ABOUT
I am an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law and a 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 recent scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Law Journal Forum, and the Emory Law Journal, among others. You can find some of my shorter pieces on the Law and Political Economy blog (here and here).
I have a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley, and 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 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.
For more information about my work, please keep scrolling, or email me at dsreddy@berkeley.edu. A current copy of my CV is available here. A copy of my Research Agenda is available here.
SCHOLARSHIP
Research and Articles
TRANSACTION BENEFITS AT WORK:
REGULATING THE FUTURE OF WORK
FOR THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY (FORTHCOMING COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW VOL. 125, 2025)
In debates about the future of work, scholars and policymakers often treat economic efficiency and distributive justice as the central values at stake. Those who argue for the end of employment as we know it appeal to economic efficiency. Here, they extend law and economics scholar Ronald Coase’s classic theorization of “transaction costs.” Technological innovation, this argument goes, has dramatically reduced the transaction costs of economic coordination, such that work today can be more efficiently performed through independent contracting or automation than through the institution of employment. In response, those who defend the legal form of employment invoke distributive justice concerns. Employers, they argue, should not be able to short circuit the social safety net constructed around employment simply by re-organizing production. Yet, in centering the ends, rather than the legal form itself, some cede the potential acceptability of a world without employment, so long as the economic benefits associated with it carry over, 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 broader redistribution and equitable concerns 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 often treated the social activity attendant to economic transactions as inherently costly, a few leading scholars have begun to argue that such social activity can have benefits too. Work can be, under the right circumstances, a site of profound transaction benefits. And, unlike distributive justice, these benefits are not independent of work’s organization; there is no substitution for them. Transaction benefits arise, or not, at the point of production, from specific organizational forms, institutional practices, and the legal rules that structure each.
Herein, I provide the first in-depth theorizing of transaction benefits at work, and 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, to proactively incentivize 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.
Accounting for transaction benefits is essential as we contemplate both the future of work and the future of scholarship at the nexus of law and economy. Independent contracting and automation may reduce transaction costs; they also sacrifice transaction benefits. Employment as an institution – defined not by employer’s formal right to control or even by its attendant statutory protections, but as a regular and ongoing relationship – has meaningful benefits for social trust, cohesion, and solidarity that should not be disregarded. To be clear, the organization of work today is unsustainable by any number of metrics and change is needed. But further disembedding work from our social lives is not the solution.
This project also serves broader theoretical goals, by suggesting one potential bridge between the law and political economy and law and economics paradigms. If economics cannot be neatly separated from other aspects of social and political life, and if economic maximization does not necessarily ensure social flourishing, or even social survival, we have no choice but to better theorize these complex relationships and to better account for the things that matter, notwithstanding being hard to count. Still, insisting on this duality should not mean ignoring questions of productivity or efficiency. Nor will it alter the fact that there will always be tradeoffs, that we will have to make difficult decisions about what to prioritize and how, when faced with goals that diverge. In other words, imagining a humane and efficient future for work – buttressed by a policy framework that carefully calibrates transaction benefits, transaction costs, and distributional and dignitary commitments – can help us imagine a more humane future for cost-benefit analysis too.
AFTER THE LAW OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY,
132 YALE L. J. 1213 (2023).
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.
“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 DISCRIMINATION 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
Jurisprudence and Social Policy
University of California, Berkeley
School of Law
2240 Piedmont Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94720-2150