganizing production. Yet, in emphasizing the benefits of that social safety net, rather than benefits inherent to employment as a form of economic production, some concede the potential acceptability of a world without employment—so long as the social safety net lives on independently of it, whether through universal basic income, portable benefits, or other policy innovations.
In this Article, I argue that neither a transaction cost-centric analysis of employment nor one focused only on distributive justice or equality fully conceptualizes all that is at stake in the institutional design and legal regulation of how we work. This is because there are transaction benefits, not just transaction costs, associated with the organization of work. While transaction cost economics has tended to treat the social activity attendant to economic transactions as inherently costly, this social activity can have benefits too. Foremost among these are relational benefits like social trust, belonging, cooperation, and social solidarity, which accrue to individuals, groups, firms, and sociopolitical systems via economic interaction, coordination, and coproduction. And unlike distributive justice, these benefits are inexorably tied to work’s organization; there is no quick and easy substitution for them through redistributive public policy. Transaction benefits arise, or not, at the point of production, from specific organizational forms and institutional practices, and from the legal rules that structure them.
Here, I provide the first in-depth theorization of work as a site of relational transaction benefits, with a specific focus on law’s role in shaping them. In a moment of crisis-level political polarization and social mistrust, we can no longer afford the illusion that work was ever, or should ever be, solely about material production. From Adam Smith to Émile Durkheim, scholars have long insisted that how we work shapes the quality and character of our social solidarity—the extent to which we are, sociologically speaking, a society at all. The future of work will shape the future of our society, whether we plan for it or not. It would be wiser to plan for it by proactively incentivizing the kind of work that produces social connectedness, rather than isolation and fracture. Just as the law has been used to minimize transaction costs, so too can it be used to promote transaction benefits.
Contemporary debates about work’s future largely overlook the transaction benefits of employment. Independent contracting and automation may at times reduce transaction costs relative to employment, but they are likely to sacrifice transaction benefits in the process. This is because employment as a socio legal institution—defined not as an employer’s formal right to control or even employment’s
statutory protections, but as an ongoing, cooperative relationship—has meaningful benefits for social trust, cohesion, productivity, and solidarity. Independent contracting is unlikely to cultivate these same benefits, and automation certainly cannot. The future of work law must do more than facilitate transactions in human labor. Work law should build productive and connective human relationships.
It is a consequential moment for American labor unions. Over the past decade, public support for labor unions in the United States has skyrocketed, from an all-time low in 2009 to a 60-year high in 2022. Yet even in this moment of renewed public interest, I argue that the American conversation about unions remains constrained by how law has framed their stakes. Within the post-New Deal constitutional framework, unions were categorized as engaging in commercial activity, rather than advancing inherently normative claims about justice at work. I refer to this jurisprudential move and the legal accommodations that have followed as the “law of apolitical economy.” Synthesizing labor history, legal doctrine, sociological theory on social movements, and original empirical work, this Article traces the trajectory of the law of apolitical economy in courts, identifies its broader cultural reverberations, and shows that it still matters today.
After the Law of Apolitical Economy,
132 Yale L. J. 1213 (2023).
“There Is No Such Thing as an Illegal Strike”: Reconceptualizing the Strike in Law and Political Economy, 130 Yale L.J.F. 421 (2021).
In theorizing the lack of strikes in recent decades, legal scholars have focused on the rules that make striking difficult, even counterproductive, for workers. But while American law on striking is ambivalent at best, the impact of legal restrictions on labor protest has always been mediated by broader political economy. One hundred years ago, as the critique to Gilded Age inequality raged, strikes by emergent labor unions made the stakes of the “labor question” apparent. These strikes were subject to legal repression, and in the shorter term, were often seen as failures. In the longer term, though, they laid the foundation for the New Deal order and its modest compression of economic inequality.
That order—built in part on a depoliticization of unions’ role in the workplace—proved unable to withstand the neoliberal turn. Yet, in today’s new Gilded Age, workers are tentatively rediscovering the power of the strike, bad law notwithstanding. Labor activists have long proclaimed, “There is no such thing as an illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one,” inviting the question of how strikes can be successful today, in spite of an inhospitable legal regime. Strikes are not just “economic weapons”; they are political protest. And the success of strikes today should be measured not only by their immediate economic wins, but also by their longer-term sociopolitical ones—to the extent they help upend the dominant regulatory and discursive impulses of recent decades, and like the strikes of the Progressive Era, legitimate a new vision of law and political economy.
Protection by Law, Repression by Law: Bringing Labor Back into the Study of Law and Social Movements, 70 Emory L. J. 63 (2020) (with Catherine L. Fisk).
Within the rich, interdisciplinary literature on law and social movements, scholarly attention has often focused on how the civil rights movement, and other movements that share a resemblance to it, have mobilized law; less attention has been paid to the labor movement’s experience of being regulated by law. In this Article, we ask how refocusing on the experiences of labor unions regulated by law complicates understandings of how movements shape law, and law shapes movements, in turn. To explore the relationship between labor and law at a critical historical juncture, we delve into the largely unexplored legal history of the first major damages judgment against a labor union under the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Decided as the New Deal era gave way to the “rights revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, this case dramatizes the costs of the labor movement’s distinct regulatory framework. Law helped institutionalize unions—to give them autonomy, power, and legitimacy. At the same time, it subjected them to an increasingly restrictive regulatory scheme that made it harder for them to act—or to be seen—as a social movement. Refocusing on labor re-centers the role of law in constructing the jurisprudential boundaries which channeled social movement activity throughout the twentieth century. As social movements today challenge these boundaries in order to assert more intersectional grievances, interrogating taken-for-granted notions about law and movements could not be more important.
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol70/iss1/2
Law Firms as Defendants: Family Responsibilities Litigation in Legal Workplaces, 34 Pepperdine L.R. 393 (2007) (with Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein & Betsy A. Williams).
Our research indicates that family responsibilities discrimination has become a risk management issue for all employers. For a variety of reasons discussed in this article--most notably, the structure and culture of law firms that has been based on traditionally masculine norms and life patterns--legal employers may be particularly susceptible to FRD liability.
CONTACT
Diana Reddy
487 Simon Hall
UC Berkeley School of Law
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200